There’s a murmur, so soft Gabrielle doesn’t catch the words, but it’s Dana’s voice. It’s accompanied by the tap of fingers against Gabrielle’s hip. Gabrielle’s eyes snap open. Cooling water drips from her hands. She withdraws them, drying them, and in her haste her elbow catches the wineglass balanced precariously on the edge of the counter.
“Damn it!”
She crouches, shaking unaccountably as she sweeps broken glass into her bare palms. It slices her, and she hisses surprise, letting the pieces tumble back to the floor. Drops of blood tap-tap-tap the blond wood.
But Dana’s fingers are on her shoulder, pulling her away. She lets the glass scatter, brushes off her palms and stands. Her cheeks are wet. Steam from the dishwater? She doesn’t dare wipe them for fear of tiny grains of broken glass still clinging to her skin. She breathes out, closing her eyes again and surrendering to the moment, even though the trembling hasn’t stopped.
Gabrielle lets her lover fold around her. Breath stirs against her throat. Lips follow breath, tracing over Gabrielle’s skin. The hand on Gabrielle’s waist brings the heat of the desert sun.
She keeps her eyes closed. Her fingers fumble at buttons. She presses her palm to the ribbed fabric underneath, remembering too late the smear of blood she’ll leave behind.
The cloth’s texture writes itself on Gabrielle’s skin. She nearly trips up the steps to the half-floor holding the bed. The aerie—Dana’s word for it. If she keeps her eyes closed, nothing can spoil this moment. She doesn’t need to see Dana’s face; the fingers, sure on Gabrielle’s skin, are enough.
This. Here. Now. It’s good. Better than it’s been in a long time. Maybe she shouldn’t… . But it’s so good, and it’s been so long.
Pleasure builds like a rush of wind, like the ground rising to meet her.
Impact.
Gabrielle’s eyes fly open, her head jerking toward the window. The ghost-impression of wings lingers on the glass. The violence jolts, a moment too late; a shock of another kind is already running through her, a gasp slipping free as she comes.
* * *
Mourning Dove: She’s deceptive. You think there is only one layer to her sorrow, the weeping sound she makes as though her heart is broken. But there is also the whistle of her wings as she takes flight. It is the sound of rushing air. It is the last sound your lover heard as she fell.
* * *
There’s a smudge of blood on the window where the bird struck the glass last night. Gabrielle notices it as she’s rinsing the cup from her morning tea. The memory of impact jars her, and she catches her breath. She glances toward the aerie before remembering she woke up alone.
Sometime in the night, she heard the distinct clack of keys. But her limbs stayed heavy, trapping her in the bed, and sleep dragged her back down. The second time, her sleep was deep enough that she never heard Dana leave.
Gabrielle pulls cleaning supplies from under the sink and climbs onto the counter. The window is stiff with years of paint and humidity, but Gabrielle gets it open. Balancing precariously, she reaches out as far as she can.
Her muscles are pleasantly sore, her skin raw and tingling. She hasn’t showered yet, putting it off for as long as possible. It’s silly, a teenage thing, like when she was in high school and bought the same kind of perfume as the girl she had a crush on. Not so she could wear it, but so she could spray in on her pillowcase before going to sleep each night.
She wants to hold on to the scent of Dana, pressed into her skin. She cherishes the faint nail marks left on her body. Distracted, Gabrielle slips. Her arms pinwheel a moment, trying to catch herself on the window frame. She misses. Her cheek strikes the counter on the way down, and stars pop, bright, behind her eyes.
Dazed, she lies on the floor, staring at the ceiling. When she turns her head, a stray page lies inches from her face. She must have knocked it over when she fell. Sitting up, she reaches for it, but pauses.
There’s something missing. No shards of glass, no blood. She broke her wineglass last night, didn’t she? She cut herself. Gabrielle turns her hands over, examining them, but her fingertips are clean. She pushes her sleeves back to look at her arms. The marks Dana left, the secret language of love bites and scratches, is gone. Gabrielle presses a hand to her forehead, blinking against sudden dizziness. When she looks up again, even the blood on the window is gone.
