Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard

questions?” I said.
    He rubbed his face and sighed as if letting out all the air he’d ever breathed.
    â€œBecause they like me,” he mumbled. “They like how I drive.”
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    My brother and I never had much in common. He started school the year before French classes were offered, so we lived a strange playground phenomenon, each of us in his own language group, as if we’d grown
up on opposite sides of an ethnically divided city. His friends were well behaved, and one of them, Elizabeth, invited him to parties where kids rode around her lawns and gardens in an electric train. Now that I no longer talked about levitation, my friends seemed increasingly like ruffians. We discussed deep-sea fishing and creatures such as sharks and electric eels. Those who’d grown up in Quebec taught us French profanity. The words and the way they were rhythmically strung together— crisse de câlice de tabarnak! —reminded me of how my father swore in English. But when I practiced them, I didn’t get the same heady feeling as with fuck or goddamn. Still, each time we learned a new insult, we ran toward the students from the English classes, shouting it at their helpless faces.
    Now, in our new house, my brother and I shared a room for the first time since we were toddlers. After my mother tucked us in, we switched on our flashlights and played Dungeons & Dragons, working through modules, The Keep on the Borderlands or The Lost City. Magic and endless journeys and the satisfaction of easy violence were so attainable that each morning I woke and looked around, surprised that I had to go to school, that my life could actually be this boring.
    And while we wandered catacombs, listening for predators, my mother delved into past lives. She attended a psychic church where there was no religion, she assured us; they just used a real church for meetings. Prayer, she said, was a way of talking to invisible beings who existed in nature and who cared about us. She taught us to repeat om, which was relaxing and sounded like mom. She’d learned to do it at the church, and otherwise the members sat around and shared experiences. She told us how one man had teleported himself while riding on a bus. He’d wanted to be somewhere so badly that suddenly he was there. The next day he boarded the same bus and the driver said, “Hey, I saw you get on last time, but I didn’t see you get off.”
    I watched her closely, trying to see signs of whether she might leave us, but she kept baking bread and flat cookies, and driving us to school with lunches so hard to chew they made my jaw ache. Maybe she was planning on teleporting away, or just vanishing, moving on to her next life. More and more it became clear to me that anything was possible.
    One Saturday, while she was at the psychic church and my brother
and sister were with friends, I again went with my father to work. The night before, he’d been arguing with her, and I’d pretended to go to the bathroom. It didn’t sound like she was leaving, but rather as if he was trying to convince her to leave me behind. But all I overheard clearly was him saying, “Deni’s like me. He doesn’t need school.” This was how he started in as soon as we left.
    â€œYou and me, we like being in nature and fighting,” he said and cited his own frequent battles as a child, sounding angry, as if the fights hadn’t been fully resolved and somewhere there was a brutish nine-year-old with whom he still had to get even.
    â€œIf I stay with you and we travel together,” I asked, “can we go to other countries, too?”
    He glanced over. “What do you mean?”
    â€œCan we travel around Africa?”
    â€œAfrica?” he repeated. I’d read a story about the descendants of dinosaurs surviving in the interior of Africa, deep in isolated lakes, and I told him about it.
    He stared at the road. “That’s