Sparrow Man

by M. R. Pritchard

  “Maybe this is their Hell too? They must be dead.” He rubs the stubble on his chin. “We need to go back to your house.”

  “We just left it.”

  “No, not your father’s house. Your house, the one you lived in with Jim.”

  “I don’t want to go back there.” I shudder at the memories.

  “We have to.” The tires of the Jeep squeal as he turns sharp in the middle of the road.

  Why is it that I keep coming back here? All I have ever wanted was to get the hell out of this town, and all this bullshit keeps pulling me back. I look to the sky and see the first hints of sunrise. “Shouldn’t we rest somewhere and wait until night?”

  “This will be quick. We’ll be fine,” Sparrow assures me with the confidence he has always had when it comes to safety and the dead.

  I give him the directions to my house.

  …

  Sparrow parks the Jeep across the street. The house looks just the same as it did a few weeks ago when I came here for clothes and supplies. I follow Sparrow through the open door. The downstairs is still overrun with cats, they scamper away as we walk through the living room.

  “I hate cats,” Sparrow whispers.

  I kick at an old pair of sneakers by the door, thinking about replacing these hiking boots with them.

  “Where would Jim have put important papers?” Sparrow asks.

  “I don’t know.” I walk towards the kitchen in search of food.

  “Weren’t you going to marry him? How can you not know where he kept things?”

  “I didn’t really pay attention.”

  I hear Sparrow’s footsteps as he searches the house.

  “Watch your step,” I warn him.

  “Why?” He stops at the threshold of the kitchen.

  “Upstairs.” I open a cupboard door only to find it empty. “They never cleaned up the blood.”

  The next thing I hear is Sparrow’s footsteps as he walks upstairs. Giving up on finding any food, I follow him. When I reach the second floor landing I notice the door to the nursery is open.

  “Sparrow, did you go in the nursery?” I ask.

  There’s no answer. I head towards the open door, drawn to it by some unknown force. Walking into the room, I immediately wish I hadn’t. A pressure hits my chest. I clutch at my shirt, pulling it away from my body, trying to stop the choking feeling.

  The walls are still painted the light yellow and green hues, the crib decorated in soft linens and stuffed animals. It’s the only room in the house that doesn’t look dank and dirty.

  My hand smoothes over my stomach, missing the feeling of having the baby in there, and I realize that I’m never going to have that chance again. Babies grow in a uterus and mine has left the building. I swipe at a tear, blink hard. Grow the fuck up. I tell myself. I should have never walked through the goddamned door. Somehow, I’m on my knees, my fingers pressing into the beige shag carpet. I stand, walk out of the room, and slam the door.

  “Noise!” I hear Sparrow’s harsh whisper from down the hall.

  “Shit,” I mumble to myself, hoping that the dead didn’t hear the door slamming.

  “Sparrow?” I call down the hallway. I search the spare room and bathroom on my way to the master bedroom. On my way, I give up trying to step around the dark stains in the carpet. There’s too many of them. “Sparrow?” He looks up, staring at me with some odd look, like he’s crazy again or I’m a bird whose feathers he’s getting ready to pluck. “What’s wrong with you?” I demand. “I’ve been calling your name.”

  “I… I was going to say something, but it seems… It seems I’ve lost my words.” He runs his hand through his hair and looks around confused.

  Walking towards him, I find a picture of my mother in his hand. “Where did you find this? I thought I lost it in the move.”

  He points to the floor where I find an open lockbox. Bending, I inspect the other papers. There is a yellowed folded piece of paper. I open it to find my birth certificate. There’s more, a letter from a lawyer in Syracuse stating the large sum of money I was about to inherit, and a letter from my bank.

  My hands sift through the papers as my brain works overtime, piecing it all together. Jim knew, he knew about the money and he knew about my mother. Part of me now wonders if he knew all of this before he drove downstate and got me pregnant, if the baby and killing us was always his plan.

  My eyes focus on the picture of my mother. The mother I never met, the mother I killed the day I was born. There’s nothing to signify who she was in this picture, just a pretty woman standing near a tree in a park. The image is blurry like someone tried to get her to stand still but the only part that came out clearly was the smile on her face.

  “There’s so much blood spilled here.” I look up from the papers to find Sparrow has moved across the room. He now stares at the stains on the carpet.

  “I know.” I close the top of the lockbox and stand up, leaving the papers and the picture. “It’s mine.”

  Sparrow turns and the look on his face is one that can only be described as deep sympathy.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him, walking around the side of the bed towards him. “I hate it when people look at me like that.”

  “Something terrible happened to you here.”

  “I fucking know that, Sparrow. Remember? I told you all about it.” I head for the door.

  “No.” He steps forward, blocking my exit from the room. “Something terrible.” He steps in front of me and places his hand over my heart. “Right here.”

  “Stop it.” I brush his hand away. “I don’t need your little pity party.” I start walking away from him.

  “No, Meg.” He grabs my arm and pulls me back to him. “It’s not pity. It’s regret. I can’t help but feel like this…” He waves at the bloodstains on the carpet. “This is my fault.”

  “How could it be your fault, Sparrow? You didn’t know me when this happened.”

