by E. Lily Yu
“Then I ran out of there,” she told Penny, as she printed Mimus polyglottos in careful letters on a paper tag. “I don’t think I’m going back.”
“You probably misunderstood. They’re nice people, there.”
“They didn’t seem friendly.”
“You must have seemed unfriendly, then. Or your behavior was off.”
Winona tied the tag to the scaly black legs and smoothed the long gray feathers.
“I think I could do this for years.”
“Do you.”
“As a job, I mean. You don’t think so?”
“With your background?”
“What, geology?”
“Gas and oil.”
“Do you have something against—”
“The greater sage grouse. The lesser prairie chicken. A million birds a year die in oil pits and spills. Have you seen what they look like, when you pull them out? Have you cleared their eyes with toothbrushes? Have you seen their lungs?”
“You drive a car,” Winona protested. “A Honda Civic. Imported. Not electric, not even a hybrid—what do you think it runs on?”
“Sure, I drive. I even fly. We’re all poisoning ourselves and each other, every minute of every day. I can read it in beak lengths, in the thickness of eggshells. We’re monsters, all of us. You’re monstrous, I’m monstrous. Everything in our freezer is evidence of that.”
“So why teach me?”
“As I said, our budget is tight, and you’re working for free. And I’m keeping a geologist off the oil fields, at least for a while.”
“Well,” Winona said, “I hope you can keep me here longer.”
Penny said nothing.
When Winona had pinned her mockingbird—she could prepare one bird a day to Penny’s three—Penny stood.
“I have a research trip to Costa Rica at the end of February, to look at Talamanca speciation. Flying, before you ask. Very hypocritical.”
“For how long?”
“Three months.”
“Is it all right if I still come in?”
“Actually.” Penny tapped her fingers on the table. “I think it’s time you moved on.”
Winona’s chest tightened. She could not speak.
“Maxine will be back in two weeks. We can’t afford to pay you. This is the next best thing I can do. Go home. Or go somewhere else. Don’t come back tomorrow.”
It was snowing when Winona left the museum. She drove slowly, her headlights picking out the quick slanting streaks of snowflakes, her windshield wipers sweeping feathery handfuls to either side.
At the door to her apartment, she stomped the slush from her boots, then set the kettle on and opened the last teabag in the box. Outside her frozen windows, the blue and purple of evening deepened to black. Here and there the orange slash of a sodium light illuminated the swirling snow.
She had stuffed so many small, soft, pointless deaths into the semblance of life. Her hands remembered the shearing of joints. Her eyes remembered the pink stains and jellied blood. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, hearing their silent singing. The shadows of hundreds of birds swept over her, flying wing tip to wing tip, and were gone.
Her tea grew cold, untouched. When her shoulders ached from stillness, and her skin felt uncomfortably loose on her, she set the mug down and went to her bedroom.
The eighty-nine enigmas on her dresser had cracked open at their crowns, the smoke and gleam emptied out of them. The shells sat hollow and transparent in a scatter of shards. She was not altogether surprised. Something strange and beautiful had been waiting, just as she was, for the hour of departure to arrive.
She scratched her itching collarbone, feeling the skin flake and peel, then her elbows and forearms. Where had these little dark bruises come from? They bloomed down her arms like blood feathers, though it had been months since she had last seen Fletcher, since she had come to him trembling with her news and he had gripped her wrists, tighter and tighter, to keep her from leaving his room. But she had freed herself. She was light with relief, clotted with guilt, sad and joyful, all at once.
With trembling, changing hands, Winona raised the window sash to the blowing cold, and the wind rushed in and blessed her cheeks with snow.
A moment later—who knows how long?—a white-throated sparrow darted out into the flurrying flakes, its dark eyes shining, the compass of its heart pointing south, toward the spring.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by E. Lily Yu
Art copyright © 2017 by Linda Yan
