Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(68)

What we call “prayer” these days, he said, well, a whole long time ago, it was considered spells.

“Like witches?” I asked.

This was a long time ago, he explained. But, before industrialization and technology and all the wonders of our modern world, people, they’d figured out a different way of engineering their world. With magic. My dad said it like a dare, like I should object here. Like he was all ready for me to. I told him to just tell me already, please. Not like he wasn’t going to anyway. The power of spells, he went on with a shrug like this was the most obvious thing, it came from a group of like-minded people all like chanting and wishing for the same thing. The power of positive thinking, basically. That was my takeaway: happy thoughts don’t just make you feel good. They can actually fix things, sometimes. Or change them, anyway.

But then witches got uncool—probably because of Halloween or The Wizard of Oz, I don’t know—our religion took over the good part of the world, and now a spell is a prayer: a whole chapel of people holding hands in a circle, chanting under their breath, wishing hard for one, single, specific thing.

For one whole half of a pregnancy, that one specific thing was this boy.

And, lo and behold, it worked. This mom became a mom over thirty-eight sweaty hours, and what the nurse carried out to the now-dad, it was a bouncing baby boy, perfect in every way. It was a miracle. It proved the power of prayer. That year the new baby had a special role in the nativity play, even, so we all forgot he wasn’t who everyone was pretending he was.

This is that boy, that mom.

And they’re just walking along that early May day, preschool over at last, his tiny graduation robe flapping, the whole broad expanse of summer opening up before them.

But first there’s this bird, the one the mom is trying to steer the boy away from.

It’s probably crawling with bird-mites and avian flu and just basic germs. People don’t call them rats of the sky for nothing.

The mom wouldn’t be a mom if she told the boy to leave the poor bird there to die, though. Better that it die in a shoe box in the bathroom down the hall from the boy, right? It’s the time-honored tradition. It’s how the world works. There would be a funeral later in the week, and then, soon, the bird would be replaced with a healthy puppy the boy can grow up with.

Just as soon as this dirty bird dies.

Except it doesn’t.

This is the important part, the part I’ve thought about and thought about.

The bird doesn’t die, even though that’s what hurt birds kids smuggle home have been doing since forever.

Why?

It’s residue.

The boy, he’s this big miracle. And he’s still got some of that church juice. All the chanting that let him develop naturally in the womb, that kept him symmetrical, that lined his genetic ladder back up so he could climb it into this world, it infused him, I think. If he’d have been a four-year-old craps player, then the dice would have always rolled in his favor, I’m pretty sure. Not because he was telling them to, but because he wanted to win.

What I see when I look back to the rest of that May, it’s the boy, creeping from his bed after lights out, making his way down to the bathroom to whisper love to this bird. Or what he thinks is love.

Really, it’s the leftovers of the spell that kept him whole. The magic still cycling through him. And it’s being wasted on a dirty, broken bird, yeah. But it works all the same.

The bird refuses to die. To the parents’ consternation—they kind of want a puppy, just for the soft-focus postcards those photos will make: boy and dog, the endless summer.

But maybe this bird, maybe it’s a lesson of sorts for them, right? Maybe they’re supposed to learn from it that love and happiness comes in all kinds of packages. Sermons don’t always come from the pulpit.

What really matters, it’s how the boy dotes on the bird, they tell each other. Like talking themselves into it. And how long does a pigeon live, anyway? This will come to a natural end soon enough, one way or another.

Maybe they name the pigeon, maybe they don’t, it doesn’t matter. I’d guess that naming a bird is like naming a turtle, or a snake, or a fish. Or your second-favorite hairbrush.

What the boy called it the one time his eventual killer babysat him, it was “Mine.” And I guess it was.

Only, it didn’t stop there, I don’t think.

I’m pretty sure that stupid bird, it’s still his.

It’s something, anyway.


So Kara and me, we’ve always been inseparable, right? Since grade school. You date one of us, you’re dating both of us. You give one of us detention, the other’s showing up too.

I guess Ben’s disappearance is kind of where that stopped.

The investigation did come to my front door, of course. Tad and Kim Rogers’s telephone records would have led the cops here anyway, but it didn’t need to go that far. I volunteered that Kara had called me in a panic. While I said it I was holding Kara. She was crying so hard she couldn’t breathe, and there was snot on her lips and she was hitting her fists into my shoulders, these weak little nothing hits, like she was trying to fight her way out of a plastic bag. I just pulled her tighter, closer.

I wouldn’t tell her about Curtis Grant’s dog until the end of the week. But I told the cops right away. They hadn’t been called to Elm when I’d let my car roll up onto the sidewalk—there was no real damage, no call to respond to—but Animal Services had showed up to document.