  “I-”

  His words are interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the first level of the house. I wish all I were hearing is the sound of a single person’s footsteps, but it’s not, it’s the sound of dozens of footsteps, dragging and scraping across the floor beneath us.

  “I knew we should have waited until night to come here,” I say.

  Sparrow looks around the room before stepping into the hallway and looking down the stairwell. “They’ll make it up these stairs,” he whispers.

  “I thought they couldn’t climb?”

  “They can’t climb ladders. But stairs, stairs are angled just enough that they can fall and drag their rotting bodies up them. We have to block them.” He moves to the bedroom and lifts a nightstand. “Come on. Help me throw some stuff down the stairs to block them.”

  “Uh, shouldn’t you choose something bigger, like a dresser?” I suggest.

  “Layers, you have to block them with layers. We start with the nightstands then the dressers.”

  I move, lifting and tossing, the commotion only seeming to draw the walking dead to the bottom of the stairs. The sound of heavy wood being pushed across the floor makes me turn to see Sparrow pushing my dresser across the floor.

  I move back and watch as he shoves it down the stairwell. We follow that with Jim’s dresser, a chair, the mattress and box springs from the bed.

  “If we take the bed apart, the headboard and footboard should be enough to block them until night. Then we can climb over everything and get out.”

  I pace the floor, look at the blood stains on the carpets, the broken mirror in the bathroom. I feel a sharp pain in my side, remembering how it got broken. And just as though Sparrow were remembering right along with me, I hear him inhale sharply from across the room.

  I turn to him. “I can’t.”

  “It’s just until night, Meg.” Sparrow walks towards me and I back away from him.

  “No. I can’t stay in this house with all these memories for twelve hours or more.”

&nbs
p; A sad understanding crosses his face. His eyes sweep across the stains on the floor. “You want to talk-” he starts.

  “No. I’ve talked about it enough with you. You’re already giving me these looks of pity. I’m done talking about it. I never want to talk about it again.”

  “Okay.” He rubs his jaw and looks around the room. “That leaves only one option.” He walks to the large window that faces a neighbor’s yard and opens it. “Come on.” He beckons me to his side.

  I cross the room to him. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting you out of here.” I follow Sparrow through the window and to the small roof that covers the side entry into the house. Sparrow holds his finger up in the air. He turns to the left, then the right, before he turns to me. “We need to get higher. Climb up onto the roof.”

  I feel his hand on my shoulder as he turns me and points to the low pitched area of the roof. I climb, Sparrow pushing at my backside to get me higher, my boots gripping the rough shingles. I straighten as Sparrow stands next to me.

  “I need you to put your arms around my neck.” He tells me as he reaches for my hands and draws them up his bare chest.

  “You need a shirt.”

  He winks. “Hold tight.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting you out of here. Just like you asked.” He pulls me by my waist, jerking me against him. “Don’t let go,” he whispers into my ear. His wings spread wide and when I look up to his face, I can see the beads of sweat starting on his brow. I think to pull back, to stop him. I know he can’t fly and this, this isn’t going to get us anything but some broken bones and then we’ll definitely be meat sack surprise for dinner.

  “Spa-,” I start, finishing with a gasp as he leans forward and drops us off of the roof. My arms tighten around his neck to the point where I’m sure I’m choking him. His feathers flutter in the sunlight as we descend the roof. Landing on the ground, Sparrow stumbles, dropping down to one knee while holding me tight against his chest.

  “I thought you couldn’t fly?” I finally breathe out.

  “Well,” he starts as he stands. “I didn’t really. Just glided down.” He smiles at me. “But if you want, you can keep looking at me like I flew.”

  “It was kind of amaz-” Sparrow bends and presses his lips to mine before I can finish. A burning fire warms my chest and spreads throughout my veins as I feel his lips move over mine. I push my fingers into his hair and press my body closer to him. Too soon he pulls away.

  “I’d like to finish this.” He looks down at me in his arms. “But we have to go.”

  He pulls me to my feet and I fight to catch my breath as his arm leaves my back.

  “Let’s get back to the Jeep,” he says with a gruff voice. “We need to get moving before more show up.”

  He takes my hand and we run through the neighbor’s yard, around the side of the house, down the street and just as we make a left to reach the Jeep where I left it parked in the road, we skid to a stop.

  “Shit,” Sparrow spits.

  “Motherfucker,” I mumble.

  There are dozens of them, the dead, pouring into my little house. And as we stop in the street, they all turn and look at us.

  …

  “Get in the Jeep, Meg!” Sparrow shouts as he moves for the driver’s side door.

  For some reason, I can’t seem to move my feet.

  “Meg!” Sparrow shouts.

  I feel my lower jaw drop and every ounce of energy I once possessed drains from me.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He moves away from the vehicle, steps towards me, scowling. “Let’s go.”

  “I shouldn’t have come here. Back to this place. I tried so hard to forget it all.” I hear the words come from my lips but it doesn’t feel like I said them. “I can’t do this anymore. You shouldn’t have made me come back here.”

  “Meg, now, we have to go.” Urgency entwines with his voice.

