A/N: Yes, this is a sequel and kind of an explanation to several things in a fanfic I wrote many years ago when I struggled with writing, The Beast in the Corner.

There is a trigger warning for sexual abuse, mostly incest, and other disturbing and abusive situations, since I go much further in depth with what Sonic had dealt with in the story.

This is somewhat based on When Rabbit Howls by the Troops for Trudy Chase. I was going to make a variation of the title on the book but I figured if this story is completed and really well done I may publish it someday, as someone had suggested to me once that The Beast in the Corner could be rewritten and published.

The sea breeze tasted as salty as ever on his tongue. He had remembered it, so long ago, when his mama and papa had took him to this very beach, in this house built of stilt glass, the sand warming his feet, his eyes, his heart, and he sees the sun over the shore, a bladed goddess that bleeds into the sky, the pink raw meat tenderizing the feast for the seagulls. The car he drove was old, a "POS" as his son had called it, and he breathed out the ocean shore all in his lungs, the tales of mermaids and mermans, the tales of watery caves and the mystical creatures that lied underneath the estuary. It felt like home to him. A home that he never felt in years.

The days spent in the psychiatric ward had tired him. His hands were weary of no cigarettes, no beer, and he never got much sunshine in a ward like that. The windows were barred while all the pink rats had pissed in their sheets, waiting for their deathtakers to come and give them a kiss into another world they barely knew. He had a world inside of him, a world that lied dormant inside of him, sleeping, a glowing ruby, a baby infant jewel, nestling inside the confines of his head.

"We were supposed to get married! Is this supposed to be our pre-honeymoon?"

The hedgehog wearing a thick overcoat even in dry summer days couldn't answer. Sipping on margaritas while back at his parent's old home they gave to him, all his all his! His mother died, the old bitched witch, and his father, the haggard bastard, they have all set and rot in their graves, and the beach house was his. He hardly knew them. His memories were clean as a Windexed window. The glass carried no trace of his mom and pop's memories.

Pop! The clap of his mighty hands as they arrived! The house had come to them, and Amy, half-dozed in her slumber, had seen how immaculate the whole house was, and Miles, little Miles, was he so excited to come and play! The beach careened its shores to the ocean, the waves licking up all the sand like a lemon popsicle, while the sky was violescent, full of wonder and hope! He had enough of the wards, the medications, the trials and tribulations of the birth and death of his inmates at the sanitarium that was colored with white steel with green and yellow pipes. The lights never lit up the rooms properly; they were as blind as moles, as blind as gods! The hedgehog had thought they were full of nicotine, the yellow burnt walls, the ashy walls, the silver walls, the hospital was a strange colored hospital, but it was old-fashioned, rustic in its design, been keeping people insane since the 1920's. The jazz age has enticed him, the dancing of their tapping shoes and the Gatsbyian characters, throe with murder and splendor, the hospital had none of that, and it continued to stink of medicine and white wine, the same liquor his father had drank, the haggard bastard, the lowlife cretin.

Give me another, will you…

Give me more…

Aren't you going to give me more?

I wanted more you son of a bitch! Give me more!

More of what?

The father's wine had collected like plasma in a hospital, ready to be dispensed to the needy, to his father's gullet, to the white man's liver, full of splendor and decay.

I told you…to give me more…

His father was a big, rustic man, as big as the ward, and he had pipes collected in his pancreas, he walked with a cane, and he often couldn't feed himself. Sonic had to take care of everything. His mother was too busy shopping. Too busy getting her nails done. Too busy ignoring her son. Her husband. The big man, obese, the imprints sucking him in his Laz-E-Boy chair. Sonic had told him that he had enough. That he couldn't have any more white wine, else his sugar would skyrocket. And out comes the big needle of insulin, inject some of that Novolin in him, have him eat a cake because he needs some sugar, then have the Novolin again…

Sonic couldn't take care of a diabetic. He hardly knew anything about them. He even looked in his school books about it, and information was scarce. Diabetes wasn't such a new disease, was it? It's been around for a long time. Maybe even since that hospital has been built. He pondered if his father was handsome back in the 1960's, another age full of self-proclaimed innocence. Rolling in his eyes seemingly deeper into the pitholes of his skull, he suckered in more breath into his lungs, the oxygen tank that allowed him to breathe like a fish inside of ice. His father was a sick man, both physically, and emotionally.

