Excerpt from

Primitive
By
Sean Craven

Jason tugged at Heather’s arm, and she turned to him. He was a skinny ten-year-old with a burr of pale brown hair, already almost as tall as she was. “Mom,” he asked, “will you please buy me this?”

They stood in the shade of a blue tarp at the flea market, where Heather had been working her way through a rack of dresses. Jason showed her a book. It was beat-up, edges rounded. The cover was all in browns, and the image of a battered, not-quite-human skull looked like a painting. It was a photograph. The book was called Early Man.

“Eeew,” she said. “That’s so morbid.”

“It’s great,” Jason said. “Look.”

Heather flipped through the pages. Bones, photographs of anthropologists and men with spears, chipped stones and paintings of cavemen. One image jumped out at her, an elephant being butchered in a marsh. A blood-slick ape emerging from a hole in the animal’s side handed out pieces of liver. A crouching figure ate brains from a crushed head the size of a recliner.

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