A Brief Note From Your Curators
Dearest readers,
Please note that, during the month of May, we Curators will be posting our stories about collections every Thursday, rather than every Wednesday.
On every Wednesday in May, the kind folks at our publisher, Greenwillow Books, will be hosting a contest in which they will post an exclusive story written by one of us, as well as give away an art print by our illustrious illustrator, Alexander Jansson.
We encourage you to enter these contests, and to follow us on Twitter, where we will be announcing each one as it happens.
Please make your way to the first contest, and follow the instructions to enter the giveaway.
Encouragingly,
Your Curators
May is for Collections
Although we Curators enjoy telling our stories, and naturally hope that you enjoy reading them, this Cabinet’s true raison d’être—if I may shock you with French—are our collections.
What haven’t we braved to feed the collector’s chief obsession? Which is, of course, completeness. Curator Trevayne once climbed an immense and ancient tree to find the nest of a winged ghoul, otherwise occupied, whose infant hatchlings greeted her with gaping mouths full of tiny, razor-sharp, bloodstained teeth. I cannot imagine how, one by one, she managed to pull those teeth—now prominently displayed in her Dentition of the Necrophagi exhibit—but I hope someday she will tell us. So far she insists she’s just trying to forget.
Curator Legrand once slept under a young child’s bed for 13 nights in a row in order, finally, to slaughter and stuff an enormous gila monster—which was just as well, as the monster had taken to sleeping under the covers at the end of the terrified child’s bed, occasionally licking her feet with disturbing interest.
Curator Bachmann once disguised himself as a snowdrift to record the domestic dispute of a pair of yeti.
I myself, for the sake of a collection, braved a 7th grade gym class. The horrors I witnessed would strain your sanity, but it was worth it to capture a splendid specimen of Adolescent Voodoo Experimentation, including a little blonde doll that may still be causing weight problems for a certain cheerleader.
But of course, these stories we tell you form a kind of collection themselves—a collection which, in fact, will be magnificently published in a few short weeks, on May 27. In honor of that massive and remarkably beautiful tome, we will devote the month of May to stories about collections, and collectors, and all the pleasant horrors they entail.
The Red Birds
Child’s Face in Red – Artist unknown
Once upon a time, in a country of mountains and forests and mirror-glass lakes, in the rookery of a great stone palace, the red birds hatched. The eggs were laid out in many little porcelain bowls, as if they were going to be eaten for breakfast, and the princess was there and the Queen Mother was there and the bird-keepers were there, and they all stood very still and listened as the tapping started, sharp and sudden, and the first cracks began to form on the shells, and then – pop! – a little head shot up, glistening-wet and red as a berry.
“Oh,” the princess whispered, when she saw it. “Grandmama, look. Look at its dear little red head.” And the Queen Mother said, “Do you like it? You may have one. Any one you like.” As for the red bird, it let out a hideous screech and began rolling about in the remains of its shell, polishing its red coat and fluffing its handsome crest.
The princess stared at it. Then she turned away and watched the other eggs intently as they shivered and wobbled in their bowls, and heads began popping up left and right, blooming like drops of blood out of the whiteness of the shells.
“Have you chosen one yet?” the Queen Mother asked after a while, because there were quite a lot of eggs, and quite a lot of red birds still to hatch, and the Queen Mother’s knees were not what they used to be. But the princess only shook her head and continued to stare at the eggs, the red bodies and the shattered shells. They stood for almost an hour, the two of them, while the bird-keepers tended to their wards, and outside the flags flew, all of them stamped with red birds, which were the mark and seal of that kingdom. A cold wind whispered across the fields and over the rooftops, and the Queen Mother began to suspect she would never move again, so stiff were her joints, when just then, from the very last egg, there came a soft, gentle knocking, and the shell fall apart, and there sat gray bird, smaller than all the others, soft and feathery as a puff of ash. The princess’s face lit up when she saw it, and she clutched at the Queen Mother’s hand. “There he is,” she said. “That’s the one I want. Oh, look at him, Grandmama, isn’t he marvelous? ”
The Queen Mother squinted at the gray bird from behind her spectacles. She watched it sitting there, so still and quiet in the remains of its shell. She eyed its soft gray wing. She shook her head. “You cannot have that one,” she said. “And not because he is plain and common. He is the most important bird of all of them, and not all his proud brothers and sisters in their red cloaks are as significant he, but I fear you will not like him. Choose a different one, and then let’s go and sit somewhere and I will read you a very long book.”
