The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  “You and Pete should get outside today,” he said. “Still plenty of daylight left. Go to the pond or something. Skip some stones. Be boys.”

  “I don’t know.…” said Mom.

  “Would you rather them be girls?” Dad asked her, a sly smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.

  “Very funny,” said Mom, who clearly wasn’t ready for jokes yet. Not after what had just happened.

  “But seriously, Jane,” Dad continued. “We can’t all stay cooped up in this house forever. We’ll go stir-crazy. Where is Pete, anyway?” he asked.

  “Up in our room,” I said, “with his radio.”

  “Figures,” said Dad, marching off toward the stairs.

  I could hear Pete complaining a moment later, saying, “But I don’t want to!”

  “I don’t care,” Dad told him. “It’ll do you boys good to breathe some fresh air.”

  “I’ll open a window,” said Pete.

  “You’ll do as I say,” Dad continued, “or I’ll take that thing away from you.”

  There was silence for a second, then Pete came clomping down the stairs and said to me, “C’mon,” as if I were a dog that he felt put out for having to walk. I knew he wasn’t really mad at me, though.

  A few minutes later we were on our way to the pond at the south edge of town, the one directly beside the graveyard. Tadpole Pond, we called it, because we used to catch tadpoles there when we were younger. We were going to ride our bikes, but Pete couldn’t find his lock key. Pete was always losing things.

  “He better not take it away,” said Pete, obviously still thinking about his radio, and about Dad as well.

  “What’s with you and that radio, anyway?” I asked.

  “I just like to stay on top of what’s happening,” he replied, a little defensively.

  “So, what is happening?” I asked him. I only knew what I saw on TV, which always seemed to be a little behind what Pete heard on the radio.

  “They’re doing more regressions,” said Pete. “Different hypnotists, like a dozen of them. Remember how Dr. Whitcombe said that a lot of what he heard was just gibberish?”

  I nodded.

  “They don’t think so anymore,” said Pete. “They think it’s a different language. They said it might be Enochian.”

  “What’s Enochian?”

  “An ancient language used by angels and demons.”

  I just looked at him. “For real?”

  Pete shrugged. “They’re not sure yet. They’re trying to translate.”

  “What else have they said?”

  “Not a lot. But they’re all scared of the light like old man Crandall, and one of them said something about fields full of bodies, but not human bodies. He said that crows were feasting like kings.”

  I felt a shiver at the imagery, but then a question sprang to mind. “Why would crows be there?”

  Pete shrugged again. “Beats me.”

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “Not quite. The guy on the radio says that if you shatter on this side, it might be because you’ve died on that side. He also says that it might work the other way around. If you shatter on this side, you die over there.”

  I thought about that for a minute as we approached the pond, but before I could really consider how important it might be, my eyes were drawn to the tall grasses at the edge of the water, where I thought I saw something moving—a heron, perhaps, or maybe a bittern. I stopped walking and grabbed Pete’s shirt to hold him back.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Not sure yet,” I whispered. I should have brought Mom’s binoculars. I squinted against the sun, my pulse quickening at the prospect of seeing a bird I’d never come across before. A few seconds passed, and then a few seconds more, and just as I was beginning to think that my eyes must’ve been playing tricks on me, there it was, a yellowish bill materializing from the reeds, followed by a long gray-and-blue neck.

  “There,” I whispered, pointing. The bird was almost as tall as I was.

  “What the heck is that?” asked Pete, obviously surprised at the size of what he was seeing. He was used to me pointing out birds barely bigger than his hand.

  “Great blue heron,” I whispered. We could see its whole body now, but miraculously it hadn’t noticed us yet. Its bill was pointed downward, its large reptilian eyes focused on the shallow water in which it stood. It moved methodically, clearly looking for prey. The instant it spotted something, it struck, its bill piercing down with incredible speed. It didn’t come up with a fish, though, but rather a garter snake—about three feet long by the looks of it. The snake wriggled in a bid to escape, but to no avail. The bird turned its long bill skyward and, with three deft flips, had the entirety of the snake within its throat. It swallowed the serpent down with surprising ease.

