fire-us verse || snippits
He thought that it was wrong - him being called mommy. Sometimes in his dreams he was certain that the person that he called Mommy, the blurry memory that kissed him good night and made him eat all of his vegetables and such... Was a woman, like Hunter. And then the man... Da?
But if he made the other people in their family eat their vegetables and tucked them in at night, didn’t that actually make him the Mommy?
He tied his hair back, not an easy feat, and nodded. Yeah. He was the mommy.
He read everything he could find - even the old, falling apart newspapers, which talked about things like sports and had pictures on them. He remembered sports, vaguely. He was always good at the one with the stick and the brown glove. Hunter sometimes came back with those gloves, for Mommy. He used them to hold hot things in his hands.
He liked the books with the stories in them the best. It helped him remember what life was like before the fire-us, even if he couldn’t always figure out what the books were talking about. Like the things called androids and ipads. What did they mean?
But some of the other things, like the book that had stories about making fire with wood, probably saved their life. That’s why Teacher knew he was important, even if it didn’t always look like it. Stories made them happy.
The only thing Boy remembered from before the fire-us was the words: “Take care of the baby. Take care of your brother. He’s all you have, you hear me?”
Then he remembered walking, crying, holding Baby’s hand. They slept in cars, with the bugs that sometimes found their way inside. He sometimes caught these ants, and him and his brother ate them. When they were hungry they ate whatever resembled food in all the empty houses.
Eventually the skeletons stopped bothering Boy. Eventually the smell stopped making Baby cry.