by Paula Guran
Realizing that her eyes were closed, Socks opened them. Everything pulsed, spun, and fell into place—a shabby room, twilit through rotting curtains, a dead candle on a cracked plate, eight terrified faces. Baby was curled into Science’s arms, and across the circle, Pet, Eye, and Map were concentrating very hard on disentangling their shoelaces. The candle was out, dead out.
“What happened?” asked Socks.
“Whoosh,” sobbed Baby. “Fire.”
Over her head, Science nodded. “We thought the place had caught on fire, and here we were, tied down so we couldn’t move.”
“It was more than the shoelaces.” Pet’s voice was shrill with panic. “We really couldn’t move. It seemed to last forever.” “But it didn’t hurt,” said Hand thoughtfully. “It wasn’t even hot. I couldn’t tell what was going on at first.”
Eye elbowed Map in the ribs. “Not until Mr. Mercator Projection here started yelling.”
“And then it just went out,” said Art. “Poof! Like that.” Science looked at Socks. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Your feet. The object of this exercise. How are they?”
“My feet.” Socks looked down. Her feet were bare, resting among blackened scraps of fabric. They were white and smooth.
They no longer felt like fire ants or ice or knives. They felt like feet.
Baby let go of Science, wiped her nose on her arm, and peered at Socks’ toes. “No more Socks,” she said with satisfaction.
“No. No more Socks.” There were thin spots in her memory still, where things like names and places and where she’d gone to school had fallen through. She remembered her father, though, his eyes, his belt, and the hard, bright flame of his rage. And she remembered running from a blue house with black shutters, barefoot and in her pajamas, running because her father was killing her mother and she couldn’t stop him. The rest would come back to her eventually. Or maybe it wouldn’t. At the moment, she was too wiped out to care.
Baby was tugging at her arm. “No more Socks,” she repeated.
“Who, then?”
“Huh?”
“She’s asking you what we should call you now that your Baggies are things of the past,” Pet translated.
“It’s a fair question,” said Art.
“Yeah,” said Map. “We gotta call you something.”
Eye punched him in the ribs. “Why? Why can’t she be the Nameless One? We don’t have one of those?”
Hand began to giggle. “Ex-Socks?”
“Sockless.”
“Silk Stockings.”
Below their hysterical joking, a sly voice sounded in her ear.
“Everyone needs a stage name, Singer.”
“Shut up, you guys.” Her voice was a little defensive, but they heard it, and obediently fell silent. “You can call me Nightingale. And I’ll sing for my supper.”
Delia Sherman’s three novels for adults are Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner), and The Fall of the Kings (with Ellen Kushner). Her novel, The Freedom Maze, won the Prometheus and Andre Norton Awards. Sherman’s short fiction has appeared most recently in the anthologies Teeth, Naked City, and Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. A collection, Young Woman in a Garden, was published in 2014. She lives in New York City.
In the streets and skies of New York City, we find a man with an ancient curse, raw and dire, of birdhood and madness. A newer form of transformative magic is also discovered there.
Painted Birds and Shivered Bones
Kat Howard
The white bird flew through the clarion of the cathedral bells, winging its way through the rich music of their tolling to perch in the shelter of the church’s walls. The chiming continued, marking time into measured, holy hours.
Maeve had gone for a walk, to clear her head and give herself the perspective of something beyond the windows and walls of her apartment. She could feel the sensation at the back of her brain, that almost-itch that meant a new painting was ready to be worked on. Wandering the city, immersing herself in its chaos and beauty would help that back of the head feeling turn into a realized concept.
But New York had been more chaos than beauty that morning. Too much of everything and all excess without pause. Maeve felt like she was coming apart at the seams.
In an effort to hold herself together, Maeve had gone to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There, she could think, could sit quietly, could stop and breathe without people asking what was wrong.
Midwinter was cold enough to flush her cheeks as she walked to the cathedral, but Maeve couldn’t bear being inside—large as the church was, she could feel the walls pressing on her skin. Instead, she perched on a bench across from the fallen tower, and pulled her scarf higher around her neck.
Maeve sipped her latte, and leaned back against the bench, then sat up. She closed her eyes, then opened them again.
There was a naked man crouched on the side of the cathedral.
She dug in her purse for her phone, wondering how it was possible that such a relatively small space always turned into a black hole when she needed to find anything. Phone finally in hand, she sat up.
The naked man was gone.
In his place was a bird. Beautiful, white feathers trailing like half-remembered thoughts. Impressive, to be sure, especially when compared to the expected pigeons of the city. But bearing no resemblance to a man, naked or otherwise.
Maeve let her phone slip through her fingers, back into her bag, and sat up, shaking her head at herself. “You need to cut down on your caffeine.”
“You thought what?” Emilia laughed. “Oh, honey. The cure for thinking that you see a naked man at the cathedral isn’t giving up caffeine, it’s getting laid.”
“Meeting men isn’t really a priority for me.” Maeve believed dating to be a circle of Hell that Dante forgot.
“Maeve, you don’t need to meet them. Just pick one.” Emilia gestured at the bar.
Maeve looked around. “I don’t even know them.”