But the little princess was adamant, and she knew her grandmama very well, and so eventually the Queen Mother relented and said, “You may have him. But you must take very good care of him and not tire of him and leave him to the servants to spoil.”
The princess nodded happily and took the little gray bird in her hands and brought him away with her, out of the rookery, and into the palace. The little bird looked over his shoulder as he left, at his brothers and sisters in their beautiful red garments, and he wanted to call out to them as he was taken away, but that was when he realized he had no voice at all.
*
The little bird and the princess got along splendidly. The little bird did not know what his special task was that the Queen Mother had spoken of, or why he was more important than all his siblings. He did not know why he could not sing, or why he had come into the world gray while they had hatched the color of roses and blood and hot coals. All he knew was that the princess was his friend, and she loved him, and he loved her too. They ate together, studied together, ran screeching through the palace halls (or at least, the princess shrieked, and the little bird flew at her side as loudly as he could, which was barely as loud as a breath when all was said and done) and at night, when the Queen Mother came to read to them, they sat in front of the fire, the little bird folded into the hollow below the princess’s chin, and they both listened to the stories as if there were nothing else in the world.
But sometimes the bird would shift, or turn his head, and would catch the Queen Mother eying him, a little sharply and a little sadly, and somewhere deep in his tiny heart he knew it would not always be this way.
*
The little bird and the princess grew older, and still the little bird did not know a lot of things. He did not know that the kingdom the palace ruled was set next to another kingdom, a great and busy country, stacked high with guns and machinery. He did not know that the aeroplanes that swooped by on their canvas wings overhead and the airships and the red flags were all the trappings of a great kingdom, and that one day his dear princess would be queen.
He had not seen the red birds since the day of his hatching in the rookery, but he had heard they were all still there and where they were kept in golden cages and hardly ever let out. He, on the other hand, was allowed to fly freely throughout the entire palace, and he went with the princess wherever she went, and stayed in her pocket during lessons and during dinner.
“One day,” the princess said, when they were up among the towers, looking out across the land, “You will fly all across the entire world.” (And here she gestured toward the mirror-glass lakes, and the white-tipped mountains and the cotton clouds tinged pink) “You will fly across the waters, and across the forests, and you will have to be the bravest of any bird. Do you know what that means? Do you know how important that makes you?”
The little bird did not know what that meant. He cocked his head and peered at the princess, and waited for her to tell him what his purpose was, but she said nothing more.
He began to suspect it was something dreadful. Perhaps he was going to die. Perhaps they were going to kill him. He wondered if the red birds in their gold cages, with their proud crests and their foolish songs, had special tasks, and he wondered if it would not be better to be one of them. But he had no voice to speak, and so he sat silently and pondered.
*
The princess grew older still, until she was not a little girl anymore but a clever and sharp-tongued young woman, and even then she kept the little bird close. When the Queen Mother died and was laid out in white lace, and the entire city was decked in lilies (because the Queen Mother had lived a long life, and a good one, and there was no sadness in that) the princess wept, and the little bird was there to comfort her. When her mother, the Queen, died, the little bird was there, too, huddled in the depths of her pocket. And when the princess stood before the roaring crowds, cloaked in purple, and became a queen, she tucked her hand behind her back and the warmth of the little bird’s feathers gave her strength.
The princess grew into a good queen. A busy queen. She still saw the little bird from time to time, but there was no more running in the halls, and no one read to them anymore by the fire, and so the little bird spent most of his time under a chair in an old sitting room, watching the door and wondering over his secret purpose.