  I look past him, watching as the horde of the dead leave my little house and amble towards us. “I’m dead anyways so it doesn’t matter.”

  Sparrow grips my shoulders, trying to direct me towards the Jeep. I don’t move. I can’t even find the strength or the want to move. A calmness washes over me with the thought that I could just stand here and end all of this right now, let the memories go, be done with dragging them around in my soul.

  “Goddammit, Meg.” Sparrow turns, removes his machete from his hip and readies himself.

  “You should just go, Sparrow.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “I think you should. Dragging me around isn’t helping you. I just want to end this. There’s more I will remember. I can feel it. And I don’t want to remember any of it.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” I notice him cringe after he says it. “I didn’t mean that...”

  “No, that’s what I am. Stupid trash. And there’s no way out. I don’t want to do this anymore. I thought you were the one with lost memories, but it seems this problem is afflicting both of us. This is wrong, Sparrow.”

  The horde and their moaning get closer. “Don’t say that.”

  “They’re coming,” I warn him. “You should leave. I’m just dragging you down.”

  “Not happening.”

  “You should go. You should move on. You’ll be better off without me. My father was right.”

  “Unpossible.”

  I close my eyes, waiting for the end, waiting to hear Sparrow’s footsteps as he runs away, for the rumble of the engine of the jeep starting. I never hear them. Instead, my ears are filled with the sound of Sparrow’s machete blade slicing and the wet thwacking of body parts hitting the ground.

  “Are you over this yet?” My eyes open with Sparrow’s voice.

  He turns to face me, blood and sweat and things I don’t care to mention dripping off of him, looking like nothing but a hulking warrior and so different from the Sparrow that I’ve grown to love. He’s no longer my sweet, slightly confused Sparrow who dragged me all over the state searching for feathers.

  “Let’s go. In the Jeep!” he orders.

  I stand still in the road, surrounded by the newly decapitated dead. “I can’t do this anymore,” I tell him, feeling a heavy weight in my chest and I’m not sure why.

  “We still have to find Jim. We have to get answers from him.”

  “Jim’s gone, Sparrow. He wasn’t in Kingston. The Safe House there couldn’t find him. I’m sure he’s here somewhere. God knows he should be in Hell for what he did. But he doesn’t want to be found. And frankly, I don’t think I can face him. Not after what he let those men do to me.”

  “Meg, we have-”

  “No!” I feel my bottom lip and chin trembling. “I should have never walked back into that house. I should have never looked at that empty nursery or that picture of my mother.” I draw a shuddering breath. I used to know exactly who I was, what was expected of me. But now, with all of this, Sparrow pushing me for answers and these memories springing up from wherever I pushed them, I suddenly have no idea who I am anymore.

  “Meg.” He shakes my shoulder.

  “Damn you, Sparrow.” I brush his hand away. “I don’t want to!”

  He blows out a breath of frustration and runs his dirty hands through his hair, looking around us as though there might be a solution out here. “I can give you just a glimpse of that normal life. Like last time. But just for a few minutes. Will that help you?”

  I nod, brushing the hot tears from the corners of my eyes.

  He grips my thigh, pressing his thumb to the birthmark on my leg and whispers the same strange words he said in the church. A bright light erupts from behind my eyes and I hear that blasted horn sound.

  perspectives and pain

  When my eyes flutter open, I find that I am standing in the zoo. The same place I left off in the aviary, with Sparrow standing in front of me, fully clothed, his wings gone but his strong green gaze just the same.

  I can feel my hair br
ushing against my neck as I move my head from side to side, taking in the normalness of the bustling zoo. It seems when we do this, the time is the same as it is in Hell. Daytime, now. The dress I’m wearing suddenly feels tight even though there is a slight breeze brushing it by my legs. I step away from Sparrow, putting an arm’s length between us.

  Sparrow frowns at me and his beautiful green eyes widen with the knowledge of what I’m about to do. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  Shaking my head at him, knowing without a doubt that this is my chance to escape, to get away, run from all of those memories and all the bullshit. Because I know he’s going to make me go back there, to that Hell where all my nightmares live. I can’t do it, not for one more second. I can’t go back there and continue on with this. I don’t even give him the chance to say two more words before I turn and run away from him as fast as I can, with the burn of looming tears behind my eyes, making my vision blurry.

  The zoo visitors step aside and watch as I run past them, choking down a feeling of pain that’s aching deep in my heart like I have never known.

  ……

  Sparrow

  Watching as Meg runs away from me, I remember this is not like the last time. This is not like how I lost her so long ago when she was nothing but a baby and I couldn’t bear to be demoralized as a babysitter. I was a warrior, after all. Born, bred and trained to fight. Not babysit. It didn’t help that every time I looked at her all I could see was a future, of us, together. One that is forbidden. So I never looked at her again, and I lost her.

  Remembering all of this now, I guess my punishment was sufficient. When I think of all that I put her through, there is a deep pang in my gut.

  Hearing a loud cracking sound I look to my left and find a huge man glaring down at me. His hair is black and long to his shoulders, but it’s the bright blue hue of his eyes that tell me who he really is.

  I know this man. I remember him. Meg’s real father.