The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  I assumed that Pete had gotten this from his radio. Whether or not it was true hardly seemed to matter. I’d pretty much given up on the news myself.

  Mom was trying. Or at least she was trying to try. She made a point of getting up in the morning to make us breakfast, but after that her momentum always stalled, and by two in the afternoon she’d have a headache and be curled up in bed with the lights off (whether we had electricity or not).

  “I’m gonna go lie down for a while now,” she’d always tell us. “Please don’t leave the house.” Her skin was pale and she seemed to be getting shakier by the day. Was she sick but not letting on? I looked for the lemon ginger tea that she liked to drink with honey whenever she was feeling under the weather, but I couldn’t find any. Maybe we were out. It had been a while since the last time we stopped by Mom’s favorite tea shop.

  Pete took it upon himself to decide what we should eat for lunches and suppers, as if someone had appointed him Chief of Rationing or something. He got mad at me once when I tried to eat some canned peaches.

  “We have to save all the canned food for later,” he told me. “Have some crackers instead. There’s some Ritz on the lazy Susan.”

  “I don’t want crackers,” I argued. “And besides, I know you had some pineapple the other night. I found the can in the garbage.” I could’ve also mentioned that I was the only one who was actually bothering to even take the garbage out—not that anyone had come to pick any of it up.

  “I skipped supper that night,” Pete said defensively. “Plus, I’m the only one here who even likes pineapple!”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Whatever,” Pete went on. “I just think we need to be smarter about what we eat now and what we save for later.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I won’t eat any canned peaches.”

  “And I won’t eat any more pineapple,” he agreed.

  Dad could shatter at any moment and there we were arguing about canned fruit. It was ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous. We were eleven and twelve years old; we shouldn’t have had to worry about any of the stuff that was happening. We should have been out on our bikes or setting off firecrackers; we should have been gluing together model airplanes or doing cannonballs at the pool. At the very least, I should have been outside birding with Mom. The glass plague had ruined everything, which I guess was why I felt a faint glimmer of hope when Pete finally mentioned a plan.

  “What plan?” I asked him. He had come down into the basement to find me. I was sitting in the room that Uncle Dean had been sleeping in, and was in the process of adding another species to my drawing pad, a brown creeper this time. The room had no windows, so if I turned off the switch and just drew by candlelight, I would never have to know if the sky turned ugly and the power went off.

  “A plan to end the glass plague,” said Pete. “For good.” His face looked orange in the candlelight. His eyes were dark shadows.

  I wanted to believe him, but the fact that he didn’t seem hopeful or excited at all made me suspicious.

  “How?”

  He didn’t lay it out right away. “It’s just an idea right now, and it’s sorta controversial.”

  I narrowed my eyes, not understanding how an end to one of the worst things in human history could possibly be controversial.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Just tell me!”

  He looked at me for a long moment, the small candle flames now bouncing in time with my heart, as if my anticipation had somehow manifested itself in fire. “All right,” he finally said. “I’ll tell you.” And then he did.

  I didn’t get mad or freak out, although I definitely should have. I guess the shock of it was just too much for me. I kept thinking that Pete must have gotten it wrong, that he must have misunderstood or misinterpreted whatever he’d heard. That, or it was a joke.

  “Shatter them ourselves?” I finally said. “On purpose? That’s the plan?”

  “The voice says that desperate times call for desperate measures,” Pete replied.

  I stared at him, wondering when “the guy on the radio” had become “the Voice,” as if his was the only one that mattered. And Pete hadn’t criticized the plan at all. Was it possible that he actually agreed with it? I couldn’t bring myself to ask him straight-out, so instead I simply whispered, “We can’t, Pete. He’s our dad.”

  “He was our dad,” he replied, his expression as hard as forged iron. “He’s something else now.…”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Pete explained it to me like the radio had explained it to him: There was a war being waged between darkness and light, between good and evil. It was probably the Big War, the Final War, and it wasn’t going the way that it was supposed to. Normally the devil relied on the souls of the damned to give life to his demon soldiers, but not anymore. Through glassification, the souls of the living and unjudged could now be conscripted as well, or maybe harvested was a better word. Clearly that’s what it was—not a plague, as everyone had been saying, but a harvest.

  The glass storms that swept through our skies were like short-lived conduits for the devil’s dark will, briefly potent but unsustainable, at least for now. The process of glassification itself was a bit of a mystery, but it was believed that it was achieved through the use of dark matter, and that its purpose was to create a state of being in which the body was neither alive nor dead, but in a sort of stasis that the soul couldn’t fully cling to, leaving it vulnerable.

  Those who were taken were slaves now. As for the ones who’d returned, it was said that the process wasn’t perfect, and that the dark matter used to make proxies wasn’t always stable. When it failed, the soul was split, with half of it remaining on the other side and half returning to this one, like what had happened with old man Crandall, who could never be made whole again. And those who had shattered could never be brought back to life. If you died on that side, you died on this one, and vice versa.

