Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(30)

Do you expect to see nothing there? But of course I am still married.

In the seminar room she meets with her honors students.

These are bright lovely girls who have missed their favorite instructor very much. They all know that her husband has died and are shy in her presence. Several girls had written to her, halting little letters she’d read with tears in her eyes, and had set aside, meaning to answer some time in the future as she means to answer all of the letters she has received some time in the future.

The girls do not glance at the widow’s rings, however. They are too young, they have no idea.

(But—what is wrong? Is something wrong? In the midst of an earnest discussion of that poem by Emily Dickinson that begins After great pain, a formal feeling comes the widow begins to feel faint, light-headed.)

Perhaps it is too soon for the widow to return to the school where she’d once been so happy, as she’d been younger. Too soon to be talking animatedly with bright young girl-students as if she were as untouched as they, stretching her wound of a mouth into a smile.

Later, speaking with colleagues in the faculty lounge she feels an overwhelming urge to flee, to run away and hide. Her arms ache at the shoulders, badly she wants to spread the enormous muscled wings and fly, fly away where no one knows her.

She excuses herself, stumbling into a restroom. All her colleagues are women, their voices are pitched low in concern she wishes avidly not to hear—Poor Claudia! She looks as if she hasn’t been sleeping in weeks.


Jangling at the front door. The widow would run away to hide but she cannot for she is powerless to keep the intruder out of her home.

Claudie he calls her in his mock-chiding voice laying his heavy hand on her arm as if he has the right.

Has she made a decision about the house?—the brother-in-law inquires with a frown.

Listing the property with Sotheby’s as he has urged. Exceptional private homes, estates. The brother-in-law has contacted a realtor who can come to meet with them within the hour if he is summoned.

No she has told him. No no no.

And the pharmaceutical research company? It is “urgent” to invest before another day passes, the brother-in-law has tried to explain.

The brother-in-law is bemused by her—is he? Or is the brother-in-law exasperated, annoyed?

Badly he wants to be the executor of his deceased brother’s estate for (of course) the grieving widow is not capable of being the executrix.

I will help you, Claudie. You know Jim would want you to trust me.

She sees how he is eyeing her, the small bright eyes running over her like ants. He is very close to her, looming over her about to seize her by the shoulders to press his wet fleshy mouth against her mouth but she is too quick for him, she has pushed away from him, breathless, excited.

Claudie! What the hell d’you think you are doing . . .

He is flush-faced and panting. He would grab her, to hurt her. But she eludes him, her arms lengthening into wings, her slender body becoming even thinner, pure muscle. Her neck lengthens, curved like a snake.

And there is the beak: long, sharp, lethal.

The brother-in-law is dazed and confounded. In quicksilver ripples the change has come over her, it is the most exquisite sensation, indescribable.

She is above the enemy, plunging at him with her sharp long beak. So swiftly it has happened, the enemy has no way of protecting himself. The great blue heron is swooping at him, he is terrified trying with his arms to shield his head, face, eyes as the beak stabs at him—left cheek, left eye, moaning mouth, throat—blood spurts onto the beautiful slate-gray feathers of the heron’s breast as the enemy screams in terror and pain.

Afterward she will wonder whether some of the terror lay in the brother-in-law’s recognition of her—his brother’s widow Claudia.

The exhilaration of the hunt! The heron is pitiless, unerring.

Once your prey has fallen it will not rise to its feet again. It will not escape your furious stabbing beak, there is no haste in the kill.


Once, two, three . . . The widow shakes out sleeping pills into the palm of her hand.

Badly she wants to sleep! To sleep, and not to wake.

On the cream-colored woolen carpet of the guest room with chintz walls, organdy curtains, just visible inside the doorway is the faintest smear of something liquid and dark the widow has not (yet) noticed.


“My God. What terrible news . . . .”

Yet it is perplexing news. That the brother-in-law has been killed in so strange a way, stabbed to death with something like an ice pick, or attacked by a large bird—his skull pierced, both his eyes lacerated, multiple stab wounds in his chest, torso.

The brother-in-law was discovered in his vehicle, slumped over in the passenger’s seat, several miles from his home.

(But closer to his home than to the widow’s home on Aubergine Lake.)

He’d been missing overnight. No one in his family knew where he’d gone. In the brass-colored Land Rover, at the side of a country road, the brother-in-law had died of blood loss from his many wounds.

It was clear that the brother-in-law had died elsewhere, not in the vehicle in which there was not much blood.

Hearing this astonishing news the widow is stunned. How is it possible, the brother-in-law is—dead? It doesn’t seem believable that anyone she knows can have been murdered, the victim of a “vicious” attack.

A man with “no known enemies”—it is being said.