"I need more…goddamn it! Sonic, get me more of my baby sweet white wine now! Mama isn't going to appreciate you treating me this way!"

Mama Stormie was always gone. Mama Stormie never gave a damn.

And his father mostly had a mentality of a child. The accident, long ago, that he caused, Sonic, the one who caused his brain to scatter and rust…

"Give me more now!"

He stored the white wine in the cabinet, the key in lock twisting its organs to keep it shut. A lock had to be installed, otherwise his father would come in and drink every wine and every beer that he had. And Sonic needed some of that beer. He needed it to stay alive in this godawful, piss-smelling world.

"I'm gonna…I'm gonna…"

Lying in the darkness of the corner of the closet, he watched his old man's hands rise, so shit-covered, so smelling of bitter chocolate wine and stained with his thousand bloodsheds from a thousand years ago. Lying awake, in fear of the once strong man's glory, his gloved hands once containing the mercy of so many gods, the teeth he shattered out of drunk men in alleys, the rats he pulled free of rat kings, and had ate upon their plaguish flesh.

The man, with breath of so much whey and alcohol, of high fructose corn syrup, his marriage ring proving nothing anymore, except how hard he could beat his child with, had risen, and he had clamored, with his voice as loud as lions in mountains, as men who were falling and plunging from the mountain god's hands.

"I'm warning you goddamn it…"

He closed his eyes. Wished it was over already.

His eyes were full of black ink. He couldn't remember any more.

"Sonic, look out!"

His hands, wet with sweat, swerved out of the way to avoid a semi-truck, and without Amy's proclamation, they would've been considered as dead as his mom and pop.

The sweat trickled from his brow, from his hands that reached for the holes in the steering wheel. Demanded a cigarette, even if his breath was becoming slighter, running away from him.

"Sonic, I don't know what's gotten into you! First you forget your wallet, and you sit there staring off into space, and then you forget Miles' name and start speaking in…what I think is Welsh? Or something like that? Then we almost got killed! I…hope that hospital hasn't made you…really loony, more than what you used to be."

He couldn't think of it.

Got that loonyness from his mother. The mother he never wished to call by Mommy or Momma ever again. His throat hacked, coughed, thinking of how he was loony enough already, as the million voices had told him in unison.

The beach was so far away, but he could collect the sea shells already, feel the tides swim underneath him…

"Sonic, are you OK?"

It was a trick question. A trick statement. OK was only a variable. The lines were 60 degrees counter clockwise. The numbers are as high as the tides of the ocean.

The infant jewel had lied inside of him, sleeping, unperturbed by the others…

The memories of his father, the ocean, the black ocean that dared to suck him up, it continued to sway under the summer breeze…

When he woke up, his teeth were broken. A clichéd dream of having his teeth fall out. But it was real. And his tongue had reached the gap of his tooth. It was there.

The young boy, the young boy who was so young, so blue, as blue as the ocean in the starless, riverring sky, his eye was red. His father had broken a blood vessel. He had wanted to call 911, but his father had told him he would finish him off if he told anyone about what happened.

Sonic's eye watered, and he went back in his room, his only escape from this filthy society. The rats had come and chewed through the walls. The broken windows and plastered teeth the home had were as broken as his tooth. His mother claimed they were going to fix the home, and sell it to some rich, wealthy family. Other than his father's temper tantrums, it was a nice home, until the rats came in, and feasted upon their leftover food and garbage, their tails always connected together, their shit and squeaking always so loud and so deathly.

Opened a beer, and he began again on his writing that was hidden under his desk. He wrote more things that he knew would never be published. Never was a good writer, his words so scrawled, as inanimate as his voice in the house of No Dreams. He always couldn't get past a paragraph without wanting to give up. His life had carried too much filth, too much pity from people who really didn't know what it was like taking care of a brain damaged diabetic alcoholic and obese father, a father whose fate was so unbelievable that even he himself could never believe it, and a neglectful mother, a relationship with her that carried on the borders of incest, but yet he couldn't say anything to stop it.

She loved him too much.

The woman that had carried veils of fisherman nets with dead shrimp lying in her curls of hair, had pictures of him in her wallet, but not her husband.