* * *
Mockingbird: She is a trickster, an illusionist. After death she has the ability not only to recreate common sounds—the neighbor’s cat, a car alarm—but sounds specific to you: the catch of your lover’s breath, her footsteps on the stairs, her voice. This is not cruelty; your reaction to the mockingbird is your responsibility alone.
* * *
It was there, typing in the desert, writing her lover’s suicide note, that Dana met the angel.
Sunrise found her chilled, her back against a curve of whalebone. Pages lay wedged beneath the typewriter, sand clogged between its keys. There were feathers, too.
One from a gull, miles from any shore. Another, jammed beneath the space bar, bright canary. Parrot. Pigeon. Crow. But the keys still worked, responding with letters instead of a flock of birds. Typing eased the ache in her fingers, so Dana didn’t stop until a shadow fell across her.
At first she mistook it for a massive vulture. But when she shaded her eyes, she saw it was a woman, not a bird. Or it was both.
The angel’s toes curled around the whale cathedral’s arched ceiling as she peered between the slats of its ribs. Everything about her was pale—hair, lips, even her nipples. Only her eyes were dark, black all the way to the edges. Her shoulders, when she flexed them, made a sound like settling wings.
The angel opened her mouth, and Dana waited to hear Katrin’s voice. Instead, the angel let out a piercing cry. Sunlight caught the fine crystalline feathers covering her body. When the angel leaped into the sky, Dana scrambled to follow.
* * *
Storm Petrel: Her song is a rush, a voice too eager to get the words out, afraid of losing ground. It tumbles like gravity until it hits the right tempo, then it becomes the sound of a record scratch, long and drawn-out. It is the sound of your first fight with your lover—vinyl pulled from beneath the needle, then shattered against the wall.
* * *
There’s a bird in the apartment. Gabrielle drops her keys, startled at the unmistakable whir of trapped wings. She reaches for the light, heart hammering, but the sound doesn’t come again. Nothing. The apartment is empty. The window above the sink is closed.
Gabrielle pours wine to calm her nerves. What would make her think a bird had gotten in?
Dana’s desk is immaculate. All the bottles and cups gone, loose pages stashed out of sight. The typewriter gleams in the late-afternoon light. Gabrielle runs a finger over its keys, resisting the impulse to check between them for feathers.
She opens her laptop and searches for “whale bones in the desert.” Her stomach twists, and she almost closes the tab before scanning the results. Images appear—bones laid flat, broken, scarcely recognizable as whales. What did she expect? An actual cathedral entered through propped-open jaws, a vaulted arch of ribs leading to the altar of the tail?
She shuts the laptop before she can search for Katrin’s name. Katrin existed. Dana loved her. And she fell. That’s all.
To distract herself, Gabrielle pulls the proofs for the museum’s latest catalog from her work bag, pages filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations showing details of wings, feathers, beaks, claws. Mockingbird. Mourning dove. Sparrow.
When a subtle ache starts behind her eyes, she sets the pages aside, glancing at the door. Dana should be home by now. Gabrielle moves to the desk, presses a hand flat against the stacked manuscript, fingers itching to rifle through the pages.
A ghost story is about absence, the way something that isn’t there shapes what’s left behind.
The spaces between the words. The spaces around them. Maybe that’s where Gabrielle should be
looking for her answers. If she traced the emptiness on each page, would it reveal the shape of Dana’s heart, the shape of Katrin?
Gabrielle fans the pages, but doesn’t lift them. In all her writing and rewriting, what is it Dana isn’t saying about Katrin? What is the absence hiding?
Falling. The beauty of flight. It’s almost romantic. A loveliness covering something ugly, harsh, something Dana can’t bring herself to write. Bloody water filling the tub, dripping on the tiles, wet ropes of hair and cooling flesh starting to soften around hard bones. Maybe her dead lover’s name wasn’t even Katrin.
For a moment, Gabrielle feels it, the ghost winding between the words, pressing up, pressing back against her palm. It’s almost a heartbeat, tapping out words, a name. She yanks her hand back. A shadow darts past, wittering overhead. The rustle of feathers. The panicked flight of wings.
