The men motion to its corpse. “Do you want us to dispose of it?”
“No,” you say, “it’s my responsibility.”
After their hushed sirens depart the driveway, you look to Matilda, and she looks to you, and together you whistle a melody at once familiar and arcane, mournful notes that have lived inside you both and waited for the right moment to escape.
Upon hearing the song, the creature thrashes its black and red wings before lurching to its feet.
You smile and beckon it to your side. It listens to your commands.
It listens though you never speak.
***
A week after your husband left, two men in dark suits appeared at the cottage door, clinging to leather briefcases stuffed with bureaucracy.
“Ma’am, we’re here on behalf of the state.”
You told them to leave. They didn’t listen.
“Your condition is a potential public health hazard.”
“What? Like I’m contagious?” You scowled and fidgeted in the doorway.
They examined you through wire-framed glasses and eyes rimmed with red. “We have to look into that possibility,” they said. “It will just be a few tests.”
You didn’t argue. Arguing with men in suits never worked out well for girls like you. They’d pin you down with paper-weights and wait for you to surrender. It was easier to acquiesce.
So they took you to a hospital and stuck you with needles until your stomach bubbled like caramel on a burner and the next child arrived. It was the only birth not at home and the only one you regretted. The men caught the creature with a dark net and without so much as a nod toward you, they exited the delivery room. As the door swung behind them, a wing flapped helplessly inside the nylon cage, and you caught a glimpse of a feather—a perfect gloss of black silk.
One month later, in a neat brown package, the men sent you the ashes along with a one-page printout of the results.
Normal crow specimen. No abnormalities detected.
You cried unabated for weeks. All the births had stolen something from you—your friends, your husband, your peace—but every time before, you comforted yourself that the tiny speck had soared to the sky, toward places you’d never see. The sentimental keepsake was yours, but the government men stole that away too. Now even your grotesque parts belonged to someone else.
On your nightstand in the box they sent you, the gray dust shuddered beneath the glow of a paper lantern. It was all you had left, and though the men gave it to the incinerator after they’d poked and prodded and gutted it, they couldn’t annihilate it. Not completely. One dark fleck of feather remained in the corner, a holdout the flames could not touch.
As a kiss goodbye, you pressed the quill to your lips, but the nothing fragment vanished into the air as though it was never there at all.
But it was there. You remembered how that lonely black wing flailed against the net. And because it was part of you, you were there too, hidden away in ash. You were there, and never again would you let them take what was yours.
***
The twelfth bird watches you and waits for your command.
Matilda waits too. You open her cage, and she hops on your shoulder.
“It’s time,” you say to her, and she leans closer and hums you an elegy you’ve never heard before.
Smiling, you open the door, and the twelfth bird takes flight.
***
After the government men sent you the package, you lingered alone in the cottage for months until at last, the tears turned to stone in your eyes. With a careful hand, you poured the ash of your lost child into a silver locket inscribed with the words TRUE LOVE.
That necklace dangled over your heart the day you started a class on bird watching at the local community college. If you were destined to birth different species, you should at least be able to identify them. Beneath flickering fluorescent lights, the other students in the class stared and whispered to each other. They knew who you were—a walking freak show in a faded linen dress. But it didn’t bother you.
At a desk with a popup top, you took notes and whistled a songbird tune. Sometimes, the bird in your belly joined in, and she had a beautiful voice, and the duets terrified the others more than anything you could croon on your own, as though the townspeople genuinely believed wings might sprout through your flesh and your mouth might transform to a razor beak that could tear them into bits. This made you smile. As she stirred in your stomach, you learned to love this bird, the fourth one, even though her feathers had a penchant for catching in the back of your throat.
She was born while you dozed one afternoon, the pang of her birth melted into your dreams of falling, always falling. When you woke, you found her in the kitchen, perched on an empty wooden canister labeled plain sugar. Thanks to what the class instructor taught you about clipping wings, you tethered her to you and named her Matilda for no reason except that it suited her. She looked like a Matilda. Her birth was so easy you cobbled yourself together again with a sewing needle and a spool of cotton thread.
But you weren’t so lucky after that. The next seven births fragmented your body, blood and muscle and intestines like pink tinsel painting the cottage floors. You loathed the paramedics and their glares and their disgust at the tricks you, a strange circus animal, performed, but you needed them if you wanted any chance of surviving.
It became a maddening routine. As you sprawled in a fountain of your own fluids, the paramedics found a broom or a flyswatter and beat your children from the walls. It always injured you anew to see the birds broken before you, even though once the men were gone, you and Matilda would coax the creatures back to you with little songs that revived their trodden bodies. Over and over, you opened the door and tried to follow them, but they always escaped you, delving deeper into the forest where the darkness and the unknown lingered.
But as with all patterns, it couldn’t last forever. Like a change in the weather, you and Matilda could feel it in your hollow bones. The bird you’d always wanted was coming. The one that could set you free.