  I’d seen some pretty neat things while watching birds in the past, but never anything like this. I was so enthralled that I failed to notice for a second that Pete was moving.

  “No, wait!” I whispered at him, but it was too late. At the sound of scuffed gravel beneath Pete’s shoe, the bird turned sharply in our direction, giving us both a brief and intense stare before flying off on huge silent wings.

  “Did you see that?!” Pete exclaimed. “It ate a whole blasted snake! What kind of a bird eats a snake?”

  Maybe I should have been heartened by his newfound interest in nature, but instead I was angry. If he had just stayed still, we could have kept watching the bird. I felt like he’d robbed me of a rare opportunity, and the fact that he was completely oblivious to this only made me even madder.

  “You can’t just walk up to them!” I told him. “That’s not how it works! You have to be patient. You have to move slow.”

  Patience had never been Pete’s strong suit.

  “It’s not like we have all day,” he said. “And besides, we already saw it eat a snake. What are the odds it was gonna do something more interesting than that?”

  He had a point, but still, I was annoyed.

  “That was crazy,” he went on, moving forward. “I didn’t even know there were garter snakes around here.”

  I’d known that there were, of course, but I hadn’t actually seen one before.

  Keeping to our usual ritual at the pond, we both collected a handful of rocks from the roadside before going down to the most accessible edge of the water.

  “Maybe you’ll skip one all the way across today,” Pete said encouragingly, but I had other plans.

  Pete had spent hours teaching me how to properly skip stones, and though I still wasn’t very good at it, I knew that each small success I had was a source of pride for him. I could tell that it made him feel like a proper big brother.

  Annoyed as I was, I decided to take that away from him today.

  He took two throws first, his stones skipping six and seven times respectively.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Now you go.”

  I took my position like a pitcher on a mound, feigning concentration. My form was almost but not quite right. My partial crouch was slightly off, and when I followed through on my toss, I angled my arm in such a way that the stone started out low as it was supposed to, but then gradually gained altitude instead of traveling level with the water. It landed with a dismal galupe and a modest splash.

  My second throw was no better.

  “Do it like I taught you!” Pete said, already irritated. “Keep your arm straight, like this.” His third stone went skipping across the water, right to the other side. I counted nine bounces.

  “I am doing it like you showed me,” I insisted.

  “No you’re not,” he argued. “You might as well just be lobbing them. Here, use this one.”

  He handed me a particularly good candidate, oblong and thin but still substantial enough to get a firm grip on. I thanked him and pretended to limber up a little, really laying it on thick now. It was all I could do to keep a straight face as this stone, too, disappeared without a single skip.
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br />   Pete huffed derisively. “Here, I’ll do an impression of you.” He picked up the biggest, roundest rock in the vicinity and heaved it out over the water from between his legs, like a rookie with a bowling ball. It sailed high into the air before falling to the surface just a few feet away from me, the heavy sploosh sending a spray of droplets in my direction. He laughed.

  I wiped off my face and looked at him. “Now you’re just being stupid.”

  “Stupid is not being able to skip a rock,” he shot back.

  “You don’t have to get mad,” I told him. “I am trying.”

  “Barely.” He shook his head and proceeded to skip six rocks in quick succession, as if trying to demonstrate how little effort it actually took. Meanwhile, I managed to find myself a mini boulder, fully twice the size of the one Pete had thrown from between his legs. Pete didn’t even see it until it was right in front of him, plummeting to the earth like a burned-up meteorite.

  The splash it made was bigger than I would have thought possible.

  “What the heck did you do that for?!” he yelled at me, dirty water dripping from his chin.

  “You did it first” was my only reply.

  “I barely even got you wet!” he said. “Look at me! My clothes are soaked!”