*
One day the queen came in looking worn and tired, and the little bird flew to her and alighted on her shoulder, and burrowed its soft head into her neck, and it was like a door had opened in the queen’s face. She let out a little gasp. She did not cry. She wanted to, the bird thought, but she did not. She simply stood, staring into space.
“There is going to be war,” she said, to the little bird, and the bird simply watched her out of one eye, and watched the glass windows with the other, and the sunlight and the blue sky. “They’ve decided to fight. There is a land between our two countries, and it is rich, and my mother kept it for many years, but now they want it as well, and they are spreading lies and- “ She looked down at the little bird, and the little bird wanted so badly to speak to her then, and give some small comfort.
“You must be good, now, little bird,” the queen said. “Are you listening? You must be brave for me, and you must never falter no matter what you see.” And then the queen laid him gently on the warm sill and hurried away, her skirts like a sail behind her, and though the little bird could not speak, he promised with all his heart that he would be brave.
*
The next day, the bird-keepers came into the queen’s chambers and caught the little bird under one of the chairs and brought him back to the rookery and put him in the cage together with the red birds.
“Now, my silent one,” one of the bird-keepers had whispered to him, as he locked the gate again. “It’s business from here on, and no mistake.”
And that was when it began to dawn on the little bird what he was here for and what he would have to do.
*
There was a war. The queen had spoken the truth. The neighboring country was displeased at the queen, who was clever and rich, and displeased at the way the lines were arranged on the map, and displeased by the queen’s army, which was quite powerful, and so the two countries agreed that the best way to solve this problem was to fight each other with guns.
It seemed a pleasant notion at first. There were parades in the city, and bright flags, and the red birds were sent swooping over the rooftops and through the streets, and everyone clapped and hooted, and then the soldiers went away, and no one heard much of anything, and life went on.
The little bird, high in the tower of the rookery, was taught to carry a brass capsule around his ankle, and taught to wait patiently while humans wrote messages and put them into his capsule. And while now the little bird knew what he would be used for he still did not understand the Queen Mother’s words, because all the birds were being taught just the same as he, and they all carried messages hither and yon, and the handsome red birds looked at him with disdain if they looked at him at all. He was not terribly important at all.
But the little bird did as he was told, and tried to avoid the red birds with their sharp claws and great wings, and he went to sleep in the far corner of the cage each night and hoped the queen would come for him soon and they would go back to the fireplace and someone would read to them.
*
One night, several months after the war began, and the countries had settled into an odd sort of routine, and the newspapers were becoming impatient because there was nothing exciting to write about, and both sides were coming to the conclusion that maybe it would be better not to fight at all, a round man in a square hat came to the palace of the queen. He played tricks in the hall all day, until he was noticed and was brought to the queen’s dining room to cheer her weary mind, and that was when he put a drop of poison in her soup while no one was looking, and she choked on her own tongue and died.
The little bird was not there to see. He was high up in the spires, following little flags on little strings, while below him the bird-keepers shouted at him – faster! and Not that way, not that way! But when he came back to the palace, he noticed the change right away. He noticed the sadness, like a velvet pall across the halls, and of course he noticed the absence of the queen, like a light gone out. And at the very first moment he could, he escaped the rookery and went in search of his queen. He found her in the chapel, but she did not move to greet him, and she did not smile, and though her eyes were open, they never looked at the little bird. She looked at the ceiling, at painting of clouds and starlight, and nothing the little bird did was able to rouse her.
The bird flew away, through the palace, deep into the cellars and there he saw a round man in a square hat, and the man was counting gold into a large bag and chuckling.
The bird did not understand. He did not understand how anyone could laugh when his queen had died. And he tried to fly away, and he tried to weep, but he could do nothing to match the grief he felt. Soon the bird-keepers had caught him again, and they brought him back to the rookery and put back in the cage. The red birds did not cry for their queen. They sat and preened and fought with each other, and when they saw the little bird weeping, they did not go to comfort him, because he was not one of them. In fact, they did not know what he was.
*
The death of the queen ignited a spark, and the spark became a flame – a fire of outrage throughout the whole kingdom. The war effort sprang up again in earnest, because when you are angry you want to fight, and you cease to think. Newspaper headlines screamed of the murder. Fingers were pointed, and fingers were cut off. The red birds were sent out in great number, and the little gray bird was, too.
