In the Shadow of Blackbirds(22)
The message fluttered out of my fingers to the sidewalk. I marched a dirty footprint across the paper on my way into the house and slammed the door behind me with enough force to rattle windows. Oberon squawked from his cage. That Western Union boy probably jumped out of his skin and pedaled away as fast as his bony legs could take him.
I thumped upstairs to my room and yanked off my mask. Stephen’s photographs still hung on the gilded wallpaper, teasing me with memories of a time when he was alive and my father wasn’t rotting away in jail. I paced the floor and pulled at my hair until my scalp ached. “Get me out of here. Get me out of here!”
A low boom echoed in the distance. My eyes shot to the window. I held my breath. Ten seconds later, the menacing clouds to the west flashed with light, followed by another crash of thunder.
A lightning storm.
I pulled up the window’s sash and felt the tiny hairs on my arms bristle with static. Lightning ignited the air, and I wanted its bolts to shock me out of my nightmare world and send me back into my old reality.
I scrounged around my room and found the makings of a kite—the parcel paper from Stephen’s package for the body, wire coat hangers for the frame, and a rope of hair ribbons for string. My clock-gear necklace would act as my conductor. I slipped my aviatrix goggles out of my leather doctor’s bag, fitted them over my face, and hurried downstairs with my creation.
The claps of thunder now followed the lightning by two seconds. The wind whipped my hair across my face, while fresh-smelling rain streaked my lenses and soaked the string of ribbons, rendering them useless. How stupid to have thought the fabric wouldn’t get drenched and heavy. The parcel paper would never soar. My name written in Stephen’s handwriting bled into black smudges, gone forever.
Lightning shot across the sky in an erratic streak more blinding than Julius’s flashlamp. Thunder reverberated against the soles of my boots a mere second later. The storm gathered overhead. My blood craved the buzz of electricity to replace the poison of the world. I wanted to touch it. I had to touch it.
I grabbed the clock gear and held it in the air with my bare fingers.
Another streak of light illuminated the front yard. A roll of thunder clapped overhead, and a slight shock of static zapped the tips of my fingers.
But that was all.
“Come on!” I yelled. “Give me something I can feel.”
Someone shrieked from across the street, distracting me enough that I turned my head, but then the world went yellow and crashed against my ears. Electricity burned my hand, threw me backward to the ground.
And killed me.
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD HELPED ME COMPREHEND THAT I was no longer alive.
First you formulate a question: Am I dead? Then a hypothesis: If I’m sitting up here in Aunt Eva’s eucalyptus tree, looking down at my own body sprawled across the grass in the rain, then I must be dead. The test: A redheaded woman in an apron runs across the street, sees my smoking clothing and my lifeless eyes staring through my goggles, and tries to shake my limp body back to life—to no avail. “Oh, dear God, she’s dead,” she yells to another woman sprinting across the lawn. “The lightning struck this poor girl dead.” The conclusion: Mary Shelley Black is indeed no longer alive.
Oh, God, I thought. What did I just do?
I looked up: a black cumulonimbus cloud bellowed around the eucalyptus like a seething beast. A siren cried out from somewhere nearby. Neighbors in flu masks gathered below me.
“What did I do?” I called down to the people, although no one seemed to hear. The version of me that sat in the tree looked solid and mortal, in my opinion, but I feared I was little more than a mirage up there. “This doesn’t feel right. What am I supposed to do?”
A black police ambulance drove into view. The neighbors waved it down with frantic arms. Men in uniforms jumped out of the vehicle and grabbed a stretcher. I could still see my prone, empty body, with its singed fingers and gray face, and no one, not even the men from the ambulance, could revive me. One of the men pushed my goggles to my forehead and pulled my eyes shut, and my skin looked cold and hostile and ugly. The idea of dropping back into that lifeless flesh sickened me, and I guessed the landing would be excruciating. But sitting in a tree above myself wasn’t right, either. This wasn’t at all the way death was supposed to be. There were no angels, harps, or pearly gates—just me staring down at my corpse, not knowing what to do.
Go back, I told myself when the officers lifted my body onto the stretcher. It’s clearly not your time. Quick! Before it’s too late.
I pushed myself off the eucalyptus branch, and down I plunged into that unappealing shell of a girl with the torturous sensation of falling into a pool of arctic water. Every square inch of me stung. I gasped for air like a dying fish and heard a pair of doors slam shut near my feet.
My arms and legs sank deep into a canvas bed in the back of a dark compartment. I had entered the too-small skin and bones of a freezing-cold girl made of lead, whose skull throbbed and right fingers burned with a pain more intense than anything I’d ever experienced. Beside me, a person gurgled and wheezed, sounding like he was drowning. The automobile’s motor vibrated against my vertebrae.
A few minutes later, we careened around a corner with a squeal of tires, and the wheezing person and I slid to the right, where my knee and elbow hit a metal wall.
A pothole threw me into the air and slammed me down again. The brakes screeched to a stop and I skidded toward the front of the compartment. More metal banged against me. Doors slammed shut. Footsteps scrambled around the vehicle.