  They were. I’d really gotten him good. I couldn’t hold it in anymore; I had to smile. And then suddenly I was laughing, too, the sound escaping from my mouth like a wild animal freed from a cage. I hadn’t laughed in days, and I immediately felt its healing power course through me, soaking my anger up like a sponge.

  Pete’s face contorted in a way that I had only ever seen in Incredible Hulk comics, but this only got me laughing harder. Glee was a possessive force and had taken me over. I was helpless against it.

  Luckily, Pete succumbed, too. Like invisible lightning, the need for laughter seemed to arc from me to him, and all at once his features softened, his rage subsiding as quickly as it had appeared. A moment later we were both doubled over, and a moment after that was when the mud-flinging started. Pete got me first, a soggy handful that filled my ear. I quickly got my revenge with a pinpoint blob that plugged up both of his nostrils. Then things got a little out of control.

  It never occurred to us that when we got home, Mom would make us wash our clothes ourselves, and not with the regular washing machine either, but rather with the basin and washboard that Dad had gotten his hands on for when the power was out. But even if that had occurred to me, I wouldn’t have cared. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so hard that the muscles in my jaw got sore.

  We walked home like a pair of swamp creatures fresh from the ooze.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Sunday marked our seventh day in a row without any darkness, which meant that Griever’s Mill was probably one of the luckiest places on earth.

  Pete and I laced up our good leather shoes after having spent twenty minutes polishing them to perfection, Pete complaining almost the entire time.

  “If we’re going to walk there, then why bother polishing our shoes?” he’d said. “They’re just going to end up getting scuffed on the way.”

  “Don’t drag your feet and they’ll be fine,” Dad told him. “And no fidgeting today,” he added. Pete had a habit of rolling up hymn books and using them as hollow drumsticks against his knees and the edge of the pew, and sometimes the back of Kyle Brewer’s head if Kyle happened to be at church that day. (Dad said that Kyle’s parents were on-again, off-again Christians.) Pete also liked to tap his feet and crack his knuckles. I don’t think he could even help it; his basic wiring just didn’t allow for him to keep still. Unless of course he had a radio pressed to his ear.

  “I’m not the only one who fidgets,” Pete grumbled. Pete hated being singled out, never mind that there was usually a very good reason for it.

  “Just promise me,” said Dad.

  “Fine,” said Pete. “I’ll just sit there, then.” As if sitting were a form of punishment.

  “Hallelujah,” said Dad. “Everybody ready?”

  I did up the last button on my shirt cuff and nodded. I had mixed feelings about church today. It was going to be hard, hearing about Uncle Dean and all the other victims who Pastor Nolan planned to eulogize. I expected there to be a lot of crying. However, I also expected the pastor to say a few things about the glass plague, and what it might mean from his perspective. I figured that if scientists couldn’t make heads nor tails of what was happening, then maybe a pastor could—not that I’d ever been much of a spiritual person myself. My faith seemed to depend entirely on how I was feeling and what was going on at any particular moment. Perhaps that made me an on-again, off-again Christian, too.

  For Uncle Dean’s sake, I hoped it all wasn’t just a load of crazy superstition. The idea that consciousness could end so suddenly and permanently didn’t seem fair to me.

  “I don’t understand why we can’t just drive,” Pete persisted. “It’ll hardly take any gas at all.”

  “It’s a beautiful day outside,” Mom said to him. “It’ll be nice to take a walk as a family. Besides, I’m the one wearing heels. If anyone should be complaining, it should be me.”

  Pete didn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and so off we went.

  In truth, it was only about a fifteen-minute walk, which was pretty much the same amount of time that it took for Pete and me to get to school (when we didn’t ride our bikes). And Mom was right—as long as you weren’t thinking about where you were going or why you were going there, it really was a beautiful day. The sun was shining and there was hardly any wind at all. Lots of birdsong as well. Mom and I took turns identifying them by sound as we went.

