Prologue
Mother with the lazy eye spoons soup into our bowls. ‘Eat up,’ she says. She smiles, and the eye rolls outward, landing on the crow on the windowsill before it rolls back in. My cousin and I lift our spoons to our mouths and swallow. The other girls – Susie and Beth and Frances and Gloria – are still too little for meals with us. They nurse of the Mothers’ milk in the bedrooms. I dip a crust of bread into my soup until it softens enough to chew. Mother doesn’t like it when Andrea and I don’t finish our lunch.
There is a thud, thud, thud from the room next door and wild grunts like pigs at the trough. Our spoons pause midair and our heads, nearly identical, pivot at the neck. Three sets of eyes fix on the locked door. Mother rises from the table to stand behind us, placing one ha
