Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(7)

Outside the school, the air still smells like morning. Seagulls and pigeons clog the field, beaks stabbing at the sprinkler-softened ground, searching for meals of worms and beetles and burrowing things. I walk past them, scanning the trees, searching the sky, looking for flashes of black against the bright and blinding world. Nine is no good. Eight would have been fine, would have been a day cast in heavenly brightness, but nine? No. I cannot abide a day defined by nines. I need ten, eleven, something I can trust not to betray me.

One of the school’s security guards sees me across the lawn, offers me a nod, and minds his own business. We have an accord, the security and I. I don’t bother them with things they don’t care about, and they don’t bother me when I’m walking the school grounds, looking for birds. A few students have grumbled in my hearing about how I get “special treatment,” but they’ve all stopped when I offered to trade them. They can have the constant count, the looming catastrophe, the knowledge that if they relax, even for a moment, they might be responsible for the end of the world. I’ll have their well-thumbed paperbacks and their easy smiles, their constant conviction that the world is not doing them ill somehow when they’re not looking.

It wouldn’t be a fair exchange and I wouldn’t know how to make it if one of them said yes, but I would try if they told me to. It would be worth it to smile at David and see no shadows lurking overhead.

I search the grounds until the bell rings in the building behind me. I count no corvids, catch no crows. This day is still defined by nines, and I am afraid. I am so very, very afraid.


My second-period teacher is less exhausted and, consequentially, less forgiving. He will not let me go. Neither will my third-period teacher, and by fourth period, the morning has bled away, leaving us marooned well in the body of the day, which is digesting us all one minute at a time. I glance anxiously at the windows as I move through the halls alongside my schoolmates, trying to mask my unhappiness. My psychiatrist says that when I am nervous, others around me are nervous, because I am so bad at concealing it. She says this puts an undue psychological burden on the people who have to interact with me.

When I ask her what to tell them about the undue psychological burden they put on me by asking me to be silent and still and not tell them when I see the shadows, she has nothing to say. There is a lesson in that, as much as in her requests for quiet. The world is a lesson, if you know how to look for it.

I am allowed to have my phone during the school day. I am a high school student now, and more, I am “special needs,” even with the mainstreaming, even with the teachers who frown and don’t know what to make of me. I could make a call. But David isn’t allowed to have his phone during the day, and his breaks aren’t the same as mine, and I have no one else to call. My mother doesn’t want me to contact her while I’m at school unless it’s an emergency. Her definition of the word is not the same as mine. Her definition is not the same as mine at all. So I run my fingers over the screen, feeling how comfortingly smooth it is, knowing that the ghosts of numbers whisper past my skin, pressed flat in digital display and waiting to be needed. I carry the mathematical world with me everywhere I go.

Lunch comes. I go to my usual bench and look at pictures of crows and ravens and jays on my little screen, trying to take comfort in the shape of their beaks, the subtle patterns of the feathers on their heads. Not all the pictures are mine. Some are downloaded from the Internet, carefully curated to soothe the parts of my soul that know, all the way to the bone, how essential it is to count the corvids accurately and chart the pattern of the day. But a few, a precious few, are pictures I took myself. They show familiar birds, birds whose voices I know, and I allow them to calm me.

I am calm when I return to class after the lunch bell rings again. I am calm as I sit in my desk next to the window and listen to the teacher droning on about material I will not understand until I see it written down. My assessments say that I am a visual learner, not an auditory learner, but somehow the accommodations intended to make me equal to my classmates never seem to come with handouts to read while the lecture goes on. I am expected to listen. I am not expected to retain.

I am calm when the classroom door opens and my principal steps inside. She is a lovely woman, aesthetically speaking. Her hair is always perfect, and her suits are always tailored just so, fitting the curves of her body without emphasizing them. She is a creature well-suited to her natural habitat, and I can’t imagine what she looks like outside the boundaries of the school.

My teacher stops mid-lecture, moving to the doorway, where she speaks with the principal in a low, hushed voice. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I know they’re talking about me. They glance in my direction several times, and this was a day defined by nines, even though I tried to make it better. Something bad was preordained.

By the time they’re ready to turn and beckon me forward, I have already gathered my things. I am serene. I am prepared for anything.

The principal’s voice is gentle. “Brenda,” she says. “There’s been an accident.”

I am not prepared for this.


Carl went to collect David from school, early. Too early. Why? There is no knowing. Carl is in the hospital, Carl is blood and bandages and uncharacteristic silence. Maybe he wanted to take David for some father-son time. Maybe he was finally making good on his threat to leave my mother and take his son away from her, away from me, the damaged sister who might damage him in turn. Maybe he just felt like it. There is no knowing, and there will never be any knowing. I could ask Carl over and over again forever, count the crows in his wake, divide by the rare and hesitant ravens pecking at the highway median, and still never find the answers I need.