His first assignment was to take a message across the bay to a man in a dingy garret of the enemy’s city. The man was a general, but he was dressed to look like a beggar so no one would know. The bird let the keepers clip the capsule to his leg. He let them toss him out into a stiff wind, and he saw them toss three red birds out after him. They flew with him a short distance, out over the city, their eyes fixed straight ahead and their vicious beaks like knives in the wind. And then they veered away in all different directions, and the little bird was left alone.
The bird did not know this, but as he passed over a beautiful green field, a rolling pasture of daisies and trees, he passed that invisible line that everyone was fighting over, and he was no longer in his mistress’s land, but in the enemy’s. All he saw was land, though, and houses, and they all had vegetable gardens out front, and vats for washing, and knickers hanging in the yard.
*
The little bird found the general-dressed-as-a-beggar waiting for him in the upper garret. The man’s head was in shadow and his eyes glimmered under his hood. He took the bird and read his message, and squeezed him tightly in his rough hand all the while, as if he thought the little bird would try to escape. The general did not understand that the bird had made a promise, and that he would keep the promise, and be faithful to his queen, even though she was buried beneath stone and roses now, and far away.
After the general had read the message, he scribbled out a new one and deposited it in the capsule, practically threw the little bird back into the night. The little bird returned to the palace, to the bird-keepers, and he slept, his head under his wing. He noticed that there were not as many red birds anymore, not as many as before.
*
The war moved quickly after the message had come to the man in the garret. It swept across the countries and burned them both, and when the little bird next flew from his roost, the capsule secure around his leg, he looked down in horror at the land. The queen’s city was all dark now, no windows lit for fear the enemy would find it in the dark and destroy it. He looked to his left and saw four of the red birds swooping away, this way and that, saw men below, shooting, the armies marching, horns blowing. And the fields beyond . . . they were scorched. Black trees stood up like the charred ribs of an animal, and red sparks leaped and flew around the little bird in eddies and gusts. The forests were blackened and the pastures were gray as a blind man’s eyes. Ash fell, from where the bird could not know, and it made the fields look as though they were covered in snow. Ash from the sky, sparks from the earth, and wind that blew into the little bird’s face, bitter and hot as tar.
The little bird flapped on tirelessly, though its wings felt heavy, and they strained against the air. He passed over the empty hulls of farmhouses, passed over neat squares of weeds, once vegetable beds, but now the home of crows-foot and scrub, and tough, coarse weeds that did not mind the choked air. The bird passed over a family of refugees, huddled in the shelter of a mortared wall. They had only the smallest fire, though it was quite cold close to the ground, and they sat close together and sang, and it was the prettiest song the bird had ever heard though their voices were cracked and split with longing.
The bird flew and flew, and at last it came to the enemy city, and alighted on one of its tall roofs, looking out across it. It was a fine city, with peaked gables and strong chimneys and solid houses. The little bird thought for a moment about the message he carried, and what it meant, and whether it would cause this place to be razed as well, like all the lands between. But the little bird had made the queen a promise and so he went into a window, waited there until a red-faced, white-whiskered man barged in and read the message, and screamed and spat, and scrawled a new message on a piece of soiled paper.
The white-whiskered man rammed the paper into the capsule and sent the little bird off with a spank, and the bird dipped and flew as fast as it could away. But as the bird fluttered back across the wasteland, he kept his eyes sharp for the group of refugees he had seen on its journey there. He wanted to be sure they had made it further, made it somewhere better perhaps. The land seemed even more beleaguered than it had the last time the little bird had passed over it. Bombs cracked tirelessly in the distance. The wind whistled like a lost lamb, but below that, below the wind, there was no sound at all, only a deathly silence, and the ash swirled up in ghostly forms among rotting walls of the farmhouses. There were no rising sparks anymore, and no ruddy glow. Those had all gone out.
*
The little bird passed over the wall where it had seen the refugees take shelter, but they were not there anymore. The fire was nothing but a pile of charcoal, crusted with frost.
