Read Prairie Ostrich for Free Online Page A

Her hands are clasped in prayer.
    â€œWhy, Albert?” Mama sobs.
    Egg steps back, steps away. She thinks of her father in the ostrich barn, of Kathy — Egg jerks towards the shadows of her sister’s open bedroom door — Kathy is still out with Stacey. Mama cries, Mama cries but Egg cannot go to her. Egg is frozen, like the Vast Open Plains of the Northern Tundra. First day of school and Albert was not with them. Albert will never be with them. He has been dead for three months, two weeks, and five days — such a long, long time. Now they are all broken apart and Mama’s lost and drifting and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never be able to put them back together again.
    Egg runs back to her room, to her bed. She pulls the covers over her head. She does not want to see, she does not want to hear. She feels her heart shrivel up in her chest, a small, hard thing, not like the blue whale at all. The blue whale will not help her; not even the speed of light will bring Albert back. She curls and tucks her knees up to her chin and thinks of the stolen mints from the drawer, the matches from her Papa’s tool box. She cannot be good. And if she is not good, then she is damned.
    Egg knows that Mama wants Albert. But Egg is alive and Albert isn’t.

October
    Time crawls in the classroom. It is not even lunchtime and it already feels like forever. As Egg looks out the window, she can see the low-lying clouds streaking against a duller grey. The trees have begun shedding their leaves, the fields fading slowly to yellow. Egg wiggles in her chair. She’s placed The Mixed-Up Files and A Wrinkle in Time on the corner of her desk for her lunchtime library trek.
    Egg likes Claudia and Jamie in the From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , their idea to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, although Egg would have chosen the big Eaton’s in Calgary instead. It’s a good story — research — if ever she should run away. Money and a good bed: these are important. Egg thinks that the most important thing about running away is not the away part. The most important thing is the destination, the running to, or it all just becomes about running and that’s another kind of stuck. Also, violin cases are handy to pack your clothes.
    Stories are imagination. Stories aren’t real. But stories tell us something, don’t they, even if they are fiction? That’s what troubles Egg. That Claudia Kincaid is so real.
    In math, she raises her hand to go to the bathroom.
    Egg takes the long way around. You’re not supposed to take the long way around, but sometimes, especially during junior recess, Egg takes the hallway into the high school wing. Kathy has a new English teacher called Miss Chapman who has a whole bunch of new words that Egg is trying to wrap her head around. She likes onomatopoeia but oxymoron makes her laugh. Kathy says that Egg collects words like dogs collect bones. As Egg peers into Miss Chapman’s classroom, she sees this new teacher at the front of her class.
    The older you get, you either fatten or you shrivel, that’s what Kathy says. Egg watches Miss Chapman at the blackboard; her writing slants and slashes — the y ’s drop like daggers and the v ’s leap off the slate. Dostoyevsky Tolstoy Chekhov . Miss Chapman stands rigid, in a charcoal dress, her midnight-black hair in a blunt bowl cut. Her fingernails are ruby red, stark against the chalk. Snow White’s stepmother. Egg can see that Miss Chapman is not shrunken nor shrivelled but compressed and contained. The forces of gravity are working on Miss Chapman. She could go off at any second.
    Grown-ups are a mystery. Principal Crawley has a thin mustache, beady eyes, and a weasel’s twitch. Vice Principal Geary is always clutching his pockets, his fingers thick as sausages. Everyone knows that Vice Principal Geary will come in drunk at