A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  Back on the love seat, she shook out the scarf, folded it triple—the nylon was quite sheer—and lined the shoebox with it. “It will be just like sleeping in a lovely meadow,” she said to the crow on the table. Then she put the bear back on, and picked up the crow.

  “If you’re not really dead, now would be the time to let me know,” she said. The crow’s wing was still, its legs stiff, its eye focused on nothing but the darkness within.

  Ms. Wronski set the crow in the box, and tucked the ends of the scarf over the crow as tightly as she could, thinking of that wing rising again. Then she fit the box’s lid on, took the bear off, and stood. She turned to the window, but the other crow was gone.

  Mr. Gamitter was at his window as she came out the door to the apartment building, hands on the glass, staring down at his fallen tree, but there was no sign of him when she reached the fence to his yard. The other crow was there, however, perched on the maple’s upturned roots.

  “Tsk tsk tsk,” she said to it. It ruffled up its feathers, and shook them smooth again.

  The maple in Mr. Gamitter’s yard had fallen, for no reason Mr. Gamitter had been able to discern, last Sunday night. And when it fell, crushing Mr. Gamitter’s roses and a section of fence, it had left a circle of upturned dirt where the roots had been. Ms. Wronski set the shoebox in the center of the circle. Then, after another check of Mr. Gamitter’s window, she fetched the shovel he had left leaning against the house, and dug a neat rectangular hole adjacent to the box. She leaned the shovel against the inverted roots of the maple, which waggled their torn ends at her in the breeze like disapproving fingers.

  “Well, it’s not your dirt anymore, is it?” Ms. Wronski said to the roots. “There’s no space in front of my building, and I’m sure Mr. Gamitter would rather not find another hole in his lawn.”

  She knelt, and lowered the box into the hole. Then she stood and brushed the soil from her skirt. The watching crow jumped down by the little grave; Ms. Wronski could not tell if it was looking up at her or down at the shoebox. In the last light of the sky and the dim glow from Mr. Gamitter’s window, the box glared, glossy green-striped white cardboard stamped with the logo of the manufacturer. The light that bounced from it to the surrounding soil was the flat sheen of the TV flicker. Nothing at all about it looked natural.

  The shoebox lid slowly rose, and slid to the side. The ends of the scarf fell open. The black arrow of the buried crow’s wing pointed up at Ms. Wronski.

  The watching crow opened its beak.

  “Oh, hush,” Ms. Wronski said, in her best schoolteacher tone. “You’re very quick with your ‘tsk tsk tsk’ but I just don’t know what you want me to do with your mate, or your child, or your friend, or whatever she is.” Her voice trembled a bit with what might have been frustration.

  The buried crow’s wing fell again. The watching crow closed its beak. The lozenge shape of Mr. Gamitter came and went in his window. Ms. Wronski pondered.

  After a while, during which the buried crow’s wing rose and fell, and rose and fell again, Ms. Wronski dusted off her hands and squatted down next to the watching crow, who blinked but did not move away. “Perhaps,” she said to it, “my mistake is in thinking you want me to do anything at all.”

  The watching crow ruffled its feathers and rattled at that.

  “OK, OK. Let’s just start over then.”

  Ms. Wronski lifted the box from the hole and carried it over the crushed fence and down the walk and across the street, to where she had first found the fallen crow. She couldn’t bear to put it back in the road, so she carefully tipped it out onto the curb. She sat next to it, and the watching crow fluttered down on the far side. The leaves of Mr. Gamitter’s maple shifted and shuddered in the breeze. What was left of the evening sky, the scattered street lamps, and TVs, and the glow from Mr. Gamitter’s window had all merged into one light.

  “Well now,” Ms. Wronski said. “I couldn’t see you clearly from my window. At first, I mean, when I got home, because of the angle and the light. Perhaps I still can’t.”

  She leaned down on one elbow to look at the fallen crow, and then leaned even farther, pillowing her cheek against her palm, and waited. The watching crow made a sound that for all the world sounded like a chuckle. The fallen crow’s wing rose up against the sky.

