Prairie Ostrich
labyrinth. If you don’t know one word, you have to look up another, until the meaning is all unravelled.
    For Egg, it is all very complicated. The Greeks were scientists but without the science. They knew about atoms but they couldn’t see them. That’s what Democritus said; Egg read it in her Young Reader’s Guide to Science . So the atoms were like stories you made up and now we know that atoms are real.
    The Greeks didn’t have Jesus. Science or no science, Mrs. MacDonnell in Sunday School says the Greeks are going to Hell.
    Egg looks up. The pointer is out. Everyone knows about Mrs. Syms and the pointer. But Mrs. Syms stands by her desk and places her hand on a stack of books. Her fingers drum, a cascade of clicks as her nails skitter off the cover.
    â€œNow children,” Mrs. Syms holds up a book, “this year we will be reading Charlotte’s Web .” Every front row desk gets a pile. “Take one and pass them back.”
    Her heart jumps when Martin slaps the books on Paulie’s desk but he quickly turns back; he has taken no notice of the switch. Even Paulie just slides the book behind him without a second glance.
    Relieved, Egg picks up the slender volume, strokes the cover: a girl, staring dreamily into the distance, a spider’s web, a pig.
    Egg knows the story for Kathy has read it to her already. Kathy goes for the stories where children fly and wise animals talk, magical and miraculous, but Egg reads the Dictionary, her favourite book. She likes the brevity and precision. The Dictionary makes sense of the world, the A to Z of it, defined and ordered. Everything else is so muddled. Egg stares at the flap of skin beneath Mrs. Syms’s chin and she thinks of the turkey’s waddle and gobble. She sits straight up in her chair, palms on the desk, alert and ready. Not that she is browner, no. As Mrs. Syms speaks to the class, enunciating her d ’s, t ’s, and i-n-g ’s, Egg looks over her fellow students: Martin Fisken, Chuckie Buford, Glenda, and all the same gang from last year. She spreads her fingers, feels the desk, solid, the chair. She knows that wood has grains but not like sand. Egg sits. She thinks of the word diaphanous . Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom says that animals can smell fear, like blood in the water; they can sense it from miles away.
    Paulie raises his hand and he is off to the washroom.
    Egg gazes at Martin’s head, his slender neck and wispy blond hair. The fuzz on the back of his head is like the softest down on the head of an ostrich chick. She starts at that unexpected fragility, at the curve of the skull that seems so much like a shell. She thinks of the ear’s spiral, how ears and noses are the strangest things and even if you leave them out of your drawings, your faces won’t turn out creepy. Martin’s little dog ears make him look smaller. A curl of his lips brings out a snarl. Egg wonders what makes the mean come out in people, if it is there all the time, like the appendix, or is it something you catch, like the cooties? Can we cut it out, the badness in ourselves, if we turn the other cheek?
    Martin Fisken twists around in his chair. His freckles, sprinkled across the bridge of his nose, remind her of sparkles on the Christmas cupcakes, the faded red on shortbread cookies. With his smile and golden hair, he could be on a Weetabix box. The thought vanishes when he leans towards Egg and whispers, “This year, Jap, this year, you are going to die.”
    â€¦
    At the first clang of the lunch bell, Egg bolts out of the classroom. Run run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man. That’s how the story goes. She skulks behind the monkey bars, close to the bushes. By the bushes, at least, she can blend in with the runts, she is small enough. She knows the art of camouflage; she’s seen it on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom , the fawns in the tall grasses,

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