“That’s exactly my point.” Emilia laughed again. “Take one home, send him on his way in the morning, and I can guarantee your naked hallucinations will be gone.”
“Fine.” Maeve sipped her bourbon. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
Surprising precisely no one, least of all the woman who had been her best friend for a decade, Maeve went home alone, having not even attempted to take one of the men in the bar with her. She hung up her coat, and got out her paints.
Dawn was pinking the sky when she set the brush down and rolled the tension from her neck and shoulders.
The canvas was covered in birds.
Madness is easier to bear with the wind in your feathers. Sweeney flung himself into the currents of the air, through bands of starlight that streaked the sky, and winged toward the cloud-coated moon.
Beneath Sweeney, the night fell on the acceptable madness of the city. Voices cried out to each other in greeting or curse. Tires squealed and horns blared. Canine throats raised the twilight bark, and it was made symphonic by feline yowls, skitterings of smaller creatures, and the songs of more usual birds.
Not Sweeney’s.
Silent Sweeney was borne on buffeting currents over the wild lights of the city. Over the scents of concrete and of rot, of grilling meat and decaying corners, of the blood and love and dreams and terrors of millions.
And of their madness as well.
Even in his bird form, Sweeney recognized New York as a city of the mad. Not that one needed to be crazy to be there, or that extended residency was a contributing factor to lunacy of some sort, but living there—thriving there—took a particular form of madness.
Or caused it. Sweeney had not yet decided which.
He had not chosen his immigration, but had been pulled over wind and salt and sea by the whim of a wizard. Exiled from his kingdom in truth, though there were no kings in Ireland anymore.
On he flew, through a forest of buildi
ngs built to assault the sky. Over bridges, and trains that hurtled from the earth as if they were loosed dragons. Over love and anger and countless anonymous mysteries.
Sweeney tucked his wings, and coasted to the ground at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The ring of church bells set the madness on him, sprang the feathers from his skin, true. But madness obeyed rules of its own devising, and the quietness of the cathedral grounds soothed him. He roosted in the ruined tower, and fed on seed scattered on the steps after weddings.
He had done so for years, making the place a refuge. There had been a woman, Madeleine, he thought her name was, who smelled of paper and stories. She had been kind to him, kind enough that he had wondered sometimes if she could see the curse beneath the feathers. She scattered food, and cracked the window of the room she worked in so that he might perch just inside the frame, and watch her work among the books.
Yes. Madeleine. He had worn his man shape to her memorial, there at the cathedral, found and read her books, with people as out of time as he was. She had been kind to him, and kindness was stronger even than madness was.
Maeve stood in front of the canvas, and wiped the remnants of sleep from her eyes with paint-smeared fingers.
It was good work. She had gotten the wildness of the feathers, and the way a wing could obscure and reveal when stretched in flight. She could do a series, she thought.
“I mean, it’s about time, right?” she asked Brian, her agent, on the phone. “Be ambitious, move out of my comfort zone, all those things you keep telling me I need to do.”
“Yes, but birds, Maeve?”
“Not still lifes, or landscapes, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Well, not worried exactly . . . Look, send me pictures of what you’re working on. I’ll start looking for a good venue to show them. If it doesn’t work, we’ll call this your birdbrained period.”
It hadn’t been the resounding endorsement of her creativity that Maeve had been hoping for, but that was fine. She would paint now, and enthusiasm could come later.
She could feel her paintings, the compulsion to create, just beneath the surface of her skin. She gathered her notebook and pencils, and went out into the city to sketch.
Sweeney perched on a bench in Central Park, plucking feathers from his arms. He had felt the madness creeping back for days this time before the feathers began appearing. Sure, he knew it was the madness. His blood itched, and unless that was the cursed feathers being born beneath his skin, itchy blood meant madness.
Itchy blood had meant madness and feathers for close to forever now, hundreds of years since the curse had first been cast. Life was long, and so were curses.
Though when he thought about it, Sweeney suspected curses were longer.
Pigeons cooed and hopped about near the bench’s legs, occasionally casting their glinting eyes up at him. Sweeney thumbed a nail beneath a quill, worried at it until he could get a good grip. The feather emerged slowly, blood brightening its edges. He sighed as it slid from his skin. Sweeney flicked the feather to the ground, and the pigeons scattered.
“Can’t blame you. I don’t like the fucking things, either.” Sweeney tugged at the next feather, one pushing through the skin at the bend of his elbow. Plucking his own feathers wouldn’t stop the change, or even slow it, but it gave him something to do.
“The curse has come upon me,” he said. Blood caked his nails, and dried in the whorls and creases of his fingers.
And it would. The curse would come upon him, as it had time and time again, an ongoing atonement. He might be occasionally mad, and sometimes a bird with it, but Sweeney was never stupid. He knew the metamorphosis would happen. A bell would ring, and his skin would grow too tight around his bones, and he would bend and crack into bird shape.
Sooner, rather sooner indeed than later, if the low buzz at the back of his skull was any indication.
“But just because something is inevitable, doesn’t mean that we resign ourselves to it. No need to roll over and show our belly, now.” Sweeney watched the pigeons as they skritched about in the dirt.
