Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(4)

Gwen felt the hairs on her arms rise. She backed out of the room and walked quickly but quietly upstairs.

She lay in bed and did not hear any movement from downstairs. At some point she fell asleep.

In the morning, making the bed, she found a feather on the bottom sheet. She inspected the pillows and plumped them up.

Andrew was in the kitchen. They tiptoed around each other.

At work, Gwen logged out of the hospital intranet and on to the Internet. She looked up “remiges,” trying various spellings until she found the right one.

“Tiny serrations on the leading edge of their remiges help owls to fly silently,” she read.

She decided they needed to talk.

When Gwen arrived home, the kitchen was in darkness, but the light at the top of the stairs was on. She hung up her coat and stowed her bag. She wondered about making a drink and waiting in the kitchen. At some point, he would have to come down. And she would ask him to explain himself.

Instead, she found herself walking up the stairs. She was halfway up when she heard him cough. He coughed again, abnormally, as if he was trying to clear his throat. Then there was a series of choking sounds. Her brother had once choked on a piece of meat when they were small, and their mother had saved him by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, sending a scrap of roast beef shooting out of his mouth, but it had been the choking sound that had stayed with Gwen. She was hearing it again now, a desperate, almost metallic squawking, mechanical and animalistic at the same time. She ran up the remaining stairs and stopped on the landing.

Andrew was standing in the middle of the bathroom, bent over at the waist. There was a small, indistinct bundle on the floor in front of him and a string of drool hanging from his mouth. The bundle—the pellet—was rounded, tapered at one end and bristly with hair. Under the brightness of the bathroom light, the whiteness of bone gleamed.

She turned away. On the floor outside the baby’s room at the other end of the landing she saw something she thought she recognised. She took a step towards it.

Even in the half-light she could make out the blue and white stripes.





The Mathematical Inevitability of Corvids

SEANAN MCGUIRE



Morning means chaos at the birdbath, the beating of wings and the opening of beaks, threat displays and warnings. The early bird may get the worm in someone else’s garden, but here, it’s the early bird that gets the best shot at the water. I put the food out when I finish my own morning tasks, and that includes counting out the birds at the bath, making sure everything is properly weighted for the day to come. The birds know that. They don’t check the feeder before the door opens anymore, or sit outside my window and scream. We’ve come to an agreement, them and me.

The big Steller’s jay is in the middle of the bath again, throwing water over his feathers and fluffing them out like he thinks he’s impressing someone. I dutifully note him down. The count always begins from the center out, and today he’s the first bird, the sorrow bird, the bird that brings down the sky. My chest is tight when I look at the bath again—a tightness that fades as I spot the two northwestern crows behind him, grooming each other with careful strokes of their beaks. The joy bird and the girl bird, in one swoop. Joy, girl, joy, whispers the voice of my grandmother, who taught me the crow-count when I was little and lost and needed something to hold on to.

One’s for sorrow, two’s for joy, three’s a girl, and there’s four, for a boy: the little black-billed magpie who’s been coming around, shy as anything, holding back when the others mob the feeder. She’s getting enough to eat, but she’s not going to find a mate if she stays around here. We don’t have many black-billed magpies in this area. She’s the first I’ve seen in years. She’s the only one that’s stayed. And then there are three. My little murder, sitting on the rim of the bath and watching the window with clever crow-eyes, waiting for me to move away from my binoculars. They’ll be at the feeder by the time I open the front door, ready for their due.

I note them down, one after the other. Five’s for silver. Six for gold. Seven’s for a secret, never to be told.

I am very good with secrets.

There are other birds at the birdbath, little brown hopping things with inquisitive voices and skinny orange feet that never move separately but always together, like the birds themselves are spring-loaded. None of them matter for my count. Perhaps somewhere there is someone who keeps their time by sparrows, or marks the passage of the starlings, but that is not me. That is not my job. I put my binoculars aside, slip my notebook into the pocket of my coat, and rise.

It is time to feed the birds.


My name is Brenda. It means “raven.” I did not choose it for myself. My mother says it was the name of my great-grandmother, who died before I was born. I would ask my grandmother, who one assumes would remember her own mother, but my grandmother died as well, three years ago, after a week where I never counted more than a single corvid in a single day. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, said the birds, and sorrow was what I got: sorrow, and a long polished box, and shoes that pinched, and a mother who cried for days before she dried her eyes and started looking at me critically, quizzically, like somehow my strangeness had been invisible before my grandmother had to go.

My name is Brenda. I am fifteen years old. I learned to count when I was two, marking things off on my fingers, looking for the answers. If I counted one of something, it was mine: one crib, one bear, one mommy, who still stroked my hair and smoothed my brow and called me her beautiful girl back then, before things got complicated. I learned to count higher numbers when I was four, when my mother came home from the hospital with a small, red-faced thing that squawked and squalled and smelled of sour milk and talcum powder. His name was David. His name is still David now, eleven years later, and he still lives with us, although he doesn’t smell of sour milk as often anymore. His father still lives with us too, tall and cold and unforgiving toward me, cuckoo child hatched from another man’s egg but still living in his nest.