The cultivation of authenticity.
Black Bird's Nest
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Written by Priscilla Wong
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There was a husband and wife. As fortune would have it, together they were able to have three babies.
Cassidy Sutter held within herself a perfect distillation of what her husband had become—shadow of fear. She moved through their days reporting to Kennedy Hartman the way a deer eats from the hands of a huntsman, knowing that survival depended on the careful measurement of words and silences. She bade his every command, whether it pleased or displeased her. He possessed an iron fist in a velvet glove that could close around a throat as easily as she opened a honey jar. If there were a man up for a crime of haste, it was Kennedy who'd get away with murder.
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In the garage, coiled neat as a businessman's tie, hung a length of rope—cobalt blue shot through with crimson threads. Kennedy had chosen it with the same care other men might choose a necktie, imagining how it would complement the beige of her throat, how it would rest against the jewelry that other men had given her in better times. The stones caught light and threw it back like small accusations, and sometimes in the evening they seemed to whisper counsel that made his pulse quicken.
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The Los Angeles River moved sluggish and brown through its concrete channels, carrying the city's secrets toward the sea. It was where Cassidy's body might surface and sink again if she were to ever betray Kennedy, where the morning news might speak of self-destruction with the casual authority reserved for weather reports. The children would carry her ashes then, scattered across the valley floor where the wind moved through her abandoned jasmine terrace and rose garden. Her voice would live on in the pentatonic songs of wind chimes, silvery and mocking him still, in the dry air.
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It was her hair that marked her for what she was—black as the bird that made its nest up from the earth. Their children had inherited this darkness, though they moved with their father's stillness, pale eyes set in faces within his silent cloak that graced his invisible sickle with icy intellect that pierced souls. They watched the world from behind windows, three small sentinels in a house that felt more like a fortress with each passing season.
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The machines had changed everything, the way machines always do. They had come quietly at first, then with increasing boldness, until a man could no longer be certain whether his thoughts were his own or something programmed into him by forces he could not name. The children understood this better than their parents, having been born into a world where such distinctions had already begun to blur.
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Cassidy learned to live with the knowledge that she had married her own destroyer. Kennedy was the kind of man who read books about influence and persuasion the way other women read scripture, picking from them the particular dagger he needed. He had found the weaknesses in her defense—the memory of her mother, the color black that ran like a thread through all her wrought iron losses—and worked at them with the patience of winter.
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The names of the Hartman offspring - Lapis, Sable and Amber. Each night, they prayed their father would not strangle their mother and marry another.ā He tucked them in, soothing their fears. Kennedy would never strangle Cassidy. He would hire a gun man to dispose of her quietly, then afterwards, take his beautiful children to China to reclaim the land of their birthright. All of it. Not a single acre left untouched.
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