The little bird flew low over the fields, searching for them, over hills and pastures. He came to a rutted, muddy trail where tanks and feet had gone, and followed that for several miles, winding among the forests and the hills. And that was when he saw them again, the refugees. They were lying by the side of the road, only they were dead now, stiff and cold, and there were dark holes in the whiteness of their skin. And beyond them, dotting the land like drops of blood far into the distance, were the red birds, bullets in their hearts, and their capsules opened, and their false messages read.
And that was when the little bird understood. He understood the Queen Mother’s words from far back in his youth, and he understood why he had no voice, and why he was gray when they were bright. The red birds were proud and beautiful, but they were not what they thought, nor as important. They were there to die.
The bird let out a silent cry, and swooped away from the earth, up, up, into the freezing sky, where it was cold as ice, but pure at least, and far away from the cannon and the death. There, the little bird looked down again, and saw the dull orange burst of bombs, and again he wished he could wail, or scream, or make any sound at all, but he was not meant to be heard.
He returned to the city of his mistress. People were lining the streets now, cold and hungry. Everything was gray, as gray as the ash that fell from the sky. Even the flags, so bright and red before the war, were dulled, and coated with grime, and nothing was left of the songs and the bluster.
The little bird received one last message, from a thin, starved-looking bird-keeper. One last message, and the last of the red birds to allow him safe journey. The little bird tried to tell them not to go, not to fly out over the land, as they were meant to die, but the red birds were proud and they only eyed him briefly and then veered away, and he never saw them again. He flew out over the land, though he was very tired now, and the ash weighted his wings, and the hot wind burned his eyes, and he did not want to fly anymore; he wanted to sleep. He passed over the fields, the farmhouses. The refugees by the roadside had wasted away to nothing. The soldiers trudged to nowhere, deep inside their greatcoats, their hats low. They sat in trenches, their boots in the mud. From time to time they leaped up and shot wildly into the gloom, and then they would all hurry across the waste and set up ranks further forward, and dig trenches where the cabbage beds had been, and it was a great victory and everyone rejoiced.
The bird flew on. He came to the enemy city again. And here he paused a moment, suspended in the air, his wings fluttering furiously. He recalled the land before he had carried that first message, before any of this had started. He recalled the green fields, and the blue sky, and the red feathers of the birds, so proud and vain and foolish. And then the image faded, and he saw what the land had become.
The bird did not fly into the window of the high tower where he had been instructed to go. He did not deliver his message. He thought of his queen, and he thought of his small wings tucked up under her chin, and he thought of the fire crackling, and grandmama reading. And if the little bird could have spoken, he would have said he was sorry. He would have said that he could not keep his promise to his queen, that whatever was in those capsules, whatever the little markings meant, they was foolishness, and man was foolishness, and he was tired. But he could not speak, and so instead he let out a pitiful cry, and only the wind and the falling ash heard him.
And at last the little bird flew away from the city. He flew away from the wastelands, the razed forests, the muddy roads, the bodies and trenches, and the weeping towns. He flew high, high above it all, into a piercing cold rain, and he did not stop until his wings ached and his head ached and he felt sure he was going to die. He dropped down out of the sky like a small stone, and came to rest in a green country, a land that was very like the old countries he had come from, but somehow not so far along as those, not yet spoiled. An old woman found the bird and brought him inside. She noticed the capsule on his poor blackened leg and took it off, and then she washed the little bird with soft cloths and warm water, and fed him berries. And when she thought he was asleep in the warmth and the silence, she rolled out the message from the capsule and read it:
“Enough,” she said, in her cracked old voice. “We have had enough. Words are what started this war, and words shall end it. Here is our surrender.”
The old woman threw the paper into the fire then, because she did not understand what it was about, and thought it was likely a dull sort of joke. And the little bird lay on its side and watched as the flames ate the paper, and it curled and blackened. He was not sorry to see it burn. His tiny, glimmering eyes did not appear to move, but their gaze turned from the fire to the window, and looked out into the morning light, at the trees and the grass. And the little bird wondered how long the war would take to reach there, and how long before those trees were burnt, too, and the grass was dead and the clouds were clouds of ash.
