Ava finds it hard to believe, as she lay shivering next to the town pub’s back door waiting for someone to bring the garbage out, that only a day before, she had never known hunger. Her thick winter cloak is now spattered with mud and smells of sewage. She has abandoned her stinking, wet gloves after a rough man pushed her to ground near the the sheriff’s station. It’s possible he just didn’t see her, seeing as she is quite small compared to the adults. No one seemed to notice her.

Just a day ago she arrived from the mountain road, guided mostly by a voice on her shoulder that told her to keep going. The image of the carriage splintered and broken below her down the cliff stiff burned into the back of her mind. Her parents stopped moving, stopped crying, and never spoke again. But then, a blackbird fluttered down from a tree and landed on her shoulder, and whispered to her to walk to town. There’s food there. She looked at him, and even thought his single oval eye should have stood out as strange, she didn’t care. She called him Ovey. She began to think of him as a guardian fairy.

He always seemed to be there, even when she couldn’t see him. He would talk to her without moving his beak, but nobody else could hear. When he flew, he didn’t flap his wings, and he never ever sang. Ovey may not be a fairy, but Ava didn’t care. Because he was her new best friend.

Soon, Ava would find out that her hunger was only the beginning of her troubles.