The Omen of Crows Nest by Cathrina Constantine

Author:Cathrina Constantine [Constantine, Cathrina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: YA Fiction
Published: 2022-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

nineteen

I laced my fingers together, making a solid fist and brought them up under my nose, covering my mouth. Squeezing and reopening my eyes, I wavered. Could she read me? I lacked compunction. The burden of shame. It weighed heavy.

Was I damaged?

Yes.

Was I deficient of scruples?

Occasionally.

Did I care— Did I suffer?

Every day.

Will it ever end?

Wasn’t it just yesterday, wasn’t it the day before that, and the day…

I’d succeeded in suturing, confining my disorders. To live with a fortification I’d contrived. Gazing into her innocuous eyes, mixed with emotions, I felt a pinch, a snap.

Hazel sank to her knees before me. “I just want to understand.”

Hazel, don’t be the seam ripper.

“Dad…Dad… he…” My tongue stumbled. What to say? Tell her he’d slap, knock me around for the fun of it. Spurned me because he didn’t believe I was his biological daughter. That might put Mom’s reputation at risk in her young eyes. Under gauze of discretion, I had countless tales. I thought I was a bad girl, a disobedient child, as he’d say. I’d learn to take my chastisements because he said I deserved them. Until I reached the age of double digits, ten, eleven, twelve, then I’d pray he’d leave on business trips and stay gone. In public and with family he’d been, not loving, but polite.

I had no right to slander her daddy, or did I? We subsisted in differing realms. Hers was sweet— tea parties, jump rope, dolls, play-acting. Mine was a field of potential landmines and chasms. I’d spent days wrestling through sludge without recourse.

I’d coped by circumventing deepening gulches. Nevertheless, I found myself tightrope walking on the verge of self-destruction.

I thought it much simpler to sidestep her question, as was my routine, and said, “He killed Chester.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Hazel rocked on the heels of her feet. Her head see-sawing from side to side, evaluating me. “I remember Mom rubbing your frozen feet and wrapping you in warm blankets as you cried about Chester. She said the pony was on his last legs. He was dying a slow, agonizing death. Because of you. You wouldn’t let him go. Daddy put Chester out of his misery. It was you, Penelope, making the pony suffer.”

I hated to concede, a failure of mine, but she was accurate. Another culpable notch to enhance my stubborn thoughts. Chester had stopped eating and drinking. But still, Dad handled it badly.

“Tell me the real reason. Why did you hate Daddy? No lies. No stupid excuses.”

Snaap

I banded my arms across my chest. Curtailing my heart from cracking like an eggshell. “He… he…” She doesn’t need to know.

Pinch.

“He wasn’t nice.” Pinch. “Dad never loved me.”

Hazel’s neck elongated like a long-necked swan, and a delicate tuck formed in her immaculate skin between her brows. “Because of Chester?”

Sna-a-p

“I don’t know why.” But now I do. My chest hurt. “Gave me spankings… said nasty things and stuff.” Her pretty face screwed up and began to change. I blinked. Reconfiguring her sudden distortion, trying to get her eyes into her skull where they belonged.

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