Because if there was one thing the little bird had learned in all his flights and his journeys across those ravaged fields, it was that there was no peace for man. They never stopped wanting, and they never stopped trying, and if they learned things, they forgot them just a soon. That was their blessing, and that was their curse. They were the red birds in a gold cage, and they flew to their death proudly, because they did not know what they were meant for. . . but oh, were their feathers bright.
Abram Brown’s Birds (Dead and Gone)
*
Curator’s Note: An eerie little tune called “Old Abram Brown” inspired the telling of this particular tale. I suggest you listen to it whilst you read, and pay particular attention to the lyrics below.
*
Old Abram Brown is dead and gone You’ll never see him more He used to wear a long brown coat That buttoned up before “Old Abram Brown” from Songs for a Friday Afternoon by Benjamin Britten*
In a mud-colored city piled high with towers, there lived a man named Abram Brown.
The city was a drab sort of place, though it hadn’t always been. Factories sat in squat buildings on the perimeter, and the smoke they produced leeched the color out of houses and horses and cabs and gowns until even the grass in the park turned crunchy and gray.
Abram Brown fit in quite well here. He wore a long brown coat that nearly brushed the ground, and his hair was gray, and his face was rather gray as well.
In fact, he looked much the same as his fellow citizens and might have gone entirely unnoticed in the drone of the city, just like most things were—had it not been for the flock of birds that followed him wherever he went.
The birds formed a sort of buffer around Abram Brown, his own personal shield, for you didn’t want to get too close to Abram Brown’s birds. No, you did not. They flapped silently about him, their feathers slick with the oil from the sky. They alighted on his shoulders and nested in his hat and burrowed into his clothes to poke their heads out between the dirty brass buttons of his coat.
Their eyes were black and beady, like any bird’s, but it wasn’t the eyes you had to worry about.
What you had to worry about was how, if the birds happened to glance your way while you carried on with your business, they would whisper while they watched you.
Their beaks did not move, but you knew it was them, all the same.
There was no mistaking the whispers of Abram Brown’s birds.
*
Octavius Sinclair hated his name but he had found his peace with it, even though the boys at school called him Octo-Face and Octavi-pus and all other kinds of horrid things.
Octavius was the sort of boy who made peace with things quite easily, because his mind was bright and open like the inside of a polished bell. This isn’t to say he was empty-headed. It’s simply to say that thoughts slid in and out of his mind with ease, never staying there too long to cause trouble.
For example, while most people either found themselves disgusted or tiredly complacent about the state of the crunchy, smoke-covered grass in the park, Octavius had decided it was actually rather beautiful.
“Is it true,” he had asked his father once, when they passed the park, “that the grass is bright green in some places?”
“I suppose,” his father had said briskly, checking his watch. He was always checking his watch, and polishing its smog-smeared face.
“Aren’t we special, then, to have our grass be such a lovely gray color?”
“What are you on about?”
“I mean, it’s lovely and gray like a dream. Like when you come out of a dream and everything is soft, and you hang there between two worlds. Like that, Papa.”
His father had snapped him hard into the street. “Keep up. You’re dawdling.”
Every day when Octavius walked home from school in his stockings and buckled shoes and that horrible burgundy jacket with the dirty brass buttons, he walked by the park where Abram Brown liked to take his birds in the afternoon.
Octavius had been quite small when he happened upon Abram Brown for the first time, right in this very park.
It had been the first day anyone had called him Octavi-pus, to the delighted jeers of all the boys in the school courtyard, so he had taken his time walking home. He had needed some time to himself to figure out how he felt about the day’s events.
Instead of paying attention to what lay before him, Octavius had been staring at his feet while walking. He therefore did not see the cloud of birds coming at him, and walked straight into it.
Most of the time, when someone walked too close to Abram Brown’s birds, they squawked and shrieked and flapped around until the intruder retreated.
