Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(71)

I’m not either.

And it all goes fine, hand over hand, feet feeling down for each careful, certain rung. It all goes fine until I look up.

The pigeon, that stupid goddamn pigeon, it’s up there on the right post of the ladder. I expect the evil eye from it, but it’s too dark for that. It’s just a shape up there—if it’s even that.

What if I’m making it up, right? What if I’m dreaming it into place?

To prove I’m not, I shake the ladder once, risking the sound of aluminum rattling.

Instead of lifting off to become part of the sky again, like, you know, a bird, this pigeon, it falls straight down like the stupid dead weight it is, right through the rungs, not even dinging into one of them.

“Dead weight” is right, too. If there’s a way to add “for weeks” in there.

I didn’t just heart-attack this pigeon with my ladder-shake. It’s been dead for weeks, it looks like. It’s been dead long enough that it bursts a little bit when it lands, onto the side of one of my shoes that I’m still calling new, just because I haven’t worn them to school yet.

I shriek on accident then clap my hand over my mouth, fall back into the sharp bushes my dad says are better than a fence.

The pigeon doesn’t clump up onto its stick legs. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just and simply dead. Without Ben Rogers to whisper life in through its little beak, it’s nothing but gross meat, dirty feathers.

When I can breathe normal again, I stand, drag the side of my shoe on the wet grass even though I know I’m never wearing it again.

I guess I’m crying now, finally. Snot on my lips, the whole package.

“I’m sorry!” I scream across to the pigeon, to the neighborhood, to the town. To Tad and Kim Rogers.

No lights go on in my house. None next door either.

This makes me think that maybe when I came down the ladder, it was into another place.

My heart slaps inside my chest but I shake my head no, you’re being stupid, girl.

Because my dad will figure this all out if I leave the ladder up—he’s got what he calls a devious mind—I edge close enough to lean it back my way, then I hand-over-hand it back to its half-size, lug it back into the garage, place it gently on its two red hooks.

Same garage, I tell myself. Same house. Same everything.

What I force myself to picture instead of the dead pigeon, probably crawling with who knows what out there, it’s Tad and Kim Rogers in their lonely backyard. There’s the silhouette of the swing set. There’s the doghouse they got because it was a deal, and they were going to need it before too long, wink-wink.

Where they’re looking mostly, it’s straight up.

In one of the church stories, a dove brings back a twig or something, one that proves life.

Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for.

There’s not that much difference in a pigeon and a dove, really. A pigeon’s just a big dove that’s learned to live a different way. A pigeon is to a dove as I am to Kara—I study for the SATs, yeah.

And I’m going to ace them. I’m going to blast off into the world and this Ben Rogers thing isn’t going to stop me. He was just, literally, a speed bump, one I’ll be the only one to ever know about.

Good-bye, Kara. I’m sorry. But you have to keep moving. If you don’t, you end up living in this town forever.

I nod to myself about the honesty of this, and then it occurs to me that either Ben Rogers or the pigeon should have the leftover magic of that spell, right?

Then why is the pigeon dead out on the grass? I edge over to the foggy-cheap window, get a line on where the feet of the ladder were. Where I’m pretty sure there’s a bird corpse. Some kind of black lump, anyway.

Which reminds me: why didn’t the cops ever find Ben Rogers? Wouldn’t there have been a giveaway tornado of flies out there? Don’t any of the neighborhood third-graders play down there in the junk, just because they’ve been warned not to? Wouldn’t a neighborhood dog have shown up with a left hand clamped between its happy teeth?

Except you ran over that dog, I tell myself.

Right after you ran over the boy.

I chuckle with the bad luck of it all, and the creaking I turn to before I even realize I’m turning, at first I think it’s my dad standing in the door that goes to the kitchen.

But that door’s still shut, exactly like I left it.

It’s not the ladder creaking either, because I’m still touching the ladder, would feel it creaking, and the red hooks are dipped in plastic anyway.

My most sincere fear is that it’s going to be Tad and Kim Rogers, their mouths just these grim lines, their eyes so disappointed. At least, before I see the tiny hand guiding the lid of the washing machine up, I think they’re my most sincere fear.

I did come back down the ladder into a different place.

I know that now.

I climbed down into a world of my own making, and now I have to live here, with Ben Rogers, who wants to crawl up my frontside, latch his mouth onto mine, and breathe into my throat whatever’s rising in his.

Maybe his parents will find the doorway that opens up to us someday.

Or maybe Kara’s shovel will.

I’ll be waiting to feel that light on my face.

But hurry, please.





The Secret of Flight