  “American goldfinch,” she began.

  “Gray catbird,” I added a moment later. Catbirds were amazing singers, but at this time of the year they were usually just making their mewling cat sounds.

  “Cedar waxwing,” Mom went on. There were actually about twenty of them, scattered across the tops of two different trees. I watched them for a moment as we walked, saw them catching small insects in midair.

  I listened hard, ignoring a few of the more common birds in the hopes of picking out something a little more difficult.

  “Tennessee warbler,” I finally came up with.

  Mom smiled. “Good one!” she said. It was nice to see her so lively and bright-eyed.

  Pete cocked an ear then, too, mocking me in a way that was simultaneously playful and serious, so that I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely trying to hurt my feelings or not. “Ruby-breasted spinker,” he declared, which of course wasn’t a real bird.

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Mom decided to play along.

  “Oh, yeah? And what sound does a ruby-breasted spinker make?” she asked him.

  Pete rocked his shoulders and searched the sky for a second before coming up with the obvious, “Spink-spink.”

  “Sounds kind of like a least flycatcher,” I informed him.

  Mom and Dad both laughed, but Pete just called me a geek. I didn’t care. I was used to it.

  We arrived at the church a few minutes later to find that the parking lot was almost half-full, this despite the fact that so many people had left Griever’s Mill altogether.

  Mom took a deep breath, steeling herself.

  On the church’s front lawn, facing the street, was one of those signs that you could slide letters into to spell out messages. I read what it said every time we came to church. Occasionally, they would put direct Bible quotes on it, but often the message was something simple, like WELCOME, ONE AND ALL! or DO UNTO OTHERS… but today it read, REMEMBER: IT’S ALWAYS DARKEST JUST BEFORE THE DAWN.

  Maybe this was supposed to make us all feel a little better, but instead it made me feel worse. After all, the darkness was still coming and going all over the world. Would it have to be complete before things got better?

  Several people stopped to offer condolences as we went inside. “Dean will be missed,” one of them said. “He was quite a
character,” another added. A third said, “Best mechanic I ever knew. The absolute best.”

  Dad just said thank you each time. Mom didn’t say anything. I could tell that she knew that she’d cry if she opened her mouth. She had that look on her face, her eyes downcast, lips a little pursed to keep them from trembling.

  We quickly learned that Charlie Watts had shattered, too, just the night before. Pete shook his head in disbelief as we shuffled to our usual spot in the seventh row and sat down. Mrs. Crandall was in her usual spot as well, but of course George wasn’t. Mom patted the old woman’s knee to let her know that she cared.

  “How is George?” she asked her.

  “The same,” Mrs. Crandall said sadly. “I figured it couldn’t hurt to come pray.”

  Pastor Nolan started by thanking us all for coming, and for finding the strength to be there for one another during these hard times. He went on to say that from misfortune can come fortitude, and that the human spirit is possessed of an uncanny propensity to overcome. His voice carried effortlessly throughout the large space even though he didn’t seem to be speaking that loudly. I’d mentioned this before and, according to Dad, it was down to good acoustics.

  “I know that many of you are here because you’ve lost loved ones,” the pastor said, “and I know that many of you are seeking answers as to why, but I think it’s important for us not to become too consumed by the need for understanding, for while it may seem to us sometimes that the Lord might revel in the inexplicable, we have to remind ourselves that His plan is larger than any of us, and by its very nature, wholly inexplicable.”

  He paused, allowing everyone a moment to digest his words, or at least a moment to try to digest his words. It wasn’t always easy with Pastor Nolan.

  “But let us also remember,” he went on, “that our faith requires no recognition on the part of the Lord. Faith is a leap we all make in the darkness, a trust that endures in the seeming absence of His light. But make no mistake, His light is here, all around us, bleeding out in every kindness, in every smile and small act of love. And so love we must, with every fiber of our being, with every atom and every cell. Only then will His will be done. Now let us stand and sing.…”