  “Up,” Ms. Wronski said. And then, “Ah.” She sat up again. The wing lowered. Ms. Wronski reached down and gently smoothed it flat with one finger.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “I teach fourth- and fifth-grade social studies, and then I come home and have my cup of tea and a sandwich, and sometimes I read and sometimes I do the crossword, and then I go to bed. ‘Up’ is something I just don’t know much about.”

  The other crow said, “Tsk tsk tsk,” and chuckled again.

  “And as for you, Ms. Know-It-All Crow, we’ll just see—”

  Ms. Wronski stopped, and was silent for a moment. Then she nodded.

  “In for a pound, Eli,” she said, and got up—slowly, because after all the evening’s activity her knees were sore—and stepped into the road, where the crow had fallen. Then she set herself down, first to one knee, and then to her seat, and then on her side, knees drawn up, just as she’d first found the crow.

  The rush of blood to her head, the feel of the asphalt against her skin, the effort and strangeness of the evening, the simple wrongness of lying in the road—surely there’s a law against it, she thought—left her dizzy. She shut her eyes.

  When Ms. Wronski opened her eyes again, she saw two crows looking down at her. Her first thought was that yet a third crow had arrived. But she had spent too much time looking at these two crows not to recognize them both, even if the one that she had found fallen now stood on its feet, head cocked to the side to look at her.

  The risen crow raised its head and cawed three times—a wild, high sound—and the other joined it in a lower, gritty counterpoint.

  A pause then. Ms. Wronski held her breath.

  The two crows cawed again, and from the distance came an answer, and another, and another, until the evening rang with the sound. Still calling, the two crows leapt into the air. One of them—Ms. Wronski thought it was the one who had stood and watched—looped around to pass just overhead, its wing tip brushing her hair, and then the two flung themselves into the sky. Two more crows flew up from behind Mr. Gamitter’s house, and three from the roof of her apartment building, and then dozens, hundreds, thousands, filling that empyrean light with their shimmering dark.

  Every crow in the city. Ms. Wronski was sure of it. Every crow in the world.

  Ms. Wronski felt as if she were sinking into the asphalt; she thought that even if she had wanted to rise, she would not be able. She lifted her arm instead. Was it to beckon the crows back, or shoo them on their way?

  “A wave farewell,” Ms. Wronski said, and lowered her arm.

  She could turn her head a bit, to look up into the crow-darkened sky. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Gamitter, standing on his lawn, looking not up at the departing crows, but at the fallen maple.

  She was losing the light, and the angle was poor, but Ms. Wronski could just make out Mr. Gamitter setting himself down, a sort of slow toppling, into the circle of dirt where the maple had stood. The leaves of the maple began spiraling loose from the branches. All down the street, the trees strained upward against the pavement; some slipped loose and began to rise.

  Coyotes

  Stephen O’Connor

  A single candle burns on a table in a dark kitchen. Melissa clanks shut the door of a woodstove and watches its triangular vents brighten with a flickering orange. She fills an aluminum kettle with water and places it on the scuffed iron lid directly over the fire. She waits. She touches her forehead to the cold glass of the kitchen window and looks out at a field where cattle are discernible only as faint smudges in a slate-blue dimness. A cow lows. Birds call across great distances.

  Melissa is thirty-eight. She is wearing cutoffs and a
T-shirt. Her feet are bare and her eyes—black in this light, but normally a dog brown—are downturned at their outer corners, and so can make her look forlorn, even when she is entirely content.

  The kettle has just begun to hiss when she hears a new sound: whispery—perhaps a mouse.

  A woman’s voice: “Oh, sorry.”

  Harriet is standing beside the stove, completely naked. “I didn’t know you were here,” she says.

  Melissa makes a small, surprised noise.

  Harriet smiles. “I’m always the first one up.” Her smile is not friendly.

  Melissa does not want to look at Harriet’s Brazil-waxed crotch, her walleyed breasts, her belly like a couch pillow left out in the rain.

  Harriet is Spencer’s big sister. She lives in this house.

  “I made a fire,” Melissa says. She points to the kettle: “For tea.”

  Harriet lifts the kettle, sways it, sets it down. “Thanks.” Her smile alters.

  Outside the window a crow caws.

