Chapter One

My mother's voice screeched into the house, from the yard Up in my room, I thought a storm had come until I saw the bare windowpane, the butter-colored sun streaming in.

I ran down the wooden steps and out the front door, peered through the railings on the front porch. My father was out by the hedges again, clipping as if some devil had possessed him, sweat streaming down his face and the shears sprouting from his giant body like antlers. For two days now all we'd heard were the sounds of metal slicing against metal, twigs being snapped through and dropping to the ground. The crops in the field were going to ruin, but my father didn't care. Our front yard was already adorned with an elephant, a lion, and a peacock with a spray of leaves fanning behind it. The hedge he was attacking now was fourth in the line that hemmed in our yard, blocking it from the country road that stretched all the way to town.

"STOP IT!" my mother screamed, beating on his back with an umbrella. My meek, religious mother who spent her days bent over in the fields and her nights bent over a Bible. "Stop that infernal clipping!"

No one could so much as raise a voice to my father without his hand coming down on them. I winced for my mother and braced myself for the beating that would surely come, once my father went back to normal. If he ever went back to normal. I had never seen my father get himself into such a frenzy. Two days ago he'd returned from market with a basket half full of eggs, picked up the clippers, and started going at it. Now the slicing sounds had made their way into our dreams, and