Penelope Crumb by Shawn K. Stout

before my brains get awake.
    Then I hear Littie gasp.
His nose must be COLOSSAL.
I turn around slowly toward the open door. And when I look up at him, the first words that come out of my mouth are filled with relief. “Oh, it’s not
that
big.”
    And to my surprise he says, “Neither is yours.” Which is a funny thing to say to somebody you’ve never met before. And I think he’s talking about my nose, but I’m not 100 percent sure.
    I pull the picture of Grandpa Felix from my pocket. The nose on his face doesn’t look any bigger than his nose in the picture. Which means thateither noses grow really, really slow or Terrible is full of lies.

    Grandpa Felix clears his throat, and that’s when I notice how different he looks from the picture. His eyes are dark and puffy and he’s got whiskers growing in the cracks on his face. He looks like he’s had a thousand really bad days, one right after the next. And who knows, maybe he has.
    I hold the picture out to him because maybe he just needs a reminder of who he used to be. He looks at it and then looks at me like I’m handing him a plate of sausage that’s been sitting in the heat too long. I slide the picture back into my pocket.
    “Well?” Grandpa Felix says. He and Littie are looking at me and waiting for somebody to say something. Littie says, “er” and “uh” and “umm,” but she doesn’t seem to know what to do next.
    “You’re really not dead at all,” I say.
    He straightens his shoulders and says, “Not yet.”
    We stare at each other for a while, and then I say, “Can I use your bathroom?” It’s the first thing I can think of. “Please.”
    Grandpa Felix looks at me like I just told him half of a joke but forgot the funny part. Then he glances behind him, at the inside of his apartment, and for a minute I think he’s going to say no. “I’ve really got to go,” I say, shifting from one foot to the other.
    “It’s not healthy to hold it,” Littie chimes in to help.
    He grunts and as soon as he takes a step away from the door, I pull Littie inside. “Whoa, this place is a pigsty,” I say. Piles of newspapers, magazines, and pictures—lots and lots of pictures—are everywhere. I pull a few from the top of a pile next to the couch. Lots of people I don’t know and places I’ve never seen before. Tall buildings, sailboats, cornfields. “My word. What is all this stuff? Are you one of those people who never throw anything away?”
    “I thought you needed to use the bathroom,” Grandpa Felix grumbles, taking the pictures from me and placing them back on the pile.
    “Oh, right. I do. Where?”
    He points to a hallway and Littie grabs my arm and whispers, “Don’t leave me out here with him. He’s kind of scary.” She looks around. “And this place is dirty.”
    “It’s not that bad,” I tell her.
    “What should I do while you’re in there?” she asks. “What if he wants to talk to me? What do I talk about? Maybe I should just come into the bathroom with you. I’m just saying.”
    Then I turn toward Grandpa Felix and say, “Do you have a TV?”
    “Over there,” he says, pointing to a corner of a room with a worn leather chair parked in front of it. “But don’t touch anything, and don’t move anything. And don’t
touch
anything.”
    “TV?” That perks Littie right up. After stepping over a couple of piles, she sinks into the chair and clicks on the TV, saying, “This is great! A marathon of
Max Adventure
!” And I know she will be fine for as long as I want to stay.
    The bathroom is mostly clear of piles, except for a stack of magazines called
Life
on the back of the toilet. I pull Winston’s picture from my pocket. It’s the same kind of paper. “Hey,” I say, marching out of the bathroom and holding up Winston’s page. “Do you take pictures in magazines?”
    Grandpa Felix is sitting at a square wooden table, running his finger along the corners of a stack of newspapers. He looks up, hardly