Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(28)

Low over the lake she flies. Through ascending columns of mist she flies. The great blue heron is the first of the predator-birds to wake each morning in the chill twilight before dawn. It is an almost unbearable happiness, pumping the great gray-feathered wings that are so much larger than the slender body they might wrap the body inside them, and hide it.

Into the marshy woods, flying low. Her sharp eyes fixed on the ground. Small rodents are her prey. Small unwitting birds are her prey.

She will wade in the shallow water moving slowly forward on her spindly legs, or standing very still. She is very patient. Her beak strikes, she swallows her prey whole, and alive—thrashing and squealing in terror.

The hoarse, croaking cry—a proclamation of pure joy.

Yet she is happiest when flying. When she is rising with the air currents, soaring and floating on gusts of wind. When her eye detects motion below, a flash of color, fish-color, and her slender body instantaneously becomes a sleek missile, aimed downward, propelled sharply downward, to kill.

Through the air she plunges and her sharp beak is precise and pitiless spearing a small fish which in a single reflex she swallows alive, still squirming as it passes down her throat, into her gullet.

She hunts without ceasing for she is always hungry. It is hunger that drives all motion, like waves that never come to an end but are renewed, refreshed.

Again the triumphant cry which you hear in your sleep. I am alive, I am here, I am myself and I am hungry.


Each morning it has been happening. The widow wakes with a sudden violence as if she has been yanked into consciousness.

A hoarse croaking cry from the lake.

A blinding light flooding the brain.

She is furious with the (deceased) husband. She has told no one.

Why did you go away when you did? Why did you not take better care of yourself? Why were you careless of both our lives?

How can I forgive you . . .


Why had he died, why when he might not have died. As he’d lived quietly, unobtrusively. Always a good person.

Always kind. Considerate of others.

He’d had chest pains, a spell of breathlessness and light-headedness but he had not wanted to tell her. He’d promised he would pick up his sister’s son at Newark Airport and drive him to relatives in Stamford, Connecticut; no reason the nineteen-year-old couldn’t take a bus or a taxi but James had insisted, no trouble, really no trouble, in fact it is a good deal of trouble, it is a trip of hours, and some of these in heavy traffic. Already as he was preparing to leave she’d seen something in his face, a sudden small wince, a startled concentration, with wifely concern asking, Is something wrong? and quickly he’d said No, it’s nothing, of course James would quickly say It’s nothing for that is the kind of man James was. And that is why (the widow thinks bitterly) James is not that man any longer, he is not is, he is was. And she might have known this. She might have perceived this. Asking, But are you in pain?—and he’d denied pain as a wrongdoer would deny having done wrong for that is how he was.

She was saying, there was pettishness in her voice (she knows), why don’t we hire a car service for your nephew, explain that the drive is just too much for you, and then you have to turn around and return and we would pay for it ourselves of course, but James said certainly not, no, he’d promised to pick up his nephew and drive him to Stamford, it would be an opportunity for him and Andy to talk together, for they so rarely saw each other in recent years. And he said my sister and brother-in-law wouldn’t allow us to pay for a car service which seemed beside the point to Claudia who said exasperated, Then they should pay for the car! Why are we quarreling, what is this about?

Well, she knew. She knew what it was about: James’s feelings of obligation to his family. James’s habit of being good. His compulsion to do the right thing even when the right thing is meaningless.

Even when the right thing will cost him his life.

The husband’s compulsion to be generous, to be kind, to be considerate of others because that is his nature.

And the pains had not subsided but increased as James drove along the Turnpike and in a nightmare of interstate traffic his vehicle swerved off the highway just before the exit for Newark Airport. And he was taken by ambulance to an ER in Newark where he would survive for ninety-six minutes—until just before the terrified wife arrives.


Exhausted insomniac hours at her husband’s death going through accounts, bank statements, paying bills.

Not death, desk. She’d meant.


The brother-in-law has left a glossy Sotheby’s brochure.

The brother-in-law has left a glossy brochure for a “genetic modification” research institute in Hudson Park, New Jersey across which he has scrawled Terrific opportunities for investment here but it’s “time sensitive”—before the stock takes off into the stratosphere.

The brother-in-law has left a snide phone message—Claudie? You must know that I am your friend & (you must know) you have not so many friends now that Jim is gone.


She is not unhappy! She has grown to love rain-lashed days, days when there is no sun, mud-days, when she can tramp in the wetlands in rubber boots. In an old L.L. Bean jacket of her husband’s with wonderful zippered pockets and flaps into which she can shove tissues, gloves, even a cell phone.

She will not usually answer the cell phone if it rings. But she feels an obligation to see who might wish to speak with her. Whom she might call back.