Warren, in his aforementioned naivete, figured that the cause of my torment was nothing more than adolescent angst, Growing-Up's foot slamming down on my dreams.

My brother was the ringleader of blind men, smiling by default and frowning with difficulty. Crying, for Warren, was a foreign practice. Like milk from a tree were tears from my brother. Not because he was proud or particularly stubborn; Warren was happy.

This happiness of his, this thing that lived inside of him but refused to visit me, I let it cut a schism between us. I let it detach my heart strings from my flesh and blood and return them to me. Warren didn't know.

So he smiled at me like a chubby-faced lion who'd caught his prey, standing in the doorway with his overalls sagging under the weight of the dirt he had collected that day. He looked like a farmer, talked like a farmer and smelled like a farmer. Simple, through and through.

"Say, Rosie," he drawled, "Ma's made blueberry pie."

Ma's blueberry pie was birdseed that I refused to peck off the ground. They would not lure me into their backyards with pretty food, just to admire the hues in my feathers. My plume was not theirs to admire. My greatest fear, as a pretty bird, would be dying in the yard of seed-sowers. I was not theirs to bring to the taxidermist.

I did not answer Warren. He stood behind me for a moment, taking his hat off and holding it to his chest like a mourner at a wake. "Y'hear me?"

"Yes."

He gave me his innocent-eyed pout, eyes belonging to a child who has robbed the cookie jar, returning his hat to his head. "Ma wants you to come downstairs."

Surrounded by shredded paper, hunched over my desk, I suppose I may have looked mad to him. Mr. Poe adjusted his bow tie, the slightest smile appearing beneath his mustache. Sylvia Plath shook her head.

"Tell Ma I don't feel good."

It wasn't a lie. I felt worse than that dead, stuffed bird. Worse than that broken china doll. Worse than the body thrown through the window in fetal position. All around me were Valium lullabies, propelling me into a deep, thoughtful sleep, surrounded by words I did not have time to write down.

Ma doesn't notice when her Valium is gone. She loses things as frequently as she pisses, and she knows it. She wouldn't dare to blame me for the disappearance of her medicine.

I needed it more than she did. You do not use chemotherapy to treat a cold. You use it to treat cancer. You do not use Valium to treat muscle spasms. You use it to treat psychosis.

Psychosis is an ugly word. It acts like a wart that has attached itself to the upper portion of your mind, pulsing and angry as you try and try to ostracize it. It grows larger by the moment, housing more and more uninvited visitors. Valium is bug spray for voices.

They always come back.