***
Through the dead forest, you follow the speck in the sky. It isn’t like the others. It stays within your sight, perching on a barren tree branch whenever you fall behind. You wander for hours, no breadcrumbs behind you, nothing to lead you back to the cottage and the town. But you already know you can’t return. That was never your home. You must find your home on your own or walk aimlessly until your legs give out beneath you and your body turns to dust.
The sun dips down to the tops of the tree trunks, and with your mended stomach in spasms, you suddenly fear you’ll lose sight of the twelfth bird in the gloom. But nestled on your shoulder, Matilda murmurs in your ear and tells you to keep going. Because you trust her, you listen to what she says.
Just before night sets in, you reach a clearing. There, they wait for you, their beaks pecking at the ground, exhuming grubs. Doves and crows, cardinals and bluebirds, dozens of them, far more than you’ve given to the world, more birds than you could have birthed in an entire lifetime. Still, they know you. They’re all parts of you, the splintered mosaic of your heart that nobody, not your friends or your husband, ever wanted to see.
“I’ve missed you,” you say, and they chirp and chatter in reply.
When the birds have their fill of worms and dirt, they float into the air. They’re ghosts like you, creatures of this world and not of this world at the same time. And they’re beautiful.
Swaying against you, Matilda nuzzles your cheek as if to say goodbye. Her feathers no longer clipped, she takes flight and joins the others. They circle above you, strung together like pearls on French wire, and you wish you possessed wings so you might yoke yourself to them.
You purse your lips and whistle, a call only they can decipher. They hear your wish, and one after another, return to earth to claim you. But they don’t take to the soil. Instead, they open your mouth and force their way down your throat and into your belly, back t
o the place from which they came. Gagging, you swallow the feathers and the beaks and the talons that rake the insides of your cheeks into ribbons. You taste blood, your blood and theirs, and you taste something else too. Each bird has a different flavor, all of them sweet perfection that melts in your mouth like spun sugar. Rock candy for the doves. Cinnamon discs for the cardinals. Gumdrops for Matilda.
When the sky is empty and the sweetness ebbs away, there’s one thing left for you to do, and you know what it is. You open the locket that hangs from your neck and gulp down the dust. Not a trace of honey there. It smacks of antiseptics and chloroform, an acrid tang that blisters your tongue. The agony the third one felt under needles and microscopes becomes your agony now, and you’re grateful to share the burden.
United at last, your children stir in your belly. It’s their home, and in a way, it’s your home too. The desiccated branches shift and contort overhead, and all around you, the forest is convulsing to life.
Through scarred skin, you hear Matilda sing a melody as the birds flap their wings in unison. Any pain they once inflicted inside you is gone, replaced with pure bliss, something far beyond what your husband or the government men or the townspeople could ever understand. This sense of calm like childhood dreams come to fruition is yours and yours alone. You tip your head back to the sky, and the birds carry you there. Together, you soar above the cottage, above the town, above the people who look up and no longer whisper but scream until their throats are raw.
For the first time, you are whole, and the world whirs to life in celebration.
Below you, the trees are all in bloom.
TEN THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE TEN QUESTIONS
Respond to the following statements, using a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “Not at All True” and 5 being “Always or Almost Always True”).
1. Something tells me there’s another place I belong, a place that’s been waiting for me.
***
They say goodbye. They say it with a strange smile like a kid who overheard a secret. But they don’t share what they know. They just walk out the door.
Maybe it’s a cabin door. Or an office door. Or a plain screen door in suburbia.
They walk out and they don’t come back.
***
My Uncle Ray’s the first in my family to vanish. It happens in the early weeks when the chattering faces on television and the mindless voices online still claim it’s some newfangled fad that will taper off like acid-washed jeans or hula hoops did.
I half-bury my face beneath my comforter. “Where did he go?”
“Probably out on a drunk,” my dad says and tucks me in as if that’s an answer.
But I can’t sleep. My parents watch from the doorway as I wrap one corner of my comforter to a bedpost and tie the other end around my waist.
“Nobody can steal me now,” I say, my body tottering against the bed frame as though I had spun in one too many circles.
They ignore me when I plead with them to fasten their bed sheets around their waists the same way.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Vivienne,” they say. “It’ll be over soon.”
***
2. No one feels or thinks the way I do.
***
By the end of the month, over a thousand are missing, and the little white number in the corner of the news reports ticks higher every day.
There aren’t bodies. The people simply vanish like soap bubbles. “It’s been long enough,” my parents say to the other parents during bridge games and over church pews. “They need to do something about it.”
I ask who “they” are, but no one tells me. All the adults and even a few kids in my grade keep talking about “them” as though they have the answers.
But they don’t have answers. They have questions. Ten questions to predict who’ll disappear next.
The news outlets announce the questions with clever headlines like “Ten Things to Know About the Ten Questions” and “Are These Ten Questions the Answer to Our Fears?”.
