Stoning Crows

I am alone. There is no one else. No one but me. There was some one else. Once. But they're gone now. They left me here, alone.

I sit in this dark room. It smells musty and cold breeze blows through the shattered pane of glass that serves as a window. Every day I sit in the same seat, at the back of the room and try to wish myself away. I watch the people around me. The tall woman who looks the same every day, the young ones who sit before her amidst the endless drone of her voice as it mixes through the ceaseless chatter of those that sit around me all day, every day. I stare at the clock on the wall. Only twenty minutes until this ends and I can creep away and hide until I have to come back here tomorrow. The time ticks by. Then, a bell rings. But to me it sounded faint and far away, barely in my train of thought, but I heard it. The people around me heard it too, and their chatter rises to a deafening roar as they shove back their chairs and race for the door, pushing, shoving and shouting as one after another, they flood out into the hallway to join the many others. I slowly arise from my seat as the last few leave. I sneak out the door and find my freedom as at last I leave this rundown school.

It isn't the best place they could have put me, nor is it the worst, but every day I resent my parents for sending me here. I resent my farther. He is a cruel man. He beats us and kicks us and locks us in the cold storage closet that is under the stairs and filled with rats and other vermin. He thinks we don't know what he does, but we do and we keep silent. We know he goes out and drinks till he falls over when he walks. We know he goes to see the horses and the card house and the drinking dens and puts his money into unwise choices. We know he visits the house where the women are kept and does the unspeakable. I resent my mother. She has plenty of money but refuses to use it to help us. She hoards it away and uses it to buy things for herself. She goes out to parties and drinks herself unconscious. She visits countless numbers of men. My sisters, my brother and I never have enough to eat or to wear. We don't have proper beds, we sleep on sacks of soot down in the cellar, which is where our mother puts us every day when we come home. Sometimes she doesn't feed us and when she does, it is only a poor meal of stale bread and water with a few foul vegetables that look like they ought to be kitchen scraps. Mother has enough money to employ a cook and she eats like she's royalty, yet she never feeds us anything fit to be eaten by growing children. We are so thin that if we were any more so, you would be able to see straight through us. We live in the cellar with the servants and vermin, but servants get paid and fed well and get to have some freedom to do what they will. We don't live well or even live relatively poorly. We have rich parents who have bad habits but at least we live.

I dawdled home, dreading the cellar where we are roughly tossed each afternoon. I paused in front of the posh mansion where my abusive parents lived their spoilt lives, even though at least one or sometimes both didn't come home some days because they were passed out, drunk in some dark alley way near the horrible drinking dens where they generally resided. We used to dream and wish that our parents would come stumbling home with a hangover and crying about how bad they've been to us. But we stopped dreaming a long time ago. We realised dreaming just doesn't work. I've seen what happens to people that drink too much. I know they die. That's what will happen to mother. It's not like I care though. In fact, I'll be glad to see her gone.

I'm in the cellar again. I don't like it, but at least we have a home. Of a sort. Though sometimes I think it doesn't count as one. There isn't any light in here so I curl up on my soot sack and sleep, just like I have done every day of every year of my miserable life.

I am awake now. There isn't any light, but I know it is day. I quietly climb up the ladder and through the trapdoor in the garden. I didn't wash this morning. I never wash. We don't wash because mother never lets us. I retrieve my dirty, beat up bag from under the hedge where I have hidden it since I was old enough to go to school. I don't want mother to know I have a bag. She doesn't let us own anything. She doesn't want us to have anything to cling to. And so, I took my only possession, my beaten up bag, and started the long journey to the horrible school where I toiled for hours on end.