Raveling Read Online Free

leaves, leaves that made a crackling sound like the paper on Eric’s examining table.
     As a boy, I had climbed into these branches and waited for a silence to arrive like a hearse at a funeral home.
    There was a path somewhere that led to Sky Highway, and I remembered running along it full speed, my arms reachingto touch the leaves of low hanging branches, my eyes closed, my head back. Where was it now? Early evening, the sun descended
     a single notch. Maybe it was this way. I walked into the clearing beyond which, I thought, must be the highway. Why did everything
     seem so unfamiliar? I could hear my own breathing, a dog panting. Along the junior high was another path that led to Sky Highway,
     I remembered. I thought I heard other people, two voices in mid-discussion. Above, the sky had become chemical yellow, striped
     with dark gray. I stopped to consider my position. Where the hell was I? The trees had become black, too, and I realized how
     heavily I had been inhaling and exhaling. I had to be careful. I have a tendency to hyperventilate. Could I see my breath?
     No. It was still too early in the season for that. Perhaps in the morning. I had moved off the path that led away from the
     house and now, looking back, could not regain it. I imagined the woods had somehow subsumed the house. Sometimes, I thought,
     these branches will lash out and swallow cars, houses, people. Had I been swallowed, too?
    Yes.
    I twisted the broken shoelace around my middle finger, cutting off the flow of blood, and I felt my artery throb.
    What I thought had been the path to the turnpike was merely a clearing under an enormous oak. Why didn’t I recognize it? A
     squirrel scurried around the trunk of the tree. I walked around it to get a better look at this animal, but he anticipated
     me and kept always on the other side.
    I was losing time.
    As a boy, I had loved the way the breezes moved through the forest, and when I was the wolf boy I could close my eyes and
     move, feeling my way through the crackling leaves and snapping, cheek-stinging branches, hearing the sounds of the highway
     in the distance, smelling the burnt smell of therotting leaves. I pushed my hands into my pockets to keep them from rising into the air like helium balloons. I dug my feet
     firmly into the earth as I walked. I closed and opened my eyes in a rhythm.
    One of my shoes was slipping on and off. But I didn’t care.
    I twisted the shoelace tighter around my finger—tighter and tighter.
    Where was the highway? I wished I had a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in months, I realized, hadn’t even thought about it. But
     now the darkness was drifting through the trees and I was feeling light drops of rain. Perfect cigarette weather. My face
     had disappeared, too, so I touched it and discovered that it was wet. Rain? Tears? When I looked at my finger I saw the familiar
     smear of brownish blood. I was bleeding. It must have been from the snapping of the small branches against my skin. I was
     inside the thickest part of the woods now. Yet I could still hear those voices, and every now and then it seemed as though
     they were discussing my progress. I tasted the blood on my finger. It made me realize how hungry I was. I looked around with
     the eyes of the wolf boy, transformed. I would be coming out on the other side in a moment, I was sure of it, and I could
     hear the cars over the next rise, could sense the sky, smoggy and absolute, over the row of convenience stores and discount
     centers that I knew were there—the 7-Eleven, the Taco Bell, Marshalls, Amazing Drug Discounts, the Mobil station, Bed, Bath,
     and Beyond. I was Balboa nearing the Pacific. If I followed this path, it would lead me there, to Hannah, to our mother, Eric’s
     and mine, Hannah who had been seeing ghosts, who waited for Eric to rescue her, but who had no idea that it was only me, Pilot
     the wolf boy, who could rescue her truly; it was only her youngest son—starved for the taste of