Her husband was the one who needed help, who needed someone to take care of his sugar intake, his rages, his breathing that soon tumbled him into unconscious little flit moments at a time, and how he couldn't tell what was right, to beat his child and ask for the white wine in the cupboard, or to wait until his sugar dropped that Selwyn could drink little increments at a time. Didn't know. Diabetes was a complicated disease, and his doctor had told him repeatedly that if he kept drinking white wine like he does now, he will die in as little as a few weeks. But yet he was still here. Selwyn, the big man who had dialysis hooked up to him, had to take shots of insulin every time he ate, and was brain damaged to the intelligence of a 6 year old child, was God's little joke.

As he wrote more single paragraphs, all of them unconnecting, all of them burnable and nothing but food for the flame creatures, his mother had arrived, her woolen hands full of bags, her face of ivory teeth like a fine-tuned piano, her eyes that were seaglass, she had dropped the presents for herself on the couch her dear husband wasn't taking, and she called her son, her son she loved.

"Sonic? Sonic, come here, mommy's got a little present for you."

He was 15, yet she still used terms such as "mommy", "baby doll", and often referred to his dead sister, Sarah, who died when she was in the womb with him. They were twins, and one had died as soon as they were born. His mother was very neurotic, just as disabled as her husband, and he knew that he had to take care of her too. She couldn't make dinner herself without wishing she could put razorblades and needles in her husband's food. She always tried to make Sonic the most gourmet food her hands could chisel from her greasy mitts, and her husband, she hated the rat king, the rat bastard, and had tried to douse his food in cigarette ashes, tinfoil, sewing needles and fabricated hearts, and cyanide.

Sick, sick as the rest of them! Her ailment needed more than the psychiatric medication they prescribed to Sonic back in the hospital.

If only he could cut off those disgusting titties and sap all the milk from them. Put them in a flowerpot, make them grow. Make them grow out to be bulbous plants that desired to be kissed by him, with thin red lips as red as sweet cinnamon and ginger.

The mother he could never escape, her arms so wide, so intoxicating with sin and shame. As much as he took care of her, he hated her too, yet couldn't leave her abandoned. He was fired from too many jobs. He wasn't sure if he could work any other job but a crone at a publishing company. One that rarely, if ever, published a good book. Most of them were trash. Sappy literature that often seeped of vampires and werewolves and romance found in Lifetime movies and Hallmark specials. He could puke from thinking of the turgid filth that collected on the pages like black, letter-shaped flies, stuck there and dying as the reader pulled them out, trying to get something out of them. Couldn't complain, as the company paid him more than his father ever got out of social security, just to keep quiet that the company was ripping off the authors and raking in profits themselves with scams. They never cared if the book they published had any merit at all.

The woman with the jewels on her hands like bedazzled eyes collected from slave children, she pointed towards him, and told him to come. Her breasts flopped around, the wretched tits, and his heart sank, his eyes had collected the well of tears from so many childhoods he had to please his mother, since the age of two. God help him, God have mercy on his soul, the little god that shined on his bowl of milk and cereal each day, the udders of the cows that were sacrileged to feed him, and his mother, and his disgusting, horribly disabled and disfigured father. The God had opened up and swallowed him whole by this point, the God of the household, the transvestite mother who was rich, but always collected dropped rings in her purse and showed them off to her family. Stole bread and wine and the milk she collected in her sagging tits. The seaglass eyes looked like jewels she stole from someone too, the sea green emeralds that spoke out to him as he carried the shopping bags, full of luxuries and heretic prizes, and she consumed him, in her pit of fire, the flames that have risen and burned all his sanctity away, the black turgid flames of Hell that Satan had kept for his guiltiest of prisoners.

He blacked out again before she could show him her gift. The blackouts always meant something bad. The forgetfulness always meant something bad. Everything he could think of in his memories were disgusting and as dark as the house had been, the house that was later bulldozed and wrecked, to settle in a nice Victorian house. A Victorian house he knew he couldn't have. He thought he deserved it, after all the shit he's been put through.

He collected all his tears of the incident, and stamped them to the address of the company who designed the house. They told him to suck a moose, whatever that meant. Maybe they were Canadian. And he tore the paper up into even, triangled shapes, and blew them across the sky. They had stabbed God's womb, and he expected it to bleed of milk, but it had not.