  All this, Pete informed me, was the “Unified Theory of Glassification,” which I thought was basically just a fancy way of saying “Our Best Guess.” The people doing the guessing were scientists and academics and scholars, and whoever the voice on the radio belonged to (nobody seemed to know).

  “If we shatter them all at once,” Pete finally concluded, “then the devil will lose all those soldiers at the same time. Think of how vulnerable he’d be. God could win.”

  “But it would be murder,” I said at length, still shocked at the sheer audacity of it.

  Pete shook his head. “It’s not that simple, Ben.”

  “Of course it is!”

  Pete sighed. “We at least have to think about it.”

  I couldn’t believe he was serious. I struggled to find any words.

  “Nothing’s for sure yet,” Pete continued. “Right now it’s just an idea.”

  “It’s a stupid idea,” I said. “If the devil can take our souls, then God can, too. I bet he’ll start to, just to make things even.”

  Pete was shaking his head before I even finished, as if this scenario had already been measured and weighed and discarded.

  “He can’t,” he told me. “He’d be taking our free will if he did. And somehow I doubt that he’s going to show up to ask for volunteers. It’s up to us, Ben. We have to stop it on our own.”

  “Not like this,” I said.

  “It might be the only way.”

  I stared at the candle flame for a moment, digging my fingernails into my palms.

  “No,” I finally said. “I won’t do it, and I won’t let you do it either. I’ll tell Mom. She’ll probably ground you to your room just for talking about it.”

  “She already knows,” Pete informed me. “I told her this morning.”

  I remembered then that Pete had gone in to check on her after lunch. He’d been in there for a while, too.

  “What’d she say?” I asked him. “That you were crazy?”

  “She didn’t sa
y anything, just laid there staring off into nowhere. Something’s wrong with her, Ben. Really wrong. She’s worse than I’ve ever seen her.”

  “And how do you think she’ll be if you shatter Dad? You’d pretty much be killing her, too.”

  “Nothing’s for sure yet,” he said again. “It’s not like there’s been a date set for the shattering.”

  The Shattering. It was like the name of a horror movie. I almost said it out loud just to hear how it sounded, only I couldn’t quite force the words past my lips. To name a thing, some inner voice told me, was to give it power, and the last thing I wanted to do was give power to madness. Surely that’s what this was. It had to be.

  THIRTY-THREE

  There was whiskey in the cupboard above the fridge. That’s where Dad kept it, I knew. I also knew that sometimes, after a particularly stressful day, he would take the bottle out and pour a little in a glass, over ice. It seemed to help, and I’d always wondered why. I had also always wondered what it tasted like, and why some people liked to get drunk and other people didn’t, why it made some of them laugh and talk loudly (like Uncle Dean), while others just got mean and angry (like James Messam). It seemed strange that the exact same substance could have such different effects on different people.

  Most people don’t know it, but there are birds that get drunk, too. They don’t really do it on purpose, but it isn’t exactly by accident either.

  The birds I mean are called Bohemian waxwings. They’re about the same size as starlings and have orange-and-black heads and beautiful yellow-and-red-tipped wings. They live up north in the boreal forest—away from us humans and all our crazy problems—but in the cold months, when the forest insects they usually feed on are gone, they move south in massive flocks in search of berries, which they gorge themselves on until spring.

  Waxwings are tough birds. They don’t fly as far south as most birds do, so they have to put up with snow and frigid temperatures. The berries they eat are often frozen solid, and they have to eat a lot of them to fuel their energy needs. I read once that a single waxwing can sometimes eat its own weight in berries in a single day. A hungry flock of them can strip a whole tree in a day or two.

  They do this all winter long, moving from one area to another, sometimes in small flocks of just a few dozen, but often in flocks of thousands, and they don’t all eat together at the same time; for every bird that’s gulping down berries, there’s another perched high in the tree on the lookout for predators like merlins or sharp-shinned hawks. The birds take turns, constantly switching places with one another. Sometimes they even feed each other, offering their freshly plucked berries to their nearest neighbor. Waxwings are always looking out for each other. It’s one of the reasons they’re my favorite birds.

  Waxwings usually don’t head north again until April, which means that they’re still around when the snow starts melting and the temperature rises. That’s when the berries thaw and the sugar inside them causes them to ferment right there on the trees, basically turning them into alcoholic berries. The waxwings continue to eat them, and if they end up eating too many, they’ll actually get sloshed.

  You can sometimes tell that the birds are drunk by the way they’re flying. They’ll almost run into you if you’re standing right in their flight path. There was one time that I had several hundred of them flying past me and around me from one tree to another, coming so close that I had to tuck my arms in tight to my sides in order not to be grazed by their beautiful wings as they passed me.

  You’d think it would be comical, seeing so many drunk birds like that, and in a way I guess it was, but all I can remember thinking at the time was how amazing it was, being surrounded by all that chaotic motion, that swirling vortex of color and sound. It made me feel like I was a part of something special, something wild and wonderfully free. I closed my eyes and experienced a lightness, as if I were floating above the snow instead of standing in it, as if the whirlwind of wings had lifted me right off my feet and swept me up into the heart of the flock. Where I belonged, I remembered thinking, strangely.

