We the Animals

One day, the narrator and his brothers sneak into their neighbor’s garden. They refer to him as Old Man, and they brazenly stomp on his plants, eating whatever they find. When they look up, they see that Old Man is watching from his porch. He calls them locusts, and when Manny asks what this means, he quotes, “What the locust swarm left, the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten; what the locusts have left other locusts have eaten.” Going on, he accuses them of invading his land, but he agrees to draw a picture of a locust for them, and he even invites them onto the porch. As the evening fades, they sit there on the porch, and Old Man teaches them how to stop mosquito bites from itching.

At one point, Manny tells Old Man that they ran away from home, and Joel says that their mother is dead. When Old Man goes inside the house to make the boys a salad, they find a wiffleball bat and start playing with it. Manny then tells Joel not to joke about Ma dying, and though the narrator notes that their mother is still distraught because Paps hasn’t come home, he thinks about the fact that she’s still very much alive. Joel, for his part, refuses to let Manny tell him what to do, so they start fighting while the narrator begs them to stop. As he does this, he thinks about how his mother often does the same thing to Paps, saying, “Stop, stop, stop.” When Old Man emerges from the house and sees Manny and Joel, he calls them animals and tells them to leave.