The beach house lied like the very prizes his mother had collected. The sea licked it evenly in her chops, and he thought how nice of a getaway it would all be. The white sheets they wore in the hospital would be replaced with fine suits and dappled gowns and silk pajamas made from the very silkworms of China and the same jewels his mother had worn. He told Amy to not wear the fine emeralds he got her a long time ago. They stayed in the jewelry box, with their precious eyes peeping at her, wanting tribulation for the crimes his mother had committed.

The Others had called. His head ached, his eyes glazed and gazing at the empty tureen of the sink that spout out clean, purified water for his slake thirst to swim in, and he wasn't sure of who they were. He carried the suitcases upstairs as he could hear whispering in the wind, the claws reaching out for him, the monster licking his jowls as he imagined how tasty his meat would be, fine cut, like the sky as the sun, the saw that seeped of blood, had made it burn on the grill. He tried to forget about it and looked at the fancy restaurants that were next to the beach house, that he would be able to afford due to his mother's will. She was dead, who gave a shit what he did with the money! Her meat was cold, her heart was cold, and her hair had turned as black as the night, her trees inside her chest no longer moving and swaying and rustling, her tree in her tit that no longer grew and blossomed out to her dead child, to her child who was as cold, lifeless, pale gray.

Couldn't think that way, as the woman was a bitch, but he could never be a hollowed out disgusting worm as herself. She and his father had wriggled for so long in the dirt; he wasn't sure when they would die. And not once had his father ever said "I love you". And not once had his mother said "I'm sorry".

The ashes were on top of the mantel piece in the beach house. She desired to be cremated. Sonic never as much as looked at the urn, or his father's, but he wanted to take them away to the darkness, the dark corner of his home that he knew for so long, that his parents often told him that he was nothing but the beast in the corner, who had forced the sick and weak woman to listen to her desires that were as wrong as the black pit in the earth underneath them were worms and devils lived, and his father claimed he couldn't stand looking at Sonic, much less gaze into the same eyes he inherited from his mother. Seaglass, with the touch of the bubbly foam that rose from the sea, and he drenched his feet in them, the feet that had walked so long in Hell's plaza.

It was both a gift and a curse to be here, he thought. The voices were unfolded in the palm of his hand, so many, like little stars, little saplings…

"Sonic, are you coming to eat with us?"

His son, the blue eyes that effaced with worry, bleeding with pity, had walked towards them, and Sonic watched the seagulls fight over a piece of food that he could remember that his father used to eat all the time. German chocolate cake, with the melting frosting staining the sand as if it stabbed it with its sharp shame.

The light broke through the window of the home, the many shards collecting on his fragmented faces. They had waited. And They had come, Their knives ready to slice him apart like a pickled meal.

—

They went to a macaroni bar, one that was special. Unique. The food was mediocre. And they ordered him to pay 125 for his meal. He had a glass of chardonnay with his alfredo that tasted faintly of the soup that he drank in the fetid summer as his mother had watched him, with glaring hatred, no longer his Mommy that had fed him until he was a large round pig, his face full of the milky dew that dripped from her tits.

He remembered, as he gazed far off into this memory…he was about eight years old. His father was a rational man at the time, working, supporting his family, but still a drunk. Selwyn still drank white wine while wearing his lascivious suit, looking to arouse his wife. But he never did. She always hungered for the beast in the corner, the child who always whispered, the child that just wanted to be loved, but was hated.

His mother had a little bit of sense back then. She often felt sorry for Sonic in ways that made her apologies even worse than the punishments. The soup, the piss colored soup, it had a spoon immersed in it, and he remembered he was full, and he didn't want to eat anymore. Their meal of German chocolate cake and ham roast and turkey and cold soup had fed him, but he didn't want any more of her bounty. The child felt he would puke all of the bounty, vomit all the roses and incarnations she had given him. The beast, the child, she wanted him, she wanted desperately for him to love her, but he never could. Her eyes always told him there was more to her lies, her fingers doused with arsenic from the cigarettes she smoked, her piano teeth, he couldn't stand the bitch, and as her yellow tobacco-stained nails had grabbed hold of his quills, she dragged him as he screamed, told her to stop.

