Before the Devil Knows You’re Here by Autumn Krause EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Autumn Krause
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Dark Fantasy eBooks
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
1836
WISCONSIN, DEEP IN THE WILDERNESS
JOHN
MOST WOULD SAY THERE’S NO SUCH person as John Chapman.
They say he died at nineteen, in the kitchen of his farmhouse. And
maybe they’re right. You need to have a heart to be alive and if I ever saw
mine, I imagine it’d be an apple. A rotten one, sitting inside my rib cage
between my lungs, putrefying me from the inside out. When I put my hand
over my bark-covered chest to feel its beats, I become painfully aware of
what I wish to forget:
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The aphids nibbling at the leaves in my hair, making them twist and
curl, though they never fall from my head.
The sticky feeling of spiders stringing their threads between my nostrils
and ears.
The tickling of hundreds of ants’ feet marching up and down my legs
and arms.
Strongest of all is the strap on my shoulder. It’s light now. The sack is
nearly empty. I have sweet relief. But I’ve worn it for so long. I know its
ways. Seeds will rise from the bottom. Their weight will make the strap pull
and gouge, cutting a weeping gash in my shoulder.
I’ve never gotten used to the next part.
My world turns black. I’m there, eyes staring into darkness, mind
awake, thoughts forming with the same slow creep of molasses oozing out
of a jar. The times come closer and closer together and I know, soon, I’ll be
lost to them completely.
So, now, before I am lost again, I must force my hand to close around
the pencil. Bark splinters at my finger joints as they bend, revealing lilywhite skin underneath. It’s visible only for a moment before wood grows
over my knuckles and my fingers are twigs once again.
There. The pencil is in my hand, and I can begin.
I don’t know if this will ever reach your eyes. But you, of all people,
deserve to know my story.
I’ll start long ago.
I was sixteen and dreamed of one thing: apples.
CATALINA
Three apples sat in a row on the doorstep.
Catalina saw them from the garden, where she’d been mending a hole in
the fence with rope and sticks so rabbits and deer couldn’t get in. The
apples hadn’t been there when she’d gone outside that morning, and she’d
only been in the garden for about twenty minutes. No one had come bearing
apples, but then no one besides Pa and Jose Luis ever came around here.
Their cabin was a small island, lost against an open sea of wilderness. It
was one of many that they’d lived in ever since Mamá had died. It’d been
so long that Catalina’s mind felt like a tool that’d been left out in the
elements, its joints rusting around her thoughts so all she felt was the dull
sense that, at some point long ago, there’d been words she’d wanted to say.
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