Read Online Prairie Ostrich by Tamai Kobayashi - Free Book Online

water. She stares at the bottle. This is what makes Mama Not-Mama. This grown-up stuff, like cigarettes, like S - E - X. Egg brings the bottle close and wrinkles her nose against the sour. Quickly, she takes a sip. Poison! She spits out the burn. Without a second thought, she dumps the bottle into the sink and watches the amber swirl away from her.
    Now she’s done it.
    The bottle is empty.
    For a second she thinks of putting maple syrup into the bottle but Mama would know because of the taste. Then she thinks of her secret hiding place: the loft. Egg must get rid of the evidence. Bottle tucked under her armpit, she runs to the side of the barn, to the ladder by the side shed. Up she goes, to the creaking roof of the shed. The splinters prick against her knees and elbows as she makes her way across the slanting overhang, into the small window of the barn’s loft. She closes the shutter behind her.
    She has stashed her comics here, in the darkness of the barn above the ostriches. Albert’s blanket, the one she has pinched from the boxes below, makes a cozy berth. A wooden crate holds her comics and clippings of her favourite TV shows, along with odds and ends: Botan candy toys from Nakashima’s in Lethbridge, a pin of the USS Uganda that she found on Centre Street in Calgary. Her Evel Knievel doll, the one she bought at the Stampede, sits coldly observing from his ledge. And here, a stack of her precious TV Guides , a rarity in Bittercreek — she can look up The Streets of San Francisco even if Kathy won’t let her watch it. She places Mama’s bottle beside the crate and jams her candle stub in the stopper. Here, above the restless ostriches, she flips through her superhero comics: secret identities and double lives. In the back pages of the comics there are miracles — Johnny Altas transformed from a ninety-pound weakling, Kung Fu Secrets Revealed, Learn Hypnotism, and Rubber Masks that are Amazingly Real! The X-ray glasses are the best — Egg wants them more than anything else in the world. X-ray, like a superhero. Egg knows that only a few letters set invisibility from invincibility: that must be a sign.
    Her father scrapes the shovel in the pens below her, a syncopated shh-shh, shh-shh that is unexpectedly comforting. Egg presses her nose against the floorboards and peers through the gap in the slats. But he is only a sliver here, so she scoots near the crate, to the hole in the wood, her special eye-knot, spy-knot.
    He is right below her. Egg thinks that he looks flat, like all the gravity has pressed him down but she knows the word for this — perspective. His hair falls, uneven, as if he had hacked blindly at his head. Egg remembers her Papa before he moved into the ostrich barn, his hair, so black, the cut, precise. Now, it’s like he is undone. Papa is unravelling.
    Chirp chirp , from the crate. He has lengthened the run and there is new chicken wire along the bottom of the last pen. The hatchlings have grown into chicks, their dun-coloured feathers still short and stiff. Some chicks have twine looped around their splaying knees — her father’s own remedy for the ones who have trouble walking on the jute.
    With a click of the gate latch, her father goes through the grill to the outside pens. Egg runs to the corner of the loft, to the creaking ladder that leads down to the boxes. Cautiously, with foot to foot and hand to hand, she descends. Ladders always feel like the edge of the world.
    She rummages through Albert’s suitcase that holds his ties, his best shoes, and his jangles and jingles — pins, a watch, an old key chain of Tetsuwan Atom. She has his set of Disappearing Cups but she wants real magic, not some sleight of hand. Those are tricks and tricks are not fair.
    She picks up Albert’s silver dollar and tries to do his knuckle roll but the silver glints and slips through her fingers. The coin rolls in a spiral loop, into the chick’s