Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(95)

She looks down and I follow her gaze to see a shiny black feather at my feet. Immediately, I stoop to grab it, but when I straighten up and open my hand, there’s nothing. The feather is still on the ground.

“You need to give it another try or do you get the point?”

I turn away and walk back to the train station.


There’s a new ebook on the iPad called Symbols & Signifiers Throughout History. It sounds like it should be a lot more interesting than Twitchers but it isn’t.

I have a two-day wait in King’s Cross before my next job, which gives me enough time to see half of Harry Potter’s luggage trolley sticking out of a wall. Or maybe it’s not his, just some nameless witch’s or wizard’s. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.

Before, in my natural-world life, I’d have oohed and aahed anyway. Magic—wow! But it’s nothing like that. Like I said, it’s really just a lot of work. And it never ends, and there’s no way out.

I guess that’s why they call it eternity.





The Acid Test

LIVIA LLEWELLYN



. . . the acid tests were much more than an excuse to trip for hours and hear The Dead play for a buck. No, there were people who passed and people who didn’t pass the test. We were trying to stop the coming end of the world.

—Timothy Leary



Someone calls on me or calls me or calls me out, I can’t tell over the sitars and drumming, but then Suzanne gives me the little strip of paper, and I don’t know, I really don’t want to do it, but the music is wailing consent and I’m already high, and it just seems easier to stick out my tongue and let it dissolve in silence than shout thank you no. At that point, there’s so much smoke in the room from all the grass and cloves and hashish that I’m already seeing dragons in the air, great snakes coiling and rippling against the beaded curtains and velvet curtains, horses with wings and beautiful birds with long hooked beaks whose wings brushed against the bookcases, knocking down textbooks and sending onionskin sheets of poetry floating through the air like large autumn leaves; or maybe that’s just everyone turned on and dancing, or knocking up against the shelves as they gas on and on about Chomsky and Searle and Leary and Marcuse. And the theatre kids talk about Sartre and Godot and a group of the really weird kids argue at the edges of the room about Heinlein and Ellison, while the prettiest girls huddle on the bed and whisper about the Michigan Murders and how all those coeds who look like them are just gone just vanished into the wide American night, the same way the pretty young boys are disappearing in the desert cities of the southwest, the same way wide-eyed freshmen disappear on every campus here in the Northwest from down in Eugene all the way up to here in little old Victoria BC, and I can’t care less about any of it to begin with because I’m an Ed major and no one wants to talk with me about Montessori education versus Waldorf, but I’d tried for the sake of beautiful Suzanne who’d been begging me to come to one of these stupid dorm mixers for a month now, and I didn’t have anything better to do tonight. And anyway there was a guy I’d seen, a guy who always hangs out at the edges of the theatre actors groupies at plays and mixers, never talking but only watching like a beautiful predator, tall and thin with the grooviest clothes and these huge brown eyes and jet-black hair, and I figured maybe he was a grad student because he just seemed so cool and calm and above it all so he probably wouldn’t show because this was a real amateur scene, but I thought he might be here anyway because this is a pretty big party and it’s the end of fall semester and there isn’t much else going on, and besides after this weekend everyone is going home for winter. But he isn’t here, and no one here is that cute or mysterious, and so what the fuck, right? I wash my tongue with the last of my beer and let the empty can roll out of my hand onto the carpet and under a desk. No one notices. I wait to see, I don’t know, dancing skeletons and far-out kaleidoscopes of universes and flowers and weird cartoon landscapes with purple penises trucking down candy cane roads, but everyone looks the same, just a bunch of college kids I don’t know, grooving to the music and having a gas, and Suzanne gets bored of me like she always does and wanders away into a bunch of admirers who are already tripping over that long Malibu Beach–blond hair of hers and that perfect kewpie-doll model face and soft brown nipples that peek out of the holes of her crocheted sea foam green dress and I realize we aren’t going back to the dorm together, not that we were supposed to because she always does her own thing even though we’ve been roommates three months now, and I stand up and the party seems to snap into focus as all the blood rushes back into my tingling legs, and I shakily push my way through the crowd and thumping bass and wailing sitars and suede fringe and Tibetan curtain beads hitting my face as people gyre like spinning tops, and then I’m spilling out into the hallway with the lovers and the fighters and the wanderers and the sick. All the people who can’t fit, who can’t find a way inside, and now, one again, I’m one of them too.


And so I curse those thoughts in me as I wander down the hall, discombobulated because it looks just like my dorm hallway and for one horrifyingly stretchy long moment I think it is my dorm or maybe there’s just one long dorm we’ve all been trapped and wandering through this semester and I’m just walking and walking eternally with no way forward or back, but then I reach the end and push my way down the stairs past all the kids tripping on the graffiti or grinding in the corners, and then I’m outside, the air so peppermint crisp and cold it almost burns my lungs and skin, dark white from snow glistening all across the campus and the soft hiss of flakes against my hot face, flakes like stars, stars and universes whirling all around me in the low wind. I reach out and let the galaxies drift and settle across my skeleton fingers, and out of the gray night fingers touch mine, long and smooth and autumn brown, and I hear the words hey girl as his face floats up from out of the crystal-white mist of the stars and snow and my breath, and there he is like a statue, eagle-nosed and black-eyed and that cool sardonicus grin. The tips of his fingers are smooth and warm, little electric circus shocks running through them into my bones and up my arms and spiraling at the back of my neck, his breath melting the ice on my lashes as he sidles up in the dark against me in his tight cords, fabric crushing and catching between our bodies, as his words fall against my burning cheeks once again, hey girl, this party is a drag, there’s a private scene happening over in the grad dorms, let me take you there. And now there is a Shift with a capital S that I feel in my feather-hollow body: I am above me and behind me and all around myself like snow like the prickling stars, watching in silence as he takes my hand, leads me down the walkway through the lawn and trees, deep into the campus, passing in and out of the pools of light under high sodium lamps, my long blond hair swaying back and forth against my aqua blue jacket, my long lean legs and round buttocks visible against the pale sea foam green of my crocheted dress, the dress that always looks so good on Suzanne, and a pale dim light flickers on inside my mind, deep in the foggy oceans of stars colliding throughout my brain as I realize that Suzanne had followed me outside, that the stone fox has been speaking to her, looking to her, he never saw me at all and when she speaks to him she speaks past through me, but I follow them anyway, stepping in her footprints and his, leaving no traces behind as I float and trip in their tracks, snatches of conversation and laughter wafting back with the midnight snow. Where did you say we’re going, I hear her soft pretty voice say, and I imagine how his face looks as he replies a secret spot in a basement of the dorms called the Purple Room, and oh how purple it is, ripe like grapes bursting on the killing floor of a distant sun, those long brows arching under the black fringe of his silken hair, as he licks his marble teeth and grins his thin-lipped grin, and Suzanne laughing and saying oh, see, everyone said you were such a square but I knew you always had it in you, languid stone fox, secret garden, murderer of possibilities, and he replies, and his reply is lost in all my pyroclastic-cold and clammy dreams.