What the magpie says

CATHERINE CHIDGEY'S new novel, The Axeman's Carnival, takes a bird's-eye view - literally - of the lives of an unhappily married couple on a sheep farm in Central Otago

- CATHERINE CHIDGEY

Along long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black as warm as a cloud above me, when I was blind, my eyes unsprouted seeds, my eyes dots of gravel stuck under skin, when I was a beak opening for nothing nothing nothing, she lifted me into her pillowed palm. My siblings cried out as she carried me away, calling from our nest high in the spiny branches: Father! Father! Where are you? Come back! My mother called for him too, her voice frantic and afraid - but he, hunting for food, had left us all unguarded.

That first day she sang me a strange human song as she packed me into a slippery box punched with holes for air. I love you, a bushel and a peck, you bet your pretty neck I do...

Then came another voice, deeper than hers, and it was a voice I knew already, a voice I remembered chopping its way up our tree and into our nest of sticks and wire and wool. Shaking us in our shells. Come away, and Get in behind, and Dutchie, Dutchie, ya mongrel. She stopped singing to me about pretty necks then and said, "You're not to touch him." "Haven't you learned your lesson, babe?" "I said you're not to touch him." The box tilted and bumped and I was all claws in search of something to hold.

"I'm just looking."

Their breaths on my bareness, raising featherless bumps. A snort that I felt as a shock, a shove.

"It's got no chance." "Give me the lid. He needs to rest."

"Well, for Christ's sake, don't name it. And don't come crying to me."