"Stop! Stop Mommy! What are you going to do? What are you going to do with me? Stop Mommy, please…"

His nose bubbled with snot, his eyes quivering with tears. His mother hacked out, struck the child hedgehog in the face, and said, "Listen to me you little shit! You're never going to call me Mommy again! I'm queen of this goddamn castle, so from now on; you're calling me 'Madam'. Or 'Goddess'. Why won't you love me you little shit? I am all your world has ever wanted. We are both nothing without each other. What the hell did you just say to me?"

His mother very rarely flew into rages. She only physically abused him when he said the truth. That he hated her.

"I said that I hated you." He choked through his sobs, but the words barely bubbled to the surface.

The latrine was filled with cold water, water that smelled of the sewers. They haven't had their pipes fixed in so long, that the water looked like waste, orange and smelling of a foul odor. The child hadn't taken a shower in a month, and was thus scorned by the other children in his school.

She sidled in the air above him an old-fashioned razor, from the golden age of jazz, and she smiled, her piano teeth playing a sorrowful, dark tune.

"Say that to me again and I'll cut your throat."

She pressed the blade to his thin neck. One good cut in his arteries and he would say goodbye to Mommy, goodbye to Daddy, and hello the God that would feed him milk and wine, as if he was always a very hungry babe who feasted on the finest things in life, including the ham roast his mother made, and the cold placenta colored soup that lied across from the bathroom, broken, smashed, as the jewel inside his body began to be birthed by the Ego.

"No Mommy, don't do this, please…"

"Then never say those things about me again! You only got me, and only me, got that? You're my life baby doll. You're the only thing I got in this miserable mess. Sarah would be too, but oh Sarah had an unfortunate time getting out of me…she's still around, isn't she Sonic? Just in a better place?"

She asked him this question many times. He always answered the same.

"Yes Mommy. She's here. She's in your room, right now, on your bed, wanting you."

She moved the razor away from his neck, and snapped it back in its case. The water stifled his nostrils. He wondered why she even poured water into this latrine from the mercurial faucet, but her hand was firmly gripped to the back of his head, the grip growing tighter, the sobs becoming more uncontrollable from the woman he deemed a bitch, but truly his Mommy.

Mommy meaning a goddess who always damned him, plunged him into Hell, and he could never get away. Well into his teens, right until he was about 17, did he ever made an elaborate plan to run from his mother and father, away from the moon that cut the sky like the Mother's razor, the sun that had glowered over him, like his father's jaundice skin back in '83, when he drank far too much wine and his liver began to go through dialysis, the first of the many curses he dealt with in taking care of a man who never cared for him.

The latrine contained the ginger water, the mother raising his head high, a baptist's first moment in cattle prodding the name of God into him. Except he didn't believe in God. He never believed in God. He was dead right when he was born. He was the Anti-Christ that gave birth to the tyrants of his mother and father, one a loony who came from a psychiatric hospital who decided to have two babies, three, four babes. And one who was well-to-do, but always drank to deal with the mother's fussing over her children that had died stillborn, the jars as sea green as her eyes.

The latrine stared back at him with shit-colored eyes, and his mother's nails scratched the ends of his head, clawing, ripping, searing, as his head was plunged into the water, the silver rim becoming corrugated as the water had touched it with its venomous body.

It had rushed into his nostrils, the water that was like shit, and his mother plunged him down further, until he couldn't see the latrine's shiny face anymore, his vision obscured by darkness, a chiaroscuro of black.

His head was full of sinews and holes. He lay across the bed from Amy, but yet as her breasts pointed upward towards the ceiling, her body vulnerable to his touch, he had no desire. One of The Others said she was like Mom, and sex was a horrible sin to commit, even if it was with someone he trusted, gave his world to.

The darkness had swallowed him whole in the bedroom. Sonic listened to the infant jewel inside him, cooing to be protected, guarded, away from the sticky milk and the sticky hands and the sticky bloody mouths.

He turned over, away from her face. He realized he had so many faces for her to see. He wasn't sure of how many, but they all wanted out.

Sonic listened to the waves fighting over the shore, drunken fools dancing on the edge of the sky, and it reminded him of his father, back when he didn't have such a large fracture in his head.

The Others spoke, a web of telephone lines in that shitty apartment they lived in. Children, wives, husbands, teenagers, even animals, they all spoke aloud to him, as he swore he could read the blood that dripped from the walls, like a finely beaded cut from a rusted razor from the 1920's.

"THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK THE BEAST IS BACK".