Bright posters appear on every lamppost and grocery store bulletin board. I never see anyone hanging them up. Instead, the glossy images materialize out of the ether as though the world is swallowing people whole and spitting out posters to replace them.
The picture is always the same. A mother clutching her two children, all three solemn like prisoners whose punishment en-tails posing for a sappy PSA. Beneath them, there’s a catch-phrase emblazoned in red letters: Help us help ourselves. Ask your friends and family if they’ve taken the test.
I see the sign again and again, but the test isn’t what worries me. I’m irked neither of the kids are wearing tethers around their waists.
“Have you completed it yet?” the smiling Sunday school faces ask my mother, and she smiles back and says we have.
I wonder why she lies about it, but I don’t question her. She’ll only hush me if I do.
“My whole family’s safe.” Our next-door neighbor leans over the fence. “My wife and I had the lowest scores possible.”
I scowl, squirming at my parents’ feet. “A low score is good?”
“Sure is,” he says. “A ten is perfect.”
I want a ten, too. This test sounds easier than learning the periodic table, and I already aced that in the fifth grade.
So on Monday morning when a bubble sheet lands on my school desk, I answer thoughtfully, the tip of my pencil painting shadows over the tiny circles.
I finish first and deem that a good sign.
Before the lunch bell, I’m corralled into a far corner, my books and puffy coat and Hello Kitty backpack overflowing in my arms. Three others join me.
“Maybe we did really well,” I say.
We stand there for an hour, though no one tells us why.
“There’s a new classroom,” the teacher says to us after the others have departed for the cafeteria. “You’ll be happier there.”
Between her tight, lacquered smile and sweaty face, I know she’s lying. But I’m not brave enough to make the accusation. A girl named Tally does it for me.
“If you’re sure this new classroom is so great, why doesn’t everyone go?” Tally’s wide green eyes never blink as she waits for an answer.
“Because you’re special,” the teacher says, and then I’m sure we’re in trouble.
***
3. There might be problems in the world, but I want to be here and help fix things.
***
The school sends me home with a note. My mother reads it after dinner and passes it to my father. Neither of them look at me. They never look at me again, not closely. They don’t want to see what the test sees.
“Those normal people don’t know what they’re missing.” Tally skips to her desk at the front of the cramped classroom. She chooses the seat because the roof leaks on the nearby radiator. The incessant plink-plunk on metal crafts a strange tune, and Tally likes to sing along.
“Quiet,” says the teacher.
The rest of us obey. In our top floor room, we stare silently at our desks—old desks with scratched wooden tops that open upwards. Mine has an ancient message carved into it: Julie loves Johnny 4E.
There are thirty of us transplants, every grade represented in our ranks from sixth—my and Tally’s year—through twelfth. We have nothing in common beyond our test scores, but the scores are enough.
Every day, one or two students sob before lunch.
“Quiet,” says the teacher.
Usually, the younger kids cry the most, but the older ones break down sometimes. I do too. We all take our turn. All except Tally. She grins and listens to the rain streaming through the roof.
“Plunk-plunk-plunk-plink,” she harmonizes.
I peer at her from two rows away. She’s there and not there, an unsolvable riddle. Part of me is sure she must live in a castle surrounded by an alligator-laden moat or in a graveyard where she tutors a battalion of ghouls.
I decide to follow her. I’m disappointed to find h
er home’s nothing more than a two-story off-white house at the end of a lane.
She leaves the front door open.
“Do you know how to play jacks?” she asks from the top of the stairs.
I shake my head, and she offers to teach me.
“It’s worth knowing,” she says.
Tally arranges the game on the landing, and I sneak gazes at her whenever she’s not looking.
“Where are your parents?”
“Maybe at work,” she says. “Or maybe they’ve wandered off.”
“Wouldn’t you miss them?”
“They aren’t here even when they’re around.” She flips the red ball into the air, and the silver metal scatters. “How about your parents?”
“They’re around,” I say. “They just don’t talk much anymore.”
Tally giggles. “No one talks much anymore. Not to us.”
After I lose at jacks, she shows me her backyard. The barren fields and skyscraper hills go on forever.
We walk until dusk, her naming birds and flowers as we coil through overgrown paths. The words she says are all nonsense, but I memorize every syllable.
When I get home after dark, my parents demand to know where I’ve been. I tell them I stayed late at school to work on my test scores.
“As long as you’re learning something,” they say.
I smile and think how Tally’s the best teacher in the world.
***
4. No matter how hard I search, I’ll never find other people in this world like me.
***
The week the number hits a million worldwide, the government sets up a dedicated hotline.
“If you see anything unusual or suspect your family or friends are in trouble” and so on.
Like learning our own phone numbers in kindergarten, the teacher forces us to rehearse the toll-free digits.
Tally recites it wrong every time, her impromptu threes and fives throwing off the whole class.
“Quiet,” says the teacher, “or it’s detention.”
That’s a lie. The parents of the other kids in detention would complain if one of us were banished there.
And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe Page 2
