By the time he was two, his head was
exactly at Alan's crotch height and he'd greet his brother on his return
from school by charging at full speed into Alan's nuts, propelled at
unlikely speed on his thin legs.
At three, he took to butchering animals -- the rabbits that little Bill
kept in stacked hutches outside of the cave mouth went first. Billy
rushed home from his grade-two class, eyes crazed with precognition, and
found David methodically wringing the animals' necks and then slicing
them open with a bit of sharpened chert. Billy had showed David how to
knap flint and chert the week before, after seeing a filmstrip about it
in class. He kicked the makeshift knife out of Davey's hand, breaking
his thumb with the toe of the hard leather shoes the golems had made for
him, and left Davey to bawl in the cave while Billy dignified his pets'
corpses, putting their entrails back inside their bodies and wrapping
them in shrouds made from old diapers. Alan helped him bury them, and
then found Davey and taped his thumb to his hand and spanked him until
his arm was too tired to deal out one more wallop.
Alan made his way down to the living room, the floor streaked with mud
and water. He went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with soapy water
and gathered up an armload of rags from the rag bag. Methodically, he
cleaned away the mud.
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