Jane Jones Read Online Free

might have been the case even if he’d still been human. Fresh Meadow Farms cookies and crackers are basically made of sawdust and glue.
    There was a time when my family would have been grateful to have any free food at our disposal, no matter how repugnant it was. I remember our sad little farm on the Oklahoma panhandle. I remember my father planting wheat, even though the crop had failed the year before. I remember all of us being so hungry that we thought about eating the skeletal old milk cow we had loved like a pet. Then I remember a brown cloud rolling across the plain and my mother covering our faces with wet rags as our house rattled and filled with something that looked like smoke. When it was over, dust had drifted in front of ourdoor like snow. The cow was dead. The wheat was gone. Both of my parents cried, and so my brother and I cried too. I thought for a while that we would pack up our things and move away after that, but we didn’t. My mother just went to work cleaning the house, and my father replanted the wheat. I couldn’t help out the way I should have, because I came down with a pretty bad case of pneumonia and almost died. Almost. From what my parents have told me, we were all closer to death than they could admit at the time.
    According to Ma, even without me being able to sit up or eat, we had run out of food. We had no livestock and no dry goods and no money or credit to buy even a tin of anything to share. My parents were ashamed, but they agreed that we couldn’t go on that way. So my father set out on foot—because he’d never earned enough to buy the horse and carriage he’d planned on getting one day—to ask Mr. and Mrs. Pike if they had anything to spare. The Pikes had just settled in to the house nearest to ours, and I recall my parents being so thrilled to have neighbors. When my father arrived, he found them loading their Model A pickup truck with all of their belongings, saying they were moving on, going to try their luck out West. When my father explained our situation, the Pikes graciously drove him back to our house on their way. Ruth Pike offered to come inand help Ma make a stew out of some of the meat and vegetables she’d packed away for the trip. Turner Pike told my father, “You ain’t never had nothing like my Ruthie’s stew.” It’s true. We never had. And we never did either. By the time the Pikes peeled away from our farm, my family was no longer dying of starvation. Also, my family was no longer officially living.
    Like I said, I was worse off than anyone because of how sick I was. When I finally came around, my mother, my father, and Zachary were still trying to figure out what in the holy hell had happened to all of them. It wasn’t like the Pikes were kind enough to leave an instruction manual. From what they remembered, once Ruth and Turner had been invited across the threshold of our home, it was over within minutes. Ruth bit my father, and when my mother tried to pull her off, she was bitten by someone. My parents couldn’t bring themselves to describe what had happened to my brother, but I guessed he’d been somebody’s dessert. Nobody ever said what had happened to me either. My father did once tell me that when he woke up, Turner was squeezing drops of blood from Ruth’s fingertip into my mother’s mouth. When Ruth saw that he was awake, she just said, “Soon you’re all gonna feel right fine again.” Then they were gone.
    At first, we didn’t understand what we’d become.Eventually, though, my parents pieced together memories of the attack with scary stories they’d heard whispered around campfires. They gradually noticed that thoughts of food were slipping away, and the idea of eating something that once made us drool now repulsed us. Even though my parents had never been particularly religious, I remember my mother praying that it was all a mistake. Then I remember her trying to accept it, even saying what a blessing it was, because while we