Then, systematically, he set about destroying everything in his room. For a long time, he leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, trying to control the hurricane of feelings that shook him to his marrow. He dragged his desk in front of the door to block it, and covered his ears to keep from hearing his parents calling him. He got to his feet and staggered back, then ran out as fast as he could and locked himself in his room. If her mother found that snake, she would drop dead on the spot, although that wasn’t likely, because when she wasn’t in the hospital, Lisa spent the day in bed.įinally his mother’s voice penetrated Alex’s consciousness and his anger dissolved in a flash, giving way to confusion and horror at what he had done. She was feeding several of the raccoons and skunks that roamed outside the house she had adopted six orphaned kittens and was keeping them hidden in the garage she had saved the life of a large bird with a broken wing and she had a three-foot snake in a box in her room. As for Nicole, the youngest in the family, she was collecting a zoo full of animals, as if she wanted to make up for the attention her mother couldn’t give her. At twelve, Alex thought, she should be interested in boys, or piercing her ears. His sister Andrea, who had always been different from the other girls, was now more Andrea than ever she was always dressing in costumes, and she wandered lost for hours in her fantasy world, where she imagined witches lurking in the mirrors and aliens swimming in her soup. Alex got out of bed without disturbing Poncho and got dressed, shivering the heat came on at six, but it hadn’t yet warmed his room, the one at the end of the hall.Īlex could feel his family coming apart. In the four years of his life, Poncho had been attacked by raccoons, the neighbor’s cat, and now a deer-not counting the times he had been sprayed by the skunks and they’d had to bathe him in tomato juice to get rid of the smell. Alex was convinced that he had the dumbest dog in history, the only eighty-pound Labrador ever bitten by a deer. But it had been raining and raining for more than a week-a real deluge-and on top of that, Poncho had been bitten by a deer and didn’t want to move. On those days, the only relief was to escape, to run along the beach with Poncho until he was out of breath. There had been a lot of days like that since his mother got sick sometimes the air in the house felt heavy, like being at the bottom of the sea. He decided that this was going to be a terrible day, one of those days when it’s best to stay in bed because everything is going to turn out bad.

Alexander looked at the clock: six-thirty, time to get up.

City of the beasts by isabel allende