But that day, they simply fluttered quietly to Abram Brown until he was covered in them, and stared at Octavius. They did not even whisper.
And Octavius, his mind so shiny clean, smiled at them, and said, “What a lovely collection of birds you have, sir.” Then he pulled out the sandwich from his pocket, which he had not had the appetite to finish after the incident in the courtyard.
He sat on a bench with Abram Brown and shared his bread with Abram Brown’s birds.
Once all the birds had eaten, Abram Brown had peered out from his beard and said, “My name is Abram Brown.”
“I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are. They say you are mad, and that I shouldn’t talk to you.”
Abram Brown had said, “And yet you are talking to me right now.”
“Everyone says you should not be mean to others, too, and yet everyone acts cruel anyhow. So why should I take them seriously?”
A bird on Abram Brown’s shoulder had cocked its head.
“Yes,” Abram Brown had said. “That makes quite a lot of sense to me.”
*
Every day after that, Octavius Sinclair took the long way home from school and met Abram Brown in the park at that same bench, and shared whatever was left of his lunch with Abram Brown’s birds.
It was a peaceful ritual, for a while, in the dream-colored park with the gray sunlight struggling down.
Until it wasn’t peaceful anymore.
Until the boys from school followed Octo-Face home one day, and spied upon him, and decided to have some fun.
*
The ringleader was a thirteen-year-old boy who wasn’t as horrid inside as he pretended to be, but we cannot excuse him for that.
His name was Horace Wickham, and Octavius baffled him.
Horace hated this city. He hated its sky full of towers and smoke. He hated that, no matter how many times he washed his hands, they still looked dirty.
Most of all, he hated the park. Parks were supposed to be green and bright, clean and full of flowers.
Didn’t anyone know that?
Didn’t anyone care that they lived in such a dirty heap of a place?
Horace cared very much. He wished he could leave, but he was only thirteen, and a small part of him worried that in fact the tales of bright green grasses and clear blue skies were merely legends from a long-ago time or a far-off world.
The hatefulness of his circumstances built up inside his heart and turned him rotten.
How could that stupid, soppy, thin-shouldered Octavius Sinclair walk about smiling all the time? How could he look around him and still be happy? It was inexplicable. It was unfair.
So Horace led the other boys from school to the park. He spied upon Octavius, and his insides churned hot and black.
“Here we go,” he whispered to the boys huddled around him. He fished out some stones from beneath the bristly black hedges and curled his fists about them.
For a moment, a thought came to him that this was a terrible idea. He wasn’t a bad boy, so he should not be acting like one.
But the stones in his fists were cold and sharp and covered in filth. The slick and slimy feel of them—and of the air, and of his own soiled skin—made Horace’s heart boil over with hate.
It was not fair, for someone to find such joy when he could not.
“Now!” he shouted, and the crowd of boys leapt out from beneath the hedges and began to throw.
*
The stones fell from the sky in showers of pain, striking Octavius’s head, arms, and stomach. No matter where he turned, they struck him. He was caught in a storm of stones and frantic black feathers.
Where was Abram Brown?
Octavius cried out in terror and fell to the ground, covering his head.
That is when he saw the bird—one of the younger ones, with a bright yellow beak and matching feet—lying on the ground in front of him. Its head had been split open, and it laid there, broken on the pavement, crooked and glistening wet.
Octavius began to sob and gently tucked the bird underneath him as he huddled there, shaking. His fingers came away stained red, and it was the brightest color he had ever seen.
He was so caught up in his grief and terror that he did not at first notice when the triumphant laughter of the boys from school turned to screams.
He did not notice when the cloud of birds left him, gathered together in one great shining black clump, and dove—pecking, biting, tearing with their tiny yellow claws.
When silence fell, it did not register with Octavius until a few long moments had passed.
He uncovered his head and dared to look up.
The first thing he saw was that the birds were gone. He saw not even a feather, heard not a squawk.
The second thing he saw was that the boys from school were gone, too—although not in the same way. The sight of them there on the ground, all red and misshapen, slid right through Octavius’s mind and out the other side.
It was not a sight worth holding onto.