There were those who might say that Sweeney’s stubbornness had gone a long way to getting him into the fix he was currently in. Most days, Sweeney would agree with them, and on the days he wouldn’t, well, those days he didn’t need to, as his agreement was implied by the shape he wore.
You didn’t get cursed into birdhood and madness because you were an even-tempered sort of guy.
“You guys all really birds, there beneath the feathers?” Sweeney asked the flock discipled at his feet.
The pigeons kept their own counsel.
Then the bells marked the hour, and in between ring and echo, Sweeney became a bird.
Dusk was painting the Manhattan skyline in gaudy reds and purples when Maeve looked up from her sketchbook. She had gotten some good studies, enough to start painting the series. She scrubbed her smudged hands against the cold-stiffened fabric of her jeans. She would get take out—her favorite soup dumplings—and then go home and paint.
The bird winged its way across her sightlines as she stood up. Almost iridescent in the dying light, a feathered sweep of beauty at close of day. Watching felt transcendent—
“Oh, fuck, not again.” In the tree not a bird, but a man, trying his best to inhabit a bird-shaped space.
Maeve closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again. Still: Man. Tree. Naked.
“Okay. It’s been a long day. You forgot to eat. You have birds on the brain. You’re just going to go home now”—she tapped the camera button on her phone—“and when you get there, this picture of a naked man is going to be a picture of a bird.”
It wasn’t.
Sweeney watched the woman pick up her paintbrush, set it down. Pick up her phone, look at it, clutch her hair or shake her head, then set the phone down and walk back to her canvas. She had been repeating a variation of this pattern since he landed on the fire escape outside of her window.
He had seen her take the picture, and wanted to know why. The people who saw him were usually quite good at ignoring his transformations, in that carefully turned head, averted eyes, and faster walking way of ignoring. Most people didn’t even let themselves see him. This woman did. Easy enough to fly after her, once he was a bird again.
Sweeney wondered if perhaps she was mad, too, this woman who held the mass of her hair back by sticking a paintbrush through it, and who talked to herself as she paced around her apartment.
She wasn’t mad now though, not that he could tell. She was painting. Sweeney stretched his wings, and launched himself into the cold, soothing light of the stars.
In the center of the canvas was a man, and feathers were erupting from his skin.
“Oh, yes. Brian is going to love it when you tell him about this. ‘That series of paintings you didn’t want me to do? Well, I’ve decided that the thing it really needed was werebirds.’ ”
It was good, though, she thought. The shock of the transformation as a still point in the chaos of the city that surrounded him.
The transformation had been a shock. The kind of thing you had to see to believe, and even then, you doubted. Such a thing should have been impossible to see.
And maybe that was the thread for the series, Maeve thought. Fantasy birds, things that belonged in fairy tales and medieval bestiaries, feathered refugees from mythology and legend scattered throughout a modern city that refused to see them there.
She could paint that. It would be a series of paintings that would let her do something powerful if she got them right.
Maeve sat at her computer, and began compiling image files of harpy and cockatrice, phoenix and firebird. There were, she thought, so many stories of dead and vengeful women returning as ghost birds, but nothing about men who did so. Not that she thought what she had seen was a ghost, or that she was trying some form of research-based bibliomancy to discern the story behind the bird (the man) she kept seeing, but she wouldn’t have turn
ed away an answer.
“And would it have made you feel better if you had found one? Because hallucinating a ghost bird in Manhattan is so much better than if you’re just seeing a naked werebird? Honestly.” She shook her head.
Though it wasn’t a hallucination. Not with the picture on her phone. Why it was easier to think she was losing her mind than to accept that she had seen something genuinely impossible was something Maeve didn’t understand.
She printed out reference photos for all the impossible birds she hadn’t yet seen, and taped them over the walls.
In the beginning, when the curse’s claws still bled him, and Sweeney had nothing to recall him to himself or his humanity, he would fly after Eorann, who had been his wife, before he was a bird. She was the star to his wanderings.
Eorann had loved Sweeney, and so she had tried, at the beginning, to break the curse. Unspeaking, she wove garments from nettles and cast them over Sweeney like nets, in the hopes that pain and silence spun together might force a bird back into a man’s shape. Even had one perfect wing lingered as a reminder of his past and his errors, it would have been change enough. More, it would have been stasis, a respite from the constant and unpredictable change that, Sweeney discovered, was the curse’s true black heart.
When that did not work, she had shoes made from iron, and walked the length and breadth of Ireland in an attempt to wear them out. But she was already east of the sun and west of the moon, the true north of her compass set to once upon a time. Such places are not given to the wearing out of iron shoes.
Eorann spun straw into gold, then spun the gold into thread that flexed and could be woven into a dress more beautiful than the sun, the moon, and the stars. She uncurdled milk, and raised from the dead a cow that gave it constantly, without needing food nor drink of its own. If there were a miracle, a marvel, or a minor wonder that Eorann could perform in the hopes of breaking Sweeney’s curse, she did so.
Until the day she didn’t.
“A wife’s role may be many things, Sweeney. But it is not a wife’s job to break a husband’s curse, not when he is the one who has armored himself in it.”