  No longer smiling, Harriet absently scratches the inside of her thigh.

  “I’ll be right back.” She leaves the room.

  When Harriet’s footsteps are no longer audible, Melissa takes the kettle off the stove and goes back upstairs. It is 5:30 a.m. She doesn’t know why she thought she should get up so early.

  Melissa and Spencer celebrated the six-month anniversary of their first date at a country inn he had found online: white linen, actual silver, and enormous glasses glinting in candlelight; a canopy bed upstairs. Melissa was in heels and a short black dress.

  She had not had a drink in a month, but when Spencer poured wine into her huge glass, she took one sip. Then more. When the glass was empty, she filled it herself.

  She laughed. “Doesn’t this feel like an Architectural Digest photo spread?”

  Spencer made a laugh-like grunt and covered his face with his gigantic glass.

  “I’ve never seen so much pseudo–William Morris wallpaper in my life!” she said. “And so many sepia-toned photographs!”

  Spencer looked around and shrugged. “I guess it is a bit overdone. Or—I don’t know: sentimental.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Spencer took another sip of wine. Then he smiled. “Is this our first fight?”

  “It’s not a fight.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “It’s a discussion.”

  “Oh, good.” He looked over her shoulder. His smile had become the smile of someone trying not to worry.

  She drank. She looked away. She looked back. “That word doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What word?”

  “Sentimental.” She looked into his eyes and held his gaze. “What does it mean?”

  “Well … ,” he said, “… I don’t know: Cheesy? Sappy? Phony—”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.” She set her glass down with a thump. “If you feel something, that’s what you are feeling. How can it be phony?”

  The table hummed.

  Beside Spencer’s plate, his black cell-phone screen went blue.

  After an interval, he returned from the parking lot and sat back down, eyes and mouth shocked zeros. He had to swallow several times before he could tell Melissa what had happened.

  “Would it be better if I went back to Boston?” she asked. Then she said, “I’m sorry.” She took hold of his cold, moist hand. “I don’t know why I said that. Of course, I’ll come. I want to come. If you need me, I want to be there.”

  Two hours of green signs with reflective lettering. Trees shooting southward through the headlights’ brown fringe. Then white hospital light.

  Near 3:00 a.m., Spencer sat on the edge of a bed in a room full of boxes. His elbows were on his knees, his forehead resting on the heels of his hands, his face a collection of golden planes and black voids in the light of three candles stuck by their melted bottoms to a dinner plate.

  Melissa put her hand on that muscular place between his shoulder blades, feeling heat beneath her palm, a mist of perspiration.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said in a voiced whisper.

  He lowered one hand and looked over at her. “I’ve got to sleep. I can’t do anything if I don’t get some sleep.”

  He took three Ambiens; she took one. They undressed, pulled the covers up to their chins. The scent of mildew settled over their faces like a sour fog. Within minutes Spencer was snoring. Melissa practiced her yoga breathing and listened to the electric yips and elastic wails of coyotes, first at one end of the valley, then at the other. After two and a half hours of anxious semihallucinations, she gave up on sleep and rummaged through her suitcase until she found a T-shirt and shorts. She made her way downstairs by phone light.

  In the blue dimness of the kitchen, she turned off her phone because the house’s electricity had gone out and no one knew when it would be restored. She lit a fire in the woodstove. She clanked the door shut.

  Now she is in bed again, lying flat on her back, hands resting one inside the other atop her breastbone—the position of a body in a coffin.

  She closes her eyes against the oranging glow behind the diaphanous window curtains and is awoken sometime later by a dream in which she is holding a baby against her breast, except maybe it isn’t a baby: it’s a cat, or a large rodent with wincing, rheumy eyes. It sinks its teeth into her flesh.

  Melissa is sitting cross-legged on a bench-like porch swing, looking out at some dozen cows scattered across a sunlit field. She cradles a cup of tea atop her right ankle. Clumps of orange and yellow dapple the trees surrounding the field. The cows munch. They lift their heads, rake their hooves through the lumpy grass, then munch again. They grunt and low.

