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to see what the bird looked like and saw that it didn’t look very different at all. Just lay so, so amazingly still.
    She knew that sometimes nerves cause animals to twitch after they’re dead, that chickens will run around even after their heads had been chopped off. In fact, she’d seen something like that firsthand herself when she was about Katie’s age. But that wasn’t with a chicken. “I killed a snake,” her dad had told her. “But it’s not dead yet. Come on. I’ll show you.”
    Riah couldn’t understand how the snake could be killed but not yet dead, but her dad led her past the line of tomatoes in the garden behind their house, where she saw a shovel with a dirty red stain lying beside the body of a three-foot-long black snake. The head lay a couple feet away and was motionless, but the snake’s body was curling and writhing furiously on the grass.
    Killed, but not yet dead.
    After a moment Riah had gone over and picked it up, then held it while it continued to squirm and spasm, held it while its severed neck leaked warm, sticky blood onto her hands, held it until it stopped moving for good.
    And now, as she cradled the dead bird in her hand, she thought of that writhing, dead snake.
    But the bird didn’t squirm at all.
    So still.
    Katie, who was crying loudly, had almost made it back to the house. Riah wasn’t surprised by her sister’s reaction. Honestly, she wasn’t surprised by her own, either. It’d been so easy to stop that bird’s life, to quiet it into death, and now she realized that it didn’t either bother her or please her, gave her no sense of accomplishment or of loss, no satisfaction or disappointment.
    She knew that she should probably feel something, that normal girls would feel bad or guilty or sad in some way, or get upset and start crying like Katie had, who was now calling for their mother.
    Katie, a normal girl.
    Riah, the freak.
    She laid the bird gently on the ground in a patch of dandelions near the stream, hoping that the gesture would somehow make her feel more reverent or more considerate of the bird’s death, but all she really felt was a sense of curiosity at the angle of the bird’s head and how it looked so odd twisted that way.
    She tilted her own head and studied her reflection in the water, tried to see what it would’ve looked like if her head was bent in the same way as the dead bird’s, but she couldn’t quite get the angle right.
    Back at the house, her mother had yelled at her, but her father had laughed it off. “Same as a racehorse,” he said in his wet, thick-tongued way. “Those things break a leg, the owners put ’em down right there on the track. Doesn’t matter who’s in the stands—women, kids, makes no difference at all, they make everyone watch.”
    Riah’s mother gave him a scolding look. “Hank, that’s enough.”
    He gazed at his youngest daughter, who was still sniffling, and his tone became firm: “Day comes when you gotta learn that everything dies. Just a matter of time. Better to learn that now than later.”
    He went back to his corn bread and ham with a renewed passion.
    â€œYou don’t need to upset Katie and you don’t need to encourage the older one,” Riah’s mom said.
    It’d been right around the time when Riah turned thirteen and her dad began visiting her bedroom that her mother had stopped referring to her by name and just started calling her “the older one.”
    Her dad grunted at the comment from his wife. “I’m just saying, killing a crippled bird isn’t cruel. Put it out of its misery. It’s the caring thing to do.”
    â€œCaring? Really?” There was unusual defiance in her mother’s tone.
    â€œYeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Really.”
    Riah watched Katie stifle back a tear. The girls had learned long ago not to argue with