Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(107)

“When did she get ill?”

“When it became clear that Pip wasn’t doing so well. You were a thriving, healthy baby but Pippa was in and out of hospital because she was struggling to feed. She slept all the time. She never cried. You were smiling, then rolling over, then walking and she was falling further and further behind.”

“And Mum couldn’t cope?”

“The doctors became worried as she had all these strange ideas. And you were a real handful.”

“Me?”

“I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t say this.”

“Tell me.”

“You were just a little girl, trying to get their attention. You’d bite Pippa, steal her food. When you were big enough, you’d try to tip her from her high chair.”

“And what exactly was it that Mum believed?”

“She insisted she’d been tricked by the birds. They’d helped her to conceive and then they went and swapped one of you for one of their own.”


I wake in the hours when the night turns from black to grey to something pale and cold. My mind’s full. It’s been working while I sleep.

Mum’s insistence that she’d been tricked by birds. That they’d helped her to conceive.

They laid one of their own in your mother’s nest . . .

Cuckoo tactics. Mimic the host’s eggs and push out one of their own. Equip your chick for warfare. Once hatched, the hooks on its legs will help it to heave its rivals from the nest.

Look under the crow palace.

I pull on jeans and a sweatshirt. Dad kept his tools in his shed. I pull the shovel from the rack, fork and a trowel for more delicate work.

It’s chilly. I leave footprints on the damp lawn. It takes a while because I go slowly. First I take up turf around the crow palace. Then I dig around the base. The post goes deep into the rich, dark soil. My arms ache.

I lean on the post, then pull it back and forth, trying to loosen it. It topples with a crash. I expect the neighbours to come running out but nobody does.

I have to be more careful with the next part of my excavation. I use the trowel, working slowly until I feel it scrape something. Then I use my hands.

I uncover a hard, white dome. Soil’s stuck in the zigzag sutures and packed into the fontanelle. The skull eyes me with black orbits full of dirt that crawl with worms.

I clean off the skeleton, bit by bit. Its arms are folded over the delicate ribcage. Such tiny hands and feet. It’s small. She’s smaller than a newborn, pushed out into the cold far too early.

Mum and Stephanie were right. Here is my real sister, not the creature called Pippa.

Oh my God, you poor baby girl. What did they do to you?


“Are you okay?” Elsa ushers me into the kitchen. It’s eight in the morning. She has her own key.

I can’t bring myself to ask whether Pippa, my crow sister, is awake. How was the exchange made? Was it monstrous Pippa who heaved my real sister from my mother’s womb? Was she strangled with her own umbilical cord? And who buried my blood sister? Was it Mum and Dad? No wonder they were undone.

“What happened to you?”

Elsa opens a cupboard and pulls out a bag of seed mix, rips it open and tips out a handful. When she eats, some of it spills down her front. She doesn’t bother to brush it off. When she offers me some I’m hit by a wave of nausea that sends me across the room on rubbery legs to vomit in the bin.

“You’ve got yourself in a right old state.” Elsa holds back my hair.

I take a deep breath and wipe my nose.

“Elsa, there’s a baby buried in the garden.”

She goes very still.

“You knew about it, didn’t you?” I sit down.

She pulls a chair alongside mine, its legs scraping on the tiles. She grasps my hands.

“I didn’t want you to know about it yet. I wish that cuckoo-brained Stephanie hadn’t come to the funeral. And Arthur and Megan hadn’t interfered with that damn key. You found the eggs, didn’t you?”

I think I’m going to faint so I put my head on the table until it passes. Elsa rubs my back and carries on talking. When I sit up, Elsa’s smiling, her head tilted at an odd angle. A gesture I don’t recognise. “I’m actually relieved. It’s easier that you know now you’re staying.”

“Elsa, I can’t stay here.”

“It’s best for everyone. You’ve others to consider now.”

I press my fists to my closed eyes. I can’t consider anything. My mind’s full of tiny bones.

“Mum knew that Pippa wasn’t hers, didn’t she?” I’m thinking of the human-bird-baby in its shell.

“Pippa?” Elsa’s eyes are yellow in this light. “No, she knew that it was you that wasn’t hers. She had to watch you like a hawk around Pip.”

I vomit again. Clumps of semi-digested food gets caught in my hair. Elsa dabs at my mouth with a tea towel. Her colours are the jay’s—brown, pink and blue. Was it her, stood at Mum’s back and pecking at her eye?

Pippa stands in the doorway looking from my face to Elsa’s and back again. I’ve never seen Pip’s gaze so direct.

Now I know why my heart’s loveless. Pip’s not the aberration; I am. I’m the daughter of crows, smuggled into the nest. Pippa is how she is because of my failed murder attempt. I affected her development when I tried to foist her from the womb.