Was he a monk that could wish for his heart to stop beating? Was he a hedgehog who once, too, was brave, like his father? Was he alive? Was he leaking poison out of his fingers like Mommy Dearest? Were his lips full of red dye and iodine? Was he pretty, smart, and everything in between? Was he a boil, a rotted wart, destined to be cured as said in the newspapers and magazines? Red and cadaverous he was, so full of white flesh, blue quills that no longer shined, hands that shed of whittled to the bone nails and so slimy his lips were full of fleshy snails. He couldn't cry anymore, the tears ran out, they were all lunged towards the ocean, where the drunken men shout, shout, shout, until the sun sleeps down, down, down, down, down…

"Shut up!"

A vase broke. It had shattered against the wall, and ashes had come flying out, its blood, its life that it once contained.

"Sonic…"

He couldn't hear their voices. They were all belted out to the dark, the din dark, the hullabaloo dark, the vociferous dark, the shouting that can cut through his legs and make him never run again.

Words were the sharpest blades. They were the hara kiri in the night.

"Sonic, what's wrong?"

He beat against his skull, he wanted them gone.

"What do you mean The Others have come back? You told me…you told me The Beast was gone just now."

The Beast was him. The Beast in the Corner that sat and watched his mother stroke the dead carcasses of her children.

Her eyes, they reminded him of the pickle jars that safely housed her little sleeping babies, all curled up like pearls in a clam shell.

"Sonic…"

Amy tenderly held his muzzle, looking at those pickled eyes, the babies calling from their milk-deprived throats.

"There's more to you than that, is there?"

He nodded his head.

"The Beast isn't gone, Amy. He's still alive. He just went away for a while. I don't know when he'll come back, but…there's more than the Beast. There's like a thousand others in there. They're alive, they all want out…"

Sleeping quietly, those little babies were, their skin mummified and gray…

"That's…right, isn't it? I mean, the drawings I saw when you escaped from the hospital. The tweezers, the pictures of the walls, the monster that…there's much more, is there?"

"I never wanted to have it happen right now. Especially when I just got out of the hospital. I don't want to go back there Amy. It was dark, it smelled, and…and someone died, someone I felt…is still around…"

"Sonic, you're being ridiculous." She wanted to slap him. Slap the crazy out of him. But he gripped his head, the voices brimming further, higher from the flames of Hell, and she couldn't think of anything to cure him. He was as sick as a dog with heart worms. He needed to be put in a cage for a long time, as the worms ate his arteries and veins.

The child had rose from his slumber, his pink rosy hands reaching out towards her, the child that wanted to be cradled, without abuse, without malice, without sexual greed.

"Are you my mommy?" he asked.

Smaller he was, his eyes black and peerless, but innocuous, and she held him, unsure of what to do with her husband at her bosom, wanting to smell her strawberry hair and be pricked by warm kisses, but she had treated him like the child he was deep inside, the fingers barely nubs, the eyes blind as stars, seeming to have a starfished nose like those moles she never saw. Starkissed, he laid aside from her chest, as she told him bedtime story after bedtime story after bedtime story to get him to sleep. But he still wanted Mommy to stop hurting him.

"I can't make all the pain of your Mommy go away," she said. "But I don't know what to do with you, I don't know what you're going to do with Miles, I don't know what you're doing to Sonic! Why are all of you doing this?"

Sonic had sat alone in that corner, his eyes pale, as pale as his skin, and he watched the new doting mother wishing her husband had never given birth.

He wished he was never pregnant with the mother's abuse, the father's drinking, the father's angry fists, and the wretched milk, oh how he hated the taste of it.

"Stay here Sonic. I'll see what we need to do with this child of ours."

He swore it wasn't his, but he stared blankly at the sandy wall, seeing the seashells beginning to drift off in the tide, the lighthouse signaling the men to come back from their fishing, and seagulls eating dead polluted fishes off the shore. The fishes still had their eyes open. They were only blind if he plucked them from their sockets.

Sonic wanted them to stop staring, so he did. And a hole, a pit where insanity lied, the vacuous gaze only looked back at him, and he imagined he could see the million worms tumbling out of its flesh, fishy flesh fishy flesh rotting in the sun, mouth so open, mouth so wide, gills so dry.

He cried, he cried! And the baby had heard him, and started to cry too.