Page 87 of Wolf of Ashes
Finally reaching the trees, I carefully navigate my way to the statue Mom once spoke about.
By the time we reach it, it’s the darkest time of night, and the only human we come close to encountering is a woman dressed in old pants and a threadbare shirt. Her feet are bare. She’s huddled beside one of the nearby trees, muttering quietly to herself, a brown paper bag held loosely in her hand.
Homeless.
Mom called us that, too. We were women with nothing more than the clothes on our backs.
I shudder as I remind myself of her words:This cage is not our home. Better to be fucking homeless than to accept these walls.
Anarchy stays behind me, keeping to the shadows, and even though I don’t think the human woman will notice us, I skirt around her position as widely as I can.
I head for the monument in the paved clearing up ahead.
It’s made up of multiple smaller statues, all connected: A girl, a rabbit, and a little man in a top hat. They’re sitting on top of, and are surrounded by, several toadstools.
It’s right out of a children’s book Mom read to me.
I’m glad it’s the warmer months on this side of the world, since Mom described this statue as being covered in snow in winter. Which would make my task harder.
What I’m looking for is a little spot, the size of my forefinger, that’s out of place. The place where Mom hid a scroll when she ran from my father’s murderer.
In her last moments before she died, she told me it was here. She didn’t tell me what was on it, only whispering, “We were loved.”
I search and search, running my fingertips over the statues for so long that I’m ready to give up.
Then my thumb brushes the underneath of the smallest toadstool, finding its surface bumpier than the others. Stooping to see beneath it, I finally spot a darker place where it looks like there’s a plug of chewing gum pressed against the metal. I can only hope it’s concealing the hole at the end of the hollow she dug with her claw. The plug is under the mushroom, where humans wouldn’t see to clean it unless they were lying on their backs beneath it.
Anarchy has positioned herself in the shadows behind the statue, but I know she’ll warn me if someone’s coming. With that thought, I slip under the statue, dig away the gum with my claw, and use my claw’s tip to carefully drag at the edge of the tightly rolled paper within the hollow.
The scroll finally falls into my hand.
The parchment is tightly wound and inky black—the paper so dark that it seems to pull at the shadows around us. It’s maybe only four inches wide and one edge is rough, as if it might have been torn.
I hold the scroll to my chest for a moment. Another rare physical connection to my mother. Then I slide out from under the toadstool and prepare myself to see what’s written on it.
My heart is in my throat as I unroll the parchment, needing to use both of my hands to keep it from snapping closed again.
I try to breathe.
A moving image appears on the page, full of color against the black backdrop.
It’s a family.
A man with black wings stands behind a woman with golden hair, who holds a baby in her arms. The man is as tall as the keeper, with hair as black as mine and golden eyes, also just like mine.
“My father,” I whisper, my throat closing up as I try to process how much I look like him.
The woman is my mother as I remember her in my youngest years, before life in a cage depleted her. Her eyes are alive, her smile vibrant, nothing like the gaunt features of the woman who died in my young arms. “Mom.”
As I watch, the man’s left wing slowly extends and curves around the woman, enveloping her and the baby.
I can’t stop the hot burn behind my eyes as she turns her face up to him, a soft smile on her lips.
The baby is in swaddling clothes. I can’t see its face, but I know it’s me.
I know in my head that this moment never happened. I was born in the cage. Mom never held me while she stood beside my father. This image is a dream, but all I can hear is her voice and the message she gave me, over and over.
We were loved.
