Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(70)

School started last week, but she’s not going. Instead she’s out in the night, like trying to find the doorway into another, better world. One in which little dead boys get to still be alive.

I’d guess Tad and Kim Rogers are looking for that same door.

I shouldn’t smile, though. I’m sure I’d be destroyed, if I were Kim Rogers. And angry, too.

That little bitch who let my son die?

I’d take an eraser to her barely sketched-in life, you can count on that. Anybody would.

The punishment on me for even just thinking that the first time, it was an eyeball, splatting into my windshield. At first I didn’t know what was happening—had I parked under a pear tree? do raccoons throw things? was somebody else out here with me?—but then I kicked my wiper on, and that single eyeball, stalk and all, it smeared across, like climbing the glass up to where it could see me better.

I dove from the car, crawled backwards away from this . . . this whatever the hell it was.

At which point something fell onto the fingers of my hand.

It was a small, pale finger. Smaller than my own. Pale from not having any blood under the skin.

And then a pair of small, smug wings flapped up there, left me alone to deal with this.

When I could breathe again, and think, I flicked the eyeball from my car and stepped on it until it was gone. I tried to do the same with the finger but it kept pointing at me, even when it was just bone.

I opened my hood just like my dad had taught me, and dropped that finger into the spinning fan.

Black rotted blood sprayed back up. Onto my face. Onto the underside of the hood.

I blew it all off at the car wash, and washed my face in the stinging mist, and left my left shoe in the trash there, after spraying it clean as well.

Only when my mom asked was she okay did I remember Kara. She was the reason I’d checked in on the way out.

“She has to work through it,” I said in the most sulky way I could, and limped upstairs, hid my head under the pillow.

Now who I hated, it was the cops.

How could they not have found a rotting body barely even hidden in the culvert? Isn’t the closest trash pile the first place you look when somebody goes missing? Haven’t they ever watched a police show?

If they’d found him like it was their job to do, then Tad and Kim Rogers could have had a coffin that weighed almost what it should, right? They could have had a service to move on from. And Kara would have known, at least.

And—more important—there wouldn’t be a little body out there in the weeds and the sumac, a decaying, putrid corpse a bird could find, settle down on. Pull parts from to bomb me with, give me away for anybody with eyes to see.

I fucking hate that bird.

Every sound I heard on the roof afterward, I knew it was more body parts. That our gutters were going to be clogged with Ben Rogers.

Finally, my parents sleeping off their pitchers of beer from bowling night, I did what I knew I shouldn’t: unlimbered the long aluminum extension ladder from the garage, walked it out the side door because the actual big garage door would wake everyone. I tipped the ladder up against the roof as gently as I’ve ever done anything.

I was going to throw Ben Rogers back into the sky.

Up on the shingles, though, it felt like I was about to fall up into that blackness myself. It felt enough like that that I hunched down.

It was just the usual tree-trash I’d been hearing, too. Like I should have known. Leaves, twigs, something like an acorn that wasn’t going to ripen, I don’t know, I’m no tree-nerd.

I didn’t know if I should be happy or pissed about this.

I sat down, hugged my knees, and tried to cry.

The rest of the town had no problem bringing forth the tears. They did it every time they even thought about Tad and Kim Rogers, and Ben.

Not me. Because I was carrying the burden for all of them. Because I knew what had happened.

I don’t want to claim I’m the victim, but I don’t want to make being me easy, either. The old me, she would never have thought that the ladder creaking behind her was because of the weight of a small body, settling onto it. The old me wouldn’t have backed away, all the way to the edge, forty feet opening up behind me. The old me would have known to breathe, would have known not to watch that open space at the top of the ladder.

This was the now-me, though. The one already planning things out: how she was going to guide Kara out to the trash pile in the culvert—trash delta, more like, thank you, tenth-grade geography—how she was going to guide Kara out there, so either Ben Rogers could finally be found, or, when he pulled himself back together with the good and hopeful but terribly misguided wishes of the whole church, he could claw his way into her stomach, not mine.

I’m not the one who lost him, after all. But now I am the one who will be seeing more and more pieces of him raining down on me in my car. Some of them mixing with a secret leftover piece of Curtis Grant’s yellow lab, so that, when this reconstituted little boy claws up onto my hood, he’ll have a canine muzzle, and long downy blond hairs coating what’s left of his decaying skin.

Is this how it always is when you accidentally kill someone?

“No,” I say out loud, like to make it real up here alone on top of the house.

The old me wouldn’t have been scared to walk right over to the top of the ladder and turn around, climb back down it.