We the Animals Read Online Free PDF

porch, into all that dark. The air buzzed with insects. There was no moon. Summer nights seemed the wildest nights of all.
    There were still millions of questions, about God, and locusts, and the Ozarks, about getting old and dying. Old Man held our bowls in his hand, and because we could not look him in the eye, we looked at those empty bowls. We looked so silently, we looked so hard, that he turned from us and set the bowls down somewhere inside the house.
    "Go on," he said, "scram."
    Millions of questions. Like, how come animals aren't afraid of the dark? Especially the tiny ones, the bunnies and little birds that are skittish enough during the day—what do they make of the night? How do they understand it? How can they sleep out there, alone? Were the trees and bushes and rabbit holes all filled with ears listening, listening, and eyes never daring to shut?
    And the other locusts, what's wrong with them, why do they come last, and what's left for them to eat?

Talk to Me
    W E WERE SEATED at the kitchen table, hungry, impatient, clamoring. We threw our heads back on our necks and grasped our bellies. Every night we died of hunger. Ma was suckling her fingertip; she had cut herself on the jagged edge of the soup can. The phone rang, and Ma spun around and popped the cut finger out of her mouth.
    "It's your father," she said but didn't answer, just dumped the soup into the pot and resumed her bloodsucking.
    We stopped whining and looked back and forth from each other to the ringing phone—this was a new game. We rested our elbows on the tabletop, held our faces in the palms of our hands, and watched her back, mirroring her silence, waiting for the next move, but she didn't look at us or offer an explanation; she just kept stirring. The phone rang as the soup simmered and hissed, the phone rang as Ma splashed the broth into three bowls and slid them under our faces, the phone rang as we extended our chins and noses into the steam and stuck out our tongues to taste the hot air. We hadn't seen or heard from our father in weeks.
    Ma ripped open a bag of crackers, scattered them across a plate, clattered that plate onto the middle of the table, and said, "What? Eat."
    She joined us, her chair turned sideways. She unlaced her work boots, slipped off her socks, and massaged her feet. The phone rang just above and behind her head. She knew where Paps was at, knew the secret of his urgency, and she wasn't going to tell us. The foot massage was a bad sign, but worse was the smile when we asked for more dinner.
    "That's it," she said, smiling her crooked tooth smile, staring at her painted toenails. "That's all there is."
    We stayed at the table for another forty-five minutes, running our fingers around our empty bowls, pressing our thumb tips into the cracker plate and licking the crumbs off, lulled into a trance by the even tempo of the phone's ring, immobilized by the repetition, listening carefully, hoping it would never stop. He was somewhere, at some phone, in a phone booth, or sitting on the edge of a someone else's bed, drunk or sober, and it was loud and hot, or cold, and he was alone, or there were others, but every single ring brought him home, brought him right there before us. The tone of the ringing changed too, from desperate to accusatory to something sad and slow, then it was a heartbeat, then it was eternity—had always rung, would always ring—then it was the piercing bell of an alarm.
    Ma stood up from her chair, lifted the receiver, and placed it back down again in one swift movement—and for a moment nothing, maybe even a full minute, long enough for our ears and clenched muscles to relax, long enough to remember and realize fully something we had long suspected: that silence was absolution, that quiet was as close to happiness as we would ever get. But then it started again, the ringing, and continued.
    "What if he's having a heart attack?" Manny asked.
    "What heart?" said Ma.
    "I'm going to get it," Manny