by C. Christine Fair

Holly and Lucy were angry birds trying desperately to escape the confinement of their corroded cages. They were thirteen and life was waging a war of attrition on them, so, they waged war on life. They had racked up abusers as if they were collecting them—fathers, uncles, brothers, brothers’ friends. They were wrathful girls. And their rage grew into vines which clutched them tightly in their strangulating embrace. They read Sylvia Plath as if her writings were a how-to guide to life. Their classmates pitied the occasional fool brash enough to say ‘Lucy and Holly are fat, ugly hillbillies’ to their faces. They’d set upon them like banshees. They dared anyone to fuck with these enormous chips on their shoulders. Some people—like their own mothers—said they were evil.

*

Holly and Lucy were angry birds trying desperately to escape the confinement of their corroded cages. The railroad track over the creek on the outskirts of Huntertown, Indiana (pop. 3,860) was their imagined escape from the petting zoo of monsters who immiserated them. They would sit on the concrete platform beneath the tracks undeterred by the algaeic stench of the creek below. ‘Lucy, where do these trains go?’ Holly would ask without expecting an answer. ‘Holly, what if we jumped in a boxcar and got the fuck out of here?’ Lucy would say in response. ‘I don’t know, Lucy. Our grandmothers would be devastated if we up and left.’ Lucy would charily second this caution, ‘Can we trust the other hobos in the box car? Maybe they’re rapists too?’ Despite these reservations, they imagined making their mothers hurt like they hurt them. And they reveled in it.

*

Holly and Lucy were angry birds trying desperately to escape the confinement of their corroded cages.  One day Lucy got tired of praying for God to give a fuck, so she hatched the plan. She said to Holly during recess, ‘Tonight is the night to jump the box car. To hell with the hobos. Meet me under the streetlamp near my house at 10 pm with your bike. Tonight, we’re getting out, Holly. I don’t know where and I don’t care.’ Lucy could taste the freedom in her mouth like a refreshing popsicle. During recess, they decided upon the required things to have in their rucksacks. At 10 pm, Lucy was there. She waited and waited and waited beneath the streetlamp. Polyphemus moths collected and fluttered above her, mesmerized by the light. Eventually, her excitement gave way to feeling cold and even afraid. Holly never came. Lucy thought she was made of stronger stuff than this. When Lucy slunk home in disappointment an hour later with her bike and rucksack in tow, she found her mother waiting for her. She bellowed, ‘Goddamnit you little fucker, fetch me my belt!’ Her hands flew about Lucy like angry birds.

oOo

C. Christine Fair is a Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University. She completed her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. Her creative pieces have appeared in Hyptertext, Lunch Ticket, Bangalore Review, Glassworks, and Existere Journal of Arts, among others in addition to her prodigious scholarly work. She causes trouble in multiple languages: Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. She is a student at the Writers Studio.