Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(75)

Are you angry that I spent time with Clara up there? There wasn’t anything between us. We were friends. Actually, we became friends because of the roof. We’d both been going up there separately to smoke, and then we banged into each other one day and started taking our cigarette breaks together. It’s a lucky thing we never burned the goddamn theater down.

I suppose that’s how she found Owen, snuck up for a quick drag on her own and ended up saving his life.

Anyway, the birds. The sun was just starting to rise, and the birds were winging back and forth across the sky like one giant creature instead of hundreds of little ones. Clara watched them for a while; then she said, “Can you imagine what it’s like, Raymond? Being part of something larger than yourself, knowing exactly where you fit in the world, then having it all ripped away from you, and finding yourself utterly and completely alone?”

God, Will, it’s been years, and I can still hear her asking it. Even when she asked it, it had been two years since you’d been gone. When you died, Will . . . Well, I knew exactly what Clara was talking about. You were everything, and I couldn’t even be with you at the end. I couldn’t tell anyone how my heart had been ripped out, or cry at your grave.

Things are different now, but there’s no one I want to cry for the way I wanted to for you.

Maybe that’s why Clara and I got along so well. We were alike in our loneliness. We both had things we couldn’t tell anyone about ourselves. Not all ghosts are about guilt. That’s something else Clara told me once, and I understand her now. Some ghosts are about sorrow, and loss. But God, Will, of all the ghosts to have haunt me, why did it have to be hers, and not yours?

Ray


Incomplete Draft of Murmuration by Arthur Covington—

typed manuscript with handwritten notes

(EDWARD and CLAIRE face each other in EDWARD’s office, the same setting as their earlier confrontation. Light flickers through a screen painted to look like a window, suggesting a storm. CLAIRE holds a gun pointed at EDWARD.)

EDWARD: Give me the gun, Claire. We both know you won’t shoot me.

CLAIRE: You don’t know the first thing about me. You have no idea what I’ll do.

EDWARD: Elizabeth is upstairs. She’ll hear the shot and call the police. There’s nowhere for you to go. You’ll be caught, and you’ll hang.

CLAIRE (laughing bitterly): It doesn’t matter. They can’t kill me. It doesn’t matter what you took from me, I still can’t die. But you can.

(CLAIRE steadies the gun. EDWARD finally shows a hint of fear.)

EDWARD: Claire, be reasonable. I can—

CLAIRE: No, you can’t. You can’t do anything. You tried to steal from me, but my life can’t be stolen, not that way. When you couldn’t steal it, you broke it, and now I can’t fly away either. I can’t leave this place, not while you’re alive.

(EDWARD reaches for CLAIRE. OWEN enters STAGE RIGHT, dressed for bed. He looks between CLAIRE and EDWARD, confused, and takes a step toward CLAIRE.)

OWEN: Will you tell my bedtime story?

(CLAIRE fires. EDWARD falls, and OWEN puts his hands over his ears and screams. CLAIRE stands still for a moment, then drops to her knees. Running footsteps can be heard from offstage.)

CLAIRE (barely audible): It didn’t work. I’m still here. Oh, God, it didn’t work.

This is still shit. That’s how it happened, but no one will believe it. The truth is too strange.

Clara shot Richard while Owen watched, and she didn’t run away. She let them arrest her. She confessed, but there was never a trial. She vanished out of the cell where they were holding her. The police were mystified.

Shit. I could write my play closer to the truth. No one would know the difference except Elizabeth. Then she’d start asking questions. What’s the point? I can never produce this goddamn play, for her sake and for Owen’s.

Clara shot Richard with Owen standing right there watching. He doesn’t remember, at least not consciously. His young mind couldn’t cope, so he shuttered the information away, but something like that doesn’t go away completely. It changes a person. It leaves a stain.

I took Owen to see a hypnotist. Elizabeth doesn’t know. Dr. Samson put Owen into a trance, and Owen recounted word for word the whole exchange between Clara and Richard. In real life, Owen didn’t walk into the room the way I wrote it in the play. He was hiding under Richard’s desk, playing a game. He wanted to jump out and scare Clara. He saw the whole thing.

That’s not the worst of it though. After describing his father’s murder, Owen started laughing. Dr. Samson thought it might be some sort of defense mechanism, his mind, even hypnotized, trying to protect him. He asked Owen about it, and Owen said he was laughing because the bird-lady was making pictures in the sky. She was telling the starlings which way to fly, like she used to on the boat from England.

God help me, he was talking about Clara. I’m more sure now than ever—she isn’t human.


TRAGEDY STRIKES THE VICTORY THEATER!

Herald Star—October 10, 1955

Betsy Trimingham, Arts & Culture

Owen Covington’s life was cut tragically short yesterday when he was struck by a subway train. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Covington was both a playwright, and a hero. I spoke with a police officer who was “unable to comment on an ongoing investigation.” He declined to say whether foul play was suspected, but I do wonder how a young man in the prime of his life could simply slip from the subway platform in front of an oncoming train.