How to Lead a Life of Crime - By Kirsten Miller Page 0,2

on the walls. The junkies were kicked out to make room for the hipsters. The dive bars started serving tapas and wine. Block by block, the jungle was chopped down and cleared away. When I finally rolled into town, all that was left behind was a pasture.

Even I knew there were places in this city that hadn’t been tamed. Neighborhoods where people have every reason to be scared of the dark. I was planning to search for just such a spot until my little brother, Jude, convinced me to stay.

• • •

As usual, he brought me a dream of the past. In this one, I was eight years old and Jude was seven. It was the third time our mother tried to disappear. I don’t recall much about that particular trip or how long we were gone. I don’t even know where we went. The house where she hid us was little more than a three-room hut. It sat on the edge of a town surrounded by desert. Our neighbors closed their curtains to keep out the heat while they scurried from one pocket of air-conditioning to the next. Every day, Jude and I waited inside for the sun to head west. Then we set out to explore. Our mother warned us to watch for snakes, but we never even heard so much as one rattle. There was nothing out there but rocks, sand, and silence. For the first time, I felt safe.

Late one afternoon, a thunderstorm rolled in and stuck around until evening. That night, a strange bleating drowned out the noise from the television set. My brother thought it sounded like sheep were being slaughtered in the backyard of our house. Our mother told us to stay indoors, but Jude and I got our hands on some flashlights and went to investigate. There were no sheep, of course. Just thousands of toads that had crawled out of the mud. They’d never learned to be frightened of humans, and we had to step carefully as they hopped around our ankles. When we shined our lights on the puddles, we saw that every tiny pool was alive with their spawn.

Jude and I stayed up half the night, making plans for our miniature army. The next morning, I rushed to my window, hoping that some of the eggs had hatched. The toads were gone, and a murder of crows had descended on the desert. I couldn’t remember having seen a single bird in the sky. Now hundreds of them stood like black-clad mourners at the edge of the puddles. I wasn’t sure what was happening until a beast flew past with a string of eggs dangling from its beak. I sprinted outside, armed with a soup ladle and every bowl that my mother had stacked in the cupboards. I filled the vessels with water and eggs and carried the sloshing contents back to the safety of our shack.

Jude found me in the kitchen, searching for a place on the narrow counter for my latest batch of orphans. “What’s going on?” He laughed.

“Look outside! You’ve got to help me save the baby toads!” Watching the dream ten years later, I winced at the shrillness of my little boy voice. “Get the broom! You can beat the crows away while I work.”

Jude stood at the kitchen door and observed the carnage. “They’re eating their breakfast,” he said. “We can chase them away, but they’ll just come back. That’s what they’re supposed to do.”

“What do you mean?” My heart was still pounding.

“Forget it.” Jude tried to undo the damage with a flash of his impish smile. “Let’s go kick some bird butt.”

He spent the rest of the morning pleading with me to go back outside, but I’d already seen that my efforts were pointless. I never checked on the eggs again. A few days later, when I heard the sound of a car pulling up in our driveway, I stayed in front of the television, watching cartoons. While my mother wailed, Jude ran outside to greet our father. He must have been as terrified as we were. But Jude always understood things. He knew that where there is prey, there will always be predators. And by the time our family was back home in Connecticut, I’d learned my lesson. There’s no point in hiding. No place can ever be safe.

• • •

The first night I spent on the Lower East Side, I woke around eleven at night to the sound of drunken laughter. I’d