The Outside by Laura Bickle

underworld.”
    In the distance, I could hear a thin, eerie howling.
    I smiled. I imagined that it was the wolves, chasing deer. And that Jaguar Sun was fighting the Darkness while we slept.
    ***
    â€œWe can’t stay.”
    Alex was right. We all knew it.
    For three nights, we had been at the Animal Farm. I called it that first, and Alex and Ginger began to laugh.
    â€œâ€˜Four legs bad, two legs good,’” Alex said.
    â€œOr is it the other way around?” Ginger mused.
    â€œI don’t get it.”
    â€œ
Animal Farm
. It’s a book by George Orwell. If we find a copy of it, I’ll be interested to see what you think of it.”
    I wasn’t sure that there would be much time for reading in the future, but it was a pleasant thought.
    We brought Horace outside for supervised grazing during the day, but never once saw any of the wild animals. We knew that they had been there—I’d found the remains of a deer in the middle of the field. The tuft of gray fur stuck to a rib bone seemed to indicate that it was not the work of the vampires. After dark, we heard the howling of the wolves. Each successive night, it seemed that they moved farther away.
    The pain and swelling in my hand began to subside. I think that the sleep and aspirin from the convenience store had done it some good, as well as our relatively clean surroundings. I felt guilty about letting Horace poop in the living-room-turned-stable, but I was sure that no was one coming back. Ever.
    We had fallen into a routine that felt relatively normal. We slept for more than twelve hours a night and ate the supplies from the convenience store. We found a few canned goods and cereal in the cupboards. I’d gathered rainwater in a bucket and had used it to wash our clothes. I learned to play Monopoly at the kitchen table with Alex and Ginger. Ginger always won.
    Ginger had located a photo album of the family in the bottom of the china cabinet. I looked through it with interest. I saw wedding pictures of a man and a woman and pictures of many holidays and vacations with the two children. The girl looked a lot like Sarah when she was younger. There were also some pictures of the animals. I saw the jaguar as a cub and the wolves looking much smaller.
    â€œWhy did they keep those animals?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Ginger said. “Maybe they thought they were helping, if the animals were abandoned by other owners and they took them in. Like a rescue. Maybe they had a thing for exotic animals.” She sighed. “It’s hard to get into other people’s heads.”
    I stroked the edge of a picture of the girl who looked like Sarah holding a wolf pup. The photographs made me even more conscious that we were occupying someone else’s home. And they made me miss my parents and my sister and my dogs.
    So when Alex said it was time to leave, I was ready. We gathered up anything that would be of use to us. I realized, as I was packing kitchen knives into a backpack, that I had become inured to the idea of stealing. And that made me sad, that I had dropped that part of my moral compass in order to survive.
    I found pencils and paper and wrote the family a note, just in case they ever returned. It was hard to find the words, but I felt that I needed to do it:
    Â 
I hope that all your family is well. I am sorry to have used your house and your possessions in this way. I hope that you return and are able to put things back in order. I hope that we all can return home and put things back to rights
.
We let the animals go
.
—
Katie
    Â 
    I came to regret leaving later. We all did.
    But that morning seemed cool and crisp and full of hope. My belly was full, my clothes were clean. I tugged the backpack high up on my shoulder and followed Alex out into the clear morning.
    As always, we moved north. Inexorably north.
    I was certain that the sun had colored