Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(99)
And the sirens have long stopped wailing, but their red and blue lights flash all across the campus, hundreds it seems, a poisonous garden of light silently blossoming in the winter sun. Birds flock in the bare branches overhead, clouds of glossy black that rise and fall with the movement of the men as they transport the bones to the ambulances and vans. Everyone’s story has been taken down, everyone who woke up in piles and heaps, running their dirty fingers across fuzzing teeth, adjusting torn clothes, creeping and shuddering their way from interrogations to their dorms and apartments, including my story of how I watched my roommate walk off into the snowy dark of night drunk and high and alone, never to be seen alive again. Outside in the hallway, the telephone rings over and over, crying out like a hungry abandoned bird, while beside me the radio on my headstand cackles with the news, and sometimes in the low afternoon light I think I see a faint movement behind its grooved surface, as if the machine is struggling to free itself from the invisible information pouring in and extruding out of the black plastic and metal of its captive brain. You’ll see things like that, he mutters, touching his long nose to the cold glass as he stares down into the chaos of his own creation, you’ll see them all the time now, because you see the reality of all things, you see beyond the surface of all this, and he presses his fingertips together, as if revolted at the touch of his own flesh, the same way you see me as I walk through the campus and through this dimension but also the real me, the multiple being folded and clipped and hobbled in this pellet of a body that seems to set all your hearts racing so, the body that has to work so hard to keep this little egg of a world intact and separate from all the other eggs of our greedy mother void-queen, and he moves from the window over to my bed, standing over me as I stare up into his face like a blade, and he leans down and grabs my breast with a grip so tight it makes me gasp as he whispers into my open mouth, don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to rid yourself all of this, and then I’ll teach you how much of them you can hold, and then I’ll show you all the other purple rooms, all the other doors, and when he kisses me with his acid tongue secreting little dribblings of his renderings of Suzanne and all the other chicks down my throat, I want to vomit in terror and disgust. But after a while the feeling passes and all that’s left is sharp and sweet as a punch.
The Crow Palace
PRIYA SHARMA
Birds are tricksters. Being small necessitates all kinds of wiles to survive but Corvidae, in all their glory as the raven, rook, jay, magpie, jackdaw, and crow have greater ambitions than that.
They have a plan.
I used to go into the garden with Dad and Pippa every morning, rain or shine, even on school days.
We lived in a house called The Beeches. Its three-acre garden had been parcelled off and flogged to developers before I was born, so it became one of a cluster of houses on an unadopted cul de sac.
Mature rhododendrons that flowered purple and red in spring lined the drive. The house was sheltered from prying eyes by tall hedges and the eponymous beech trees. Dad refused to cut them back despite neighbours’ pleas for more light and less leaf fall in the autumn. Dense foliage is perfect for nesting, he’d say.
Our garden was an avian haven. Elsa, who lived opposite, would bring over hanging feeders full of fat balls and teach us about the blue tits and cheeky sparrows who hung from them as they gorged. Stone nymphs held up bowls that Dad kept filled. Starlings splashed about in them. When they took flight they shed drops of water that shone like discarded diamonds. The green and gold on their wings caught the sun.
Pippa and I played while Dad dug over his vegetable patch at the weekends. The bloody chested robin followed him, seeking the soft bodied and spineless in the freshly turned earth.
Dad had built a bird table, of all things, to celebrate our birth. It was a complex construction with different tiers. Our job was to lay out daily offerings of nuts and meal worms. At eight I could reach its lower levels but Pippa, my twin, needed a footstool and for Dad to hold her steady so that she didn’t fall.
Elsa taught me to recognise our visitors and all their peculiarities and folklore. Sometimes there were jackdaws, rooks, and ravens but it was monopolised by crows, which is why I dubbed it the crow palace. Though not the largest of the Corvidae, they were strong and stout. I watched them see off interlopers, such as squirrels, who hoped to dine.
After leaving our offerings we’d withdraw to the sun room to watch them gather.
“Birdies,” Pippa would say and clap.
The patio doors bore the brunt of her excitement; fogged breath and palm prints. Snot, if she had a cold. She touched my arm when she wanted to get my attention, which came out as a clumsy thump.
“I can see.”
Hearing my tone, Pippa inched away, looking chastised.
Dad closed in on the other side with a forced, jovial, “You’re quiet, what’s up?”
It was always the same. How are you feeling? What can I get you? Are you hungry? Did you have a bad dream last night?
“I’m fine.” Not a child’s answer. I sounded uptight. I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary to say, Go away. Your anxiety’s stifling me.
I put my forehead against the glass. In the far corner of the garden was the pond, which Dad had covered with safety mesh, unfortunately too late to stop Mum drowning herself in it. That’s where I found her, a jay perched on her back. It looked like it had pushed her in. That day the crow palace had been covered with carrion crows; bruisers whose shiny eyes were full of plots.