Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(39)

“Do you know what they all are?” she asked.

He turned to her, feeling what he thought was a smile break out on his features. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”


The boys at school had laughed at him, but they had never known how to hurt him, not really. They had never known what he was. They said he had no mother, but that wasn’t true. Arnold had had a mother once, although she had given him up. He often imagined her doing it, a woman without a face handing him over like an unwanted parcel, her other hand still clutching tightly onto another hand . . .

He could not remember his sister. He only remembered her existence, like a fact written in one of his books and nothing more. She was the good chick his mother had kept. He was the bad chick she had given away.

He didn’t feel anything about it, not really, not now. It simply was.

He stared down at the feathers on the shore, the leavings of all the good chicks who had been nurtured and who had grown and eventually flown. The sky was the same as always: grey and flat and featureless. Under it, birds sang and hissed and clicked. He could hear them but he couldn’t see them in their hiding places among the reeds.

The one in his hand pulled and spat and made an almost eerie wailing that rang out across the water. He had covered her mouth and thrown her into the back of the Land Rover, knocked out by chloroform. Arnold had obtained it long before on the grounds of subduing samples for his art but it still worked. She had woken on the way back and she had cried then too, but it hadn’t taken long. Now he was by his own quiet lake, wearing his wetsuit, sleek and dark. He turned to her and smiled. He knew she could see everything in that smile, if she looked properly.

She had fought and kicked and screamed. Bad chick.

He waded into the water. His feet were bare and mud oozed and slid beneath his toes. Her cry grew louder but he didn’t stop, just took her with him, and her teeth began to click with the cold of it. He steadied himself against a low branch and went deeper still.

Beneath the surface, in the cold, the others were waiting. He could feel them. When he attained the right depth, a mass of bubbles spewing from her lips, he went in closer than he had before. He could see where their eyes had been. No trace of them remained but they stared anyway and he remembered the glutinous globes, round and ripe. The fish must have taken them first.

Now, not even their clothing looked the same. The water had claimed everything; they were stained and dark. Particles drifted before his eyes, blurring everything but not hiding it.

He pushed the chick into the hole with the others, in among the stones and rot and slimy things; in among the loak. She still clutched and grasped, but she was weak and he pushed her in deeper. He seized a pale arm, wrapping it around her for company—the skin was torn and nibbled, mottled with fish eggs—and he shifted a branch to cover them both. He held it in place for a while, not really looking at anything, and then he drifted into the darkness and the grief.

He could feel them watching him still, watching without eyes. He knew that they knew him for what he was; what he had always been. He was one of them, the bad chicks. This was his home. Now it was their home too.

All the bright children with their bright stares, bold and mocking and knowing. It was surely only their parents who could ever mistake them for good chicks, surely only their parents who would ever call them that. It did not matter. A bad chick could never be made good, could not be made to feel at home in the air and in the light; he knew that. But a good chick could most certainly be made bad, and he had made them, again and again.

At least she was with her sisters and brothers. She need never be alone, not like him.

Later, he finished off his painting of the bittern. This time there were no smudges and no smears, nothing at all to mar the perfect surface.


Arnold had gone back only because he had been curious about the kitten. He climbed the stone stile and went down to the riverbank. The kitten was still there. Its skin had been opened like a bag that had been unzipped. What was in there was like white worms, bloodied and mauled. The clean ginger fur was bloodied too. It no longer had any eyes.

Arnold was leaving soon, transferring to a home somewhere else, somewhere he might fit in. He already knew that he would not. There was never any use in flying away; he would still be the bad chick, the one who wasn’t wanted.

As he thought it, a fist bashed him around the ear. “Fight,” a voice shouted, in the way that boys did when there was a fight.

Arnold whirled to see Batty’s face up close. “Fight, fight,” Scott and Dale chanted as Batty grinned and lashed out, catching him under the chin. Arnold’s teeth clicked together painfully.

Batty hit out again and Arnold stumbled, driven back farther and farther, until his leg slipped from beneath him and he took another step to regain his balance and found there was nothing there. He went over, flailing, and suddenly he was in the water.

The boys laughed, leaning with their hands on their knees, slapping and jeering. Arnold couldn’t make out the words. He pushed himself up, his hands clutching at the slippery stones. The water no longer felt cold; it was warming against his skin, running down his face and into his eyes. His fist had closed around a smooth rock; it was shaped a little like an egg. He pushed himself up and climbed out of the water. The boys didn’t move. They didn’t see the rock until he reached Batty and hefted it and brought it down on the taller lad’s skull.

There was a sharp, loud crack, and Batty stopped laughing. He stopped doing anything at all. He fell to his knees on the grass. His mouth hung open, a dribble of spit suspended from his lip.