The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

I didn’t know what they were crying for. Their kids weren’t dead.

“How did he die?” she asked. “Don’t know,” I said. I knew.

There’s nothing for you to be scared of.” “There’s nothing I am scared of,” I said.

No one saw me but I was still there. I was basically God. “So that was all it took,” I thought. “That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world. One morning, one moment, one yellow-haired boy. It wasn’t so much after all.”

I didn’t cry. I never cried. It just gave me another stain to pretend was Steven’s blood.

“That’s not how it works,” said Donna. “People don’t just die for no reason.”

“How long do you think Steven will be dead for?” I asked.

He had been dead for a long time already, and forever was a very long time more.

But my mammy says it’s bad for kids to have everything they want.” I didn’t think it would be bad for me to have everything I wanted.

I wanted to slam her against the curb. I wanted to see what color her blue dress would turn when it had her brains smashed all over it.

“I mean I’m not allowed to laugh,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Because my little brother died,” she said.

freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.

“Are you dead?” I whispered. She didn’t answer, just sniffed. “You can’t sniff if you’re dead, so you must not be dead,”

I didn’t know what would happen to her name when she moved to the new parents.

Sometimes I wondered if the hunger could have stopped my brain growing the way normal brains grew, because I had never had any sustenance to make into new cells.

“A nosebleed with seeds in it. Interesting.” “Well I am the bad seed,” I said.

“Like when you thought it was the right time to have me adopted.”

“You weren’t an easy kid to look after.” “You weren’t an easy mam to be looked after by.”

“Well. That must be nice for you,” she said. “Nice not to have had a kid who made the world worse.”

“Was I dead?” I asked. “Before I came to the hospital. When I swallowed the tablets. Was I dead?” She laughed. “Of course not. If you were dead you wouldn’t be talking to me now, would you?”

If you hadn’t been brought to the hospital so fast, you wouldn’t be here now.” “No. Obviously,” I said. “I’d still be in the playground.”

not one of them had been written by me. It was Mam’s writing. They were Mam’s words.

Notes from jail fake

It was, I realized, the same as the writing on the hate mail she had brought to Haverleigh to show me, the vicious notes

I’ve called her Molly Linda.

If I had known people would be so nice to me just because I had been in the hospital, I would have tried to get myself in the hospital much sooner.

“Because you’re going to start behaving?” “No,” I said. “Because no one’s ever going to catch me.”

“That’s for the toilet,” she said. “You’re for the toilet,” I said.

They were quite young. Mam wasn’t well for a long time, but it was a shock with Da.”

“Stop with the fucking dead thing. You’re eight years old, Chris. You’re too old to believe that. Stop.”

Even Jesus probably didn’t really come back after he was dead, he probably just stayed really quiet in the cave so everyone thought he was dead then jumped out to give them a shock.

the next person I kill is going to be dead forever too, and the person after that and the person after that and the person after that.

was only eight, but I still got a cell and a trial. Some things were so bad they stopped you being a kid.

“No one else is going to be dead,” said the one on my left.

You never knew when someone was going to kill you. Just ask Steven and Ruthie.

Deep down I knew people couldn’t go back in time. Deep down I knew people couldn’t come back alive again once they were dead.

There were lots of things I didn’t know about dying—how it felt, how it worked, almost everything, really—but the one thing I had learned was that it lasted forever. When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead.

I stayed sitting. I was too tired to do any more killing. I was too tired to do anything at all.

You couldn’t understand about fair and unfair when you had a mammy who made scones and a da who put your name into songs.

I understood it now. It was the way you cried when you were tired to the middle of your bones, when you didn’t have enough left inside you to do anything else except cry.

I was broken-glass girl. I hurt other people just by being me.