  No one else is awake. The house at her back is entirely silent, except for an occasional snap as the gathering heat filters unevenly though floorboards and beams. She imagines Spencer’s sad face. She imagines sitting beside him on the bed upstairs. He is naked; she is clothed. She holds both of his hands, and talks. His face grows sadder and sadder. She hugs him and feels his sadness—a warm, beautiful pain—flooding from his heart into hers, then filling her whole body.

  It is true, she tells herself. I do feel his sadness. I love Spencer. I love him. I love him so much.

  In the corner of each eye she feels that sharp, almost erotic ache that commonly precedes tears. But no tears come.

  What she is imagining is telling Spencer that she cannot stay. That she has to leave.

  When Spencer pulled up in front of the hospital, Melissa said, “Just go. I’ll park.” He ran into the emergency room, she slid into the driver’s seat, then steered through teepees of gray light descending from spindly lampposts. She strode through the dark spaces between silent cars, her stiff legs limbering with every step, the cool night air filtering up under her short black dress, her heels on the macadam going tock, tock, tock—a sound she normally liked, but that embarrassed her now.

  Spencer wasn’t in the waiting room, and the triage nurse wouldn’t tell her where he was, even when she said he would most likely be with his mother. “Her name is Millicent Galeano,” Melissa added, hoping this would be enough to establish her family connection.

  The nurse nodded through her plexiglass window at the room behind Melissa’s back. “Take a seat. He’ll come get you when he’s through.”

  Across the aisle from Melissa, a mother kept patting the hand of her teenaged daughter, whose skin was the color of wet plaster. Down at the end of the aisle, under a muted television, a cluster of gaunt, yellowish men and bulky, red-cheeked women, who might all have been siblings, laughed and traded one-liners as if they were gathered around a table in a bar.

  With every passing minute, Melissa felt more absurd in her skimpy dress and huge heels. Arctic air was blowing down on her from circular vents overhead and there were goose bumps on her legs. She had to keep her arms folded across her chest.

  Ten minutes became twenty became thirty. Almost as soon as she had sat down she composed a text,
“They won’t let me inside. I’m in the waiting room,” but she never sent it because she didn’t want to pester Spencer. Finally, she deleted the text, typed, “Hope everything’s OK,” and hit Send.

  Spencer didn’t respond, but not long afterward he stepped through the door beside the triage nurse’s window, moving as though his limbs were made of stone and his gaze was too heavy to lift from the floor. Melissa threw her arms around him. She led him outside into the night air (which now felt warm) to a bench inside a bus shelter. Mosquitoes hummed invisibly in the dark and made their tiny stings.

  “We were too late,” he said. “She might even have been dead when Harriet texted.”

  This is what Melissa knew: not long before she met Spencer, his mother had a stroke that left her weak on one side and introduced long silences into her speech. Harriet moved back to the farm to do her mother’s cooking, shopping, and laundry, and to help her take care of the cows. Once upon a time Harriet had been “the family genius” (Spencer’s words). She had a BA in physics and an MA in astrophysics, both from Cornell. But then a bad breakup led to a drinking problem (or perhaps it was the other way around), and for nineteen years she had been a blackout drunk. Now she went to AA every night and worked as a receptionist in a pediatrician’s office. She was forty-seven. Never married. No children. Spencer once told Melissa that Harriet had been more of a mother to him than his mother. “She was a rock,” Spencer said. During the whole time Melissa had known him, he had only visited the farm once, and when he came home he told her his mother and Harriet fought constantly, screaming until their voices went raw. Spencer called his mother and sister twice a week, but whenever Melissa asked about the calls, he only shook his head and changed the subject. Harriet’s text had read: “Mom in hospital. Doc thinks big stroke. Come now.”

  “What happened?” Melissa said.

  “I don’t know. She has this black bruise on her cheek. Harriet said she fainted in the shower. Or maybe in the doorway to her bedroom. The story keeps changing. In any event, Harriet didn’t call the doctor until Mom was waving one hand in the air and saying things that didn’t make sense.” He shrugged. Maybe he glanced at Melissa—though in the darkness she couldn’t see his eyes. “It was the doctor who said call nine-one-one. I think Mom was still alive when they arrived, but there was nothing anyone—” Spencer stopped talking.