Page 46 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

That’s going to be tough, Hollis said.

Walt didn’t respond. Instead he sent a frisson of irritation Hollis’s way and continued kneading.

Hollis didn’t know what to do when Walt was sad. He shouldn’t care, but he did because Walt was using his body to feel things, and it was making him upset by default.

Had Walt been sad this whole time? It didn’t seem like it at first, but Walt had a lot of reasons to be unhappy. Hollis had more, considering the circumstances, but still.

Hollis watched him put the loaves in the oven and then tidy up the kitchen.

How

They were strangers, he realized.

This experience was different, knowing Walt was a person.

The horror of his intrusion was disturbing enough to feel demonic at the time. A spirit playing some sort of game that Hollis had lost. Every instance of Walt’s amusement felt like being taunted, his irritation like a threat, his ennui an insult.

Watching him talk to people Hollis knew was so dark that it tripped him into hysteria. Even now, after a month of Walt being somewhat normal, he still couldn’t control how it made his heart race with panic.

Yeah, he could joke around with Walt, but it never stopped feeling like a survival tactic. The chasm of the unknown behind Walt’s intentions was at the edge of his feet.

Hollis wasn’t a religious guy. He wasn’t scared of Walt because of hell or whatever, the supernatural existing at all was very much enough of a motivator. As was being a puppet of sorts.

But it was . . . different knowing Walt used to have a home. Had . . . sisters.

Knew another seventeen-year-old well enough to create the sort of revulsion Annie inspired in him.

That he went to dance halls and smoked and probably made the same food he cooked for his own family for Hollis’s. Even if his bread was about to be so dry and tough it would shock Hollis’s ma into disgust.

He was a person.

There was a feeling in Hollis’s belly that he couldn’t name, at bearing witness to Walt’s depression. Hollis wanted to be angry, he had the right to spit at Walt, You’re the one hijacking my life, why do you also get to be the one who’s sad? But it didn’t feel . . . right.

He didn’t feel sorry for him, and he was absolutely still going to try to figure out how to get Walt out of him. But he just couldn’t yell at him.

Not about this.

Eat

Walt’s bread turned out fine. It wasn’t pillowy and delicious with yeasty holes like Hollis’s was. It was dense and almost like cake, but it soaked up his ma’s white gravy well enough that no one made them answer any hard questions.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown were watching a black-and-white movie, and Walt lingered on his way up to Hollis’s room.

I saw this in theaters, he said.

I figured. What’s it called?

The Third Man. It’s funny how well it’s held up. You never really know what things people will latch on to in the long run. This wasn’t even the most popular movie of that year. Samson and Delilah and Pinky were the ticket. No one mentions those now.

“You want to sit down? Casting a long shadow, june bug.” Mrs. Brown tilted her head backward to smile at Hollis upside down.

“Nah,” Walt said. “Some other time.”

Walt walked them up the stairs in the dark, and Hollis tasted his loneliness.

Walt’s Bread

Ingredients