* * *
There is an uncanniness to all birds’ voices. Sometimes there are words just on the edge of hearing. They say me, too or help me. Sometimes they say their names, the ones we’ve given them—chickadee, chick-a-dee-dee-dee. Sometimes it sounds like they’re saying the name of someone you should know, someone you can’t quite remember. (The human mind is designed to seek patterns, to find meaning where there is none.) After death, birds’ voices become clearer. You’ll wish you could put things back the way they were, when you didn’t understand them.
* * *
Dana came home from the desert with the angel on her back. In her apartment, it perched in the aerie, watching her. She tried to reread the pages she’d banged out until her fingers ached, fighting stiff keys clogged with feathers and sand. But they’d turned ancient, gone the ivory of bleached bone, the ink paled to brown like dried blood. Illegible.
Panic. The sensation of wings. Tiny claws scratching at her skin from the inside out. A thousand birds trapped between her bones.
With her eyes closed, she pressed a hand to her chest. Through cloth and skin she felt the faint tap-tap of a beak, Morse code answering her pain. K-A-T-R-I-N. Her pulse drummed a response: I’m here. The words echoed, written featherlight against her palm. When she opened her eyes, she found the angel waiting with her arms open.
* * *
Evening Grosbeak: She is a multiplicity. Instead of one voice in her song, there are many, each clamoring over the other. Each one a lie. Each one the truth.
* * *
Gabrielle half-wakes, struggling to come up the rest of the way. A weight crouches at the end of the bed. Her eyes won’t open. Her limbs won’t move. She wants to sit up, but the sheets hold her down.
There’s a rustle of pages like wings.
Her eyes snap open. She’s lying on her side, facing Dana’s naked back. She can’t tell if Dana is breathing. Everything is indistinct. She’s seeing the room through a fog; the space is wrong. She wants to reach for her lover, but can’t.
Her eyes snap open. She is alone. But footsteps climb toward her. She can’t see. Can’t wake up. Can’t get away.
Her eyes snap open. Dana’s naked back faces her, furrows scored deep into the skin, welling with fresh blood. It drips tap-tap-tap on the floor. Blood soaks the sheets. Everywhere. Tap-tap-tap on the window. The moment of impact shocking her awake.
Her eyes snap open. A weight crouches at the end of the bed. She can’t see it properly, but she knows it’s the angel, the one who followed her lover home from the desert. Feathers brush her skin. A cold hand reaches for hers.
Her eyes won’t open. Hands strike the pillow around her. The terrible sounds of impact. The promise of violence never delivered. Close, but never touching. They create a rush of air, a sound. They draw closer, but not close enough.
Gabrielle sheds dream after dream. Fighting to wake up for good. Her throat is raw with every word she fails to scream. It tastes of blood.
She is falling.
Sunlight knifes her awake with a ragged gasp. A sound like dying, which turns into a choking cough. Gabrielle claws at her throat and the sheets until the sensation passes, then draws in a lungful of air.
For a moment she can’t orient herself, can’t trust that she’s finally awake. Then she manages to roll over. The imprint of Dana’s head haunts her pillow, but Gabrielle is alone. She kicks the covers away. Pages fresh from the typewriter scatter like feathers.
She snatches them up, scanning.
There are words scribbled in the margins, curled around the text, filling the blank spaces and defining them. Notes on birdsong in her handwriting.
No. It must be a trick. She couldn’t have written them. Didn’t write them. She’s being haunted.
Gabrielle tosses the pages away from her, but it isn’t enough. She scrambles after them, tearing and tearing and tearing, scattering them from the aerie like snow.
* * *
Calliope Hummingbird: In life, her song is called bickering. In death, she is silent. You find yourself wishing she would speak again, even to argue. Even to weep or scream. But she only looks at you with bright eyes, withholding judgment, withholding forgiveness, withholding her song.
* * *
Fucking the angel is nothing like Dana expected. It was … it is …
It is moments threaded along a string, constantly picked apart and woven together again. It is. It was. It will be.
The angel’s talons rake her back, her thighs, her arms. Let out her blood.
The angel takes her hand, leads her to the aerie.
“I’m not ready for this. Katrin …”
The angel’s eyes are black all the way to the edges. Her pulse drums K-A-T-R-I-N. Dana’s answers: I’m here.
