Crow by Amy Spurway

Author:Amy Spurway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2019-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

6 BLOOD AND WATER

One of the reasons Allie Walker did not die in the grungy bathroom of her father’s house on Christmas Eve night is that her kid brother, Lennon, is a demanding, impatient little tool. Despite agitated huffing and puffing about how he needed to fix his hair before his girlfriend arrived, Allie still wasn’t getting out of the bathroom fast enough. Lennon booted the door open. He found Allie in an empty bathtub, fully dressed, semi-conscious, with a broken Daisy razor beside her and an empty pill bottle in hand. The other reason that Allie Walker did not die in the grungy bathroom of her father’s house on Christmas Eve night is that the bathroom wasn’t even grungy. She scrubbed every inch of it with a toothbrush before dumping a mittful of Ativan down her throat, and trying to smash the blade out of a pretty pink razor.

[…]

“Allie, what the fuck?” It’s all I can stammer when I see her propped up in her hospital bed at the understaffed, rundown General Hospital in Town.

Her golden hair is woven into a careless braid, fluorescent lights give her skin a dewy, ethereal cast, and her grey eyes a blue, mirrory shimmer. IV lines and leads tether her to the moment-by-moment realities of her blanket-draped body. She looks perfectly at home here, in the cool, sterile professionalism of the clinical world. There’s an eerie elegance to her, like a porcelain doll in a glass case. Vulnerable and ­fragile, yet safe and secure. Allie would have made a kick-ass doctor. But she makes a beautiful patient, too.

“I didn’t mean to,” she mumbles, like she’s lost in a rather pleasant daydream. I stifle a gasp, as around her head I watch a band of blackened blue wrap around a wobbling sea of cobalt waves. A greyish-white froth erupts and is swallowed over and over again, as that hallucinatory ocean bashes against the hallucinatory wall. Meanwhile, a sickly smear of thick soot has moved in and settled over Allie’s midsection.

“Crow? You okay?” No mumbling now. Allie sounds concerned. On point. Like her practical, everything-is-under-control self.

“Me? Yeah. Fine. Why?” I say, pretending I can will away the surreal things I am sick of seeing. Still, the black blue band around her head bulges up in response to the thrashing and crashing. It’s like a pimple. I cringe, feel my shoulders lurch up toward my ears. It looks like it’s going to pop.

“You just spaced out completely. Petit mal seizures. Ask your doctor about petit mal seizures.”

“No. Shut up. I’m fine,” I say, bent on redirecting her attention to where it belongs, but where she was never good at putting it. “What happened, Al? I had no idea it was this bad . . .”

Which is utter bullshit. If I’d stopped to pull my head out of my own miserable arse for a minute, I’d have seen it. Her mother died. Allie wasn’t there when it happened, like she always swore she would be. And just

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.