Page 10 of Liar Byrd
My eyes find my mother in the dining room, and she gets paler and paler, her bones poking against thin skin. She’s withering away, being eaten alive by whatever infection has been turning her right leg black.
But there are no doctors or hospitals to treat infections.
Not here.
Only Jeremiah can save us, and he chooses not to save my mother.
I should hate her for what she did, but if there is a god, he is already punishing her.
Jeremiah beams, so happy when I throw up one morning and can’t stop.
“We are blessed.”
I turn away from his smile and pretend not to notice the bruises on the inside of my thighs from fighting back.
Three days later, he screams at me when I’m still half-asleep, and pain is stabbing my belly until I sit up and look at the blood soaking the sheets.
He blames me, and he’s right to.
Itismy fault.
In all the time that he has kept me in his bed, I have wished to die.
Every.
Single.
Day.
And the universe was listening.
Except, it didn’t kill me.
It killed my baby.
Chapter 5
Byrdie
Two days after I killed my baby, my mother dies.
Anger is a kindling that burns out too fast. If Jeremiah had let her go to a hospital, she would have lived, and if Mom had never brought me here, none of this would have happened.
My eyes are dry and itchy as I watch the men lower her canvas-wrapped body into the red dirt.
Jeremiah slides his arms around me. I shudder, wanting to shove him into the hole his acolytes dug, smack him on the head with the shovel, and watch him bleed out. Ihate.
More than anything, I hate.
It’s a quiet hate. An acid that burns through the white of my bones. Blisters them. No one sees. No one can. But I know it’s there. A cancerous rage consuming me from the inside out.
I stand beside Jeremiah as he speaks with the others, and I say nothing.
What is there to say?
I want to run.
How can you run when the devil has made you his wife?