Dana’s fingers tangle in feathers, pulling the angel down and into her, harder and deeper. The angel’s beak is between her legs, and she is coming. Oh, God, she is coming, and nothing has ever felt this good.
Blood soaks the sheets, hotter than tears. Tap-tap-tap, hitting the floor. She cries out, choking on her lover’s name, and all that comes is a sob.
Her fingers are in Dana’s Katrin’s hair. Wet ropes tangled from bathwater grown cold.
Gabrielle’s fingers are in Dana’s hair, on her wrist. So much blood. Shaking her. Holding her down, keeping her from flying.
She … No. Dana. Dana brought the angel back from the desert. Dana holds Katrin, soothes the goose-pimpled flesh where the pinfeathers have torn free. Gathering bloody feathers and keeping them from scattering in the wind. She will hold on until the shaking stops. She will never let go.
Fucking the angel is …
Gabrielle tears the pages until there is nothing left. Only blood and feathers covering the bed.
She pulls the angel into her. Deeper. Harder. She comes.
And she is all alone.
* * *
Loon: There is much debate over her song. Is she laughing or crying? Is it a lonely sound or an invitation to join in her joke? Do you think death will make it easier to tell?
* * *
Gabrielle opens the apartment door to birdsong. A robin, a pigeon, a thrush. A high, nattering yell, and one that sounds like a question asked over and over again. A macaw, an owl, a peacock’s scream. She drops her keys, throwing her arms up to cover her eyes as wings rush overhead.
When she lowers her arms, her iPod glows at her from the docking station, a single word scrolling across the screen: birdsong.
Her fingers shake as she turns the player off. The cacophony stops.
“Dana? Hello?”
The silence is thick, a presence filling every corner of the room.
“Dana?”
Part of her knows there won’t be an answer, but she wants one, needs one so badly it hurts. She needs something to still the flutter of her pulse, so close beneath the surface of her skin. The pills by the sink aren’t cutting it anymore. That’s why she stopped taking them. That’s why …
She closes the door, sets her keys down. The window over the sink is open. There’s a smear of blood on the glass, almost like a fingerprint.
&nb
sp; A breeze rustles the papers on Dana’s desk, peeling them from their neat pile and scattering them around the room. Gabrielle’s head throbs, the edges of a migraine coming on.
She reaches for the pill bottle, knocks it over.
Bending, she picks up a fallen page instead. It’s blank. She picks up another. Blank. All of them.
A shape of absence. The words picked apart too often, unraveling. One tug and the whole story comes undone.
Wind rattles the single page left in the typewriter, demanding her attention. Blank, too.
Feathers roll through the room. No, not feathers, paper, torn to shreds. There’s a scrap lodged between the typewriter keys. She digs, trying to reach it, but her fingers are too large and the space too small. The keys clatter, a staccato pulse, Morse code, the rattle of wings. An apology. A confession. A ghost story. Each key strike echoes the frantic, trapped beating of her heart. Begin again.
She waits for the door to open, the sound of Dana coming home to prove her wrong. But the only answer in the silence is the frantic scrabble of the typewriter and the shiver-hum of wings.
Words crowd the blank spaces of the page, responding to the strike of her fingers. She shakes. Tears roll down her cheeks. Haunted.
Instead of a suicide note, Gabrielle’s lover left her a typewriter.
The Sorcerer of Etah
Gray Rinehart
The birds returned early, as if the breath of a storm god chased them up from the south. Isi sniffed the gentle wind as he watched the little auks; it was all wrong.
The serfaq flew in by the hundreds, by the thousands, a month early—the days were short, the twilights long, the nights dwindling but still dark. The rookeries were packed with snow and ice, and the birds flapped and screeched and fought over the few clear spots on the cliffs. They were almost as thick and loud now as they would be when the little ones fledged, before they flew south again.
Isi’s sledge coasted as the dogs raised an outcry at the birds. They flew crazily, as if they were drunk, and some wheeled in close enough that Isi could almost have snared them without a net. He’d netted five hundred a day during the hunt last summer, many of which were safely cached inside sealskins back at Siorapaluk, slowly fermenting into slimy, delicious kiviaq.
Clockwork Phoenix 5 Page 9
