finch. seven.

My parents eventually got tired of mumbling at me for not speaking. Said my eyebrows did all the talking anyway. I got Dad's ugly mug, chaotic eyebrows too - I'm not lucky like Whiskey. He got Momma's beauty. Lucky bastard. Cheekbones and shit, I've just got cheek. Stick my tongue inside one and roll my eyes, that says more than words ever will.

I stopped speaking because I didn't have much to say. I liked being quiet. Unassuming. Easier to watch people that way. Dad didn't notice when I would follow him into the dawn of the morning to go collect game, but by the time he noticed I was plodding through the snow behind him it was too late to go back. Grumbled something along the lines of  if Whiskey couldn't handle it his little girl couldn't.

Then I took the knife out of his hand and slit that deer's throat with one slow blink.

He stopped grumbling at me in the mornings after that - his turn to be lost for words. Drunk idiot can barely hold the knife still with his shaking hands now anyway. Lazy cuts, jagged slices, harder to sell. Harder to clean up. Harder to scrub the blood off of my hands in warm water. If I get frostbite we're all fucked so I'm selfish with the fireplace, watching steam dance around the crumbling brick as my fingers dance in front of the light.

I hate winter. The days are too short and too cold and yet it goes on and on and fucking on, until you're pretty sure the whole world is going to be a frozen wasteland forever. People on this side of Seven get real depressed this time of year. Counted fourteen pairs of shoe soles hanging from the trees like ornaments one day when I was walking to school. I was eight. When I walked home that day they were gone, nothing left of them but strands of jagged rope cut short and left tied to branches, a bunch of shuffled footprints around the tree trunks half blown over by the chilling breeze.  

Fourteen in one day, and I was eight years old. That's just the adults. Kids around here are either miserable or awful or both, rich and poor. They whine and complain and cry all damn day, I think it's why I stopped talking to them. You ever met Maisy Dupree? Yeah. Now you get what I'm taking about. They don't want to hear reason or resolution - they just want to complain. I got tired of telling them if they're not gonna fix their own problems then they should just shut up or get to work. Privileged kids don't know how to get to work and the poor kids don't have enough brains or means to solve their own problems, nobody wins.

Except me, when I can get out of talking to them.

I stopped going by my first name in third grade. Glass is a stupid name anyway. Reminds me of my Dad, smashed bottles and tipped-over tumblers scattered on the kitchen bench. Finch is technically my Dad's name too, but it's also my Mom's and my brother's and all my siblings - except I made it my own. When people call me Finch they're talking right at me, not to anyone else in my family. Even if they're talking mad smack about the Finch's drunken father I don't mind, because they're not wrong. He's a drunk, a textbook one too. What kind of idiot names their kids Whiskey and then Glass? And they wonder why I look so angry all the time.

I can't get mad at people speaking the truth about Dad, or me, or anyone else in my family. Whiskey's a baby and Mom's a mess and Dad's a drunk and I'm infuriating. At least they ain't lying. I hate liars. Mom's a great liar. Things will be fine and Your father won't forget your birthday and the cat ran away and we'll celebrate Ratmas next year, I promise.

Kicking up sludgy snow as it melts into spring, bullshit. Stretching my arms into too-small clothes, maybe if Mom got a job I could have clothes that actually fit - bullshit. Whiskey pissing the bed again because he's afraid of the dark whilst Momma dotes on him and I fight for a scrap of her attention, bullshit. It's all bullshit. I learned long ago that the only thing that comes out of anyone in this family's mouth is bullshit, so I say nothing at all.

At least I'm honest about that.