  I certainly never felt like I belonged at school, where hardly anyone ever looked out for anyone else, where a bully could be barreling right toward you across the playground and no one would offer so much as a peep of warning. Instead they would simply stand there, breathing a sigh of relief that the bully’s attention wasn’t on them. I guess that’s just how humans are. Maybe not all of us, and not all the time, but most of us, and often.

  I saw the waxwings many times that winter and early spring, from the growing warmth of early April all the way back to the frigid mornings at the start of January, some of them so brutally windy and bitterly cold that I was certain no bird in existence could possibly survive outside.

  We always think of birds as being such small and breakable things, all soft feathers and no weight at all, wings of little more substance than toothpicks and parchment paper, and yet when we humans are balled up under blankets in front of the fireplace, they’re out there in the harsh world enduring it all, and not only that, but they’re singing.

  Maybe we’re the breakable things, fragile in heart and mind, souls as wispy and weak as a single tissue. Maybe someday when we’re all gone and the birds are still around, they’ll think to sing a song in our memory, just a few flat notes to mark our passing. Maybe that’s all we’re worth.

  I carried a chair from the dining room into the kitchen. It was the only way that I could reach to get Dad’s whiskey.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I awoke with the left side of my face feeling wet against a cushion. When I sat up, I realized why; I’d puked there, and then passed out in it. It wasn’t a lot of puke, but still. I could smell it, and it stank like the whiskey. I shuddered, and then stood up, feeling a little wobbly.

  I went to the kitchen and cleaned myself off, passing Dad on my way, and feeling guilty for what I’d done. I imagined him shaking his head at me, his eyes full of disappointment.

  The house was quiet. Mom had apparently not come down to make us breakfast today. I quickly looked in on her before brushing my teeth to get rid of the pasty alcohol taste. She was sleeping.

  I went back downstairs. The air in the house seemed thick and stale, and felt heavy inside my lungs. I opened a window, but it wasn’t enough.

  I need to get outside, I thought. I need fresh air. But first I needed some water. I drank down two full glasses, filling myself with liquid since I couldn’t stomach the thought of food.

  I got my shoes on and went out onto the front step, thinking that I would just sit there for a while, hungover like some old hobo. Only I didn’t. The compulsion to get outside quickly turned into a compulsion to leave, to get away from my house and my family and everything else, if only just for a while.

  I started walking, but not with any particular destination in mind. It was partly cloudy, the wind blowing just hard enough to rustle leaves. I turned left at the end of the street, and then right at the end of that one, and soon I was on my way somewhere, my feet having apparently decided this for me.

  Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons after church, Mom would let me come with her to a tiny tea shop on the corner of First Street. We would walk there, taking our time and pointing out birds along the way, occasionally stopping for a moment or two just to listen, which probably looked strange to those passing by, a mother and son standing totally motionless on the edge of the sidewalk, heads cocked off to the side. All we needed was a matching pair of tinfoil hats.

  The tea shop was called Holga’s Herbal Happiness, and Mom loved going there. She said it was like taking an olfactory vacation. From mint leaves and orange blossoms to ginger root and lemon, the shop housed the smells of more teas than I would have believed even existed. Admittedly, though, my own reasons for tagging along had less to do with my nose than they did with my fondness for black licorice.

  Holga kept a jar of licorice under her counter, but not the twisty packaged kind like at the corner store. This was a
uthentic licorice, the pieces small and round and much too salty to even qualify as candy. Eating it made you wince. It cleared your sinuses and made your eyes water, but for some reason I craved it. Holga told me one time that she and I were the only two people in town who were brave enough to eat the stuff.

  Mom tried it once and almost gagged, and afterward demanded a free cuppa (as Holga called it) to wash the foul taste out of her mouth. Holga already had a kettle on, so in short order they were both sipping honey-sweetened chamomile and gossiping.

  I tried not to listen in, focusing instead on the taste of my licorice and whatever was happening outside the window at the front of the shop, where a hummingbird feeder hung from a tree. I had never actually seen a hummingbird drink from it, but maybe someday I would.

  I wondered sometimes, while Mom and Holga went on about books or gardening, what Pete and Dad were talking about. I’d always assumed that while I was spending time with Mom, Pete and Dad must have been hanging out together, too, probably discussing muscle cars and football with Uncle Dean. I imagined them at the garage, laughing at dirty jokes and drinking 7UPs from the vending machine.

  I assumed all this, but when I finally got around to actually asking, Pete just gave me a funny look.

  “What do you mean?” he asked me.

  “On Sunday, when I’m at the tea shop with Mom,” I repeated. “Where do you and Dad go? What do you guys talk about?”

  “We don’t go anywhere,” Pete replied. “We don’t talk about anything. We just come home.” There was bitterness in his voice. He tried to hide it but failed. I could hear the hurt, too.

  “Oh.” I should have left it at that, but I didn’t. “You guys must at least watch sports together.”