The third thing Octavius saw was old Abram Brown’s long brown coat, lying on the soot-covered pavement, empty as a rotting fruit peel.
*
That night, Octavius Sinclair heard whispers in his dreams. Even when he woke up to fetch a glass of water, he still heard them—the same whispers, following him into the waking world.
At first, Octavius could not understand what these whispers said. He drank his water and tucked himself back into his rickety white bed and sat very still to listen.
Eventually, he pulled out three words from the whispers: Dead and gone.
They came to him, over and over. No matter how hard he tried to push them through his mind and out, they would not budge. They stuck there, right behind his eyes, and built and built. The words overlapped and fell apart and came back together again, but Octavius could still understand them.
Dead and gone.
Dead and gone.
When a sharp knock came at Octavius’s window, he got right up and opened it.
He knew, by then, after hours of listening to these whispers in his head, what he would find. He had begun to recognize the sounds.
A black bird hopped onto the window sill. It tilted its shiny round head and stared at Octavius.
Dead and gone.
“I know,” said Octavius. “Poor old Abram Brown.”
The bird snapped its beak open and shut, flitted up onto Octavius’s shoulder, and stayed there.
Together, they sat by the open window and looked out into the smoky night sky, waiting.
A sound came to them from somewhere out in the darkness—the sound of a thousand flapping black wings.
*
Ariel
Drawing by William Kentridge.
The cage was far too small for such a large bird. Any cage is too small for a bird; but this dusty iron one was hardly bigger than the bird herself. Her own waste festered on the floor of the cage, which no one ever cleaned, and the fumes rose up around her all day.
Once she had had a nub of bone to chew on, but she’d chewed that to dust long ago. Now she gnawed on the bars of the cage—not with any hope of escape, but only to push away her fear and loneliness.
The bird had been in the cage almost, but not quite, her whole life. Faint memories of some of other place and other kind of time haunted her. She worried over it. Was there really such a time? Could she open her wings full and free once?
Was there really a place called Sky: infinitely blue, infinitely accepting?
When memories of Sky came like hot arrows into her fearful heart, she would pull out her own feathers, one at a time, to forget. It hurt terribly, but the pain eased or hid the pain of missing Sky, at least for a while.
Sometimes she was certain she only imagined Sky—that Sky only stood for a place and time that was not this place, and not this time. But whatever Sky was, she longed for it.
The bird lived in an old, high-ceilinged apartment, well above the city streets, with a thin man in a red coat and a little girl in a purple, frothy dress. Once a week, the thin man would seize the cage and carry it outside, banging the bird inside to and fro, through noisy, smoke-blackened streets, and into a dark building. Once inside, the man’s wiry hands would reach inside the black bars, seize the bird, and stuff it inside a suffocating black sack. Then he stuffed the sack inside a black hat and left.
For hours, as the bird struggled for breath, she would listen to muffled noises: first shouts and curses and laughter; then the blare of off-key trumpets; then the sleek and booming voice of the man in the red coat.
Then, without warning, the sack was opened, and the bottom of the hat was smacked, forcing the stunned bird into the air. It would flutter desperately, awkwardly, stretching wings that had not been used in a week. Bright lights blinded it, the rising roar of a crowd made it flutter, terrified, unsure where to fly. Within seconds, the man’s hard hands were back around the bird, thrusting it back inside the sack. And soon enough, it was back in its cage on its table again.
It was the job of the girl in the frothy purple dress to give the bird food or water, but often she forgot, and when she remembered, her hands were not always satisfied only to leave the food, but had also to touch the bird, and her hands were hot and rough and cruel.
Once, after slipping the food in, the girl seized one of the bird’s wings and yanked, nearly breaking it. In pain and fear, the bird struck at the girl’s hand, hard. Then there was no food or water for many days, not until the bird was crumpled at the bottom of her cage, breathing shallow and fast, and the thin man shouted and hit the girl.
But mostly the girl and the thin man ignored the bird. And mostly the bird turned its back on the room to stare at the wall beside its cage, watching the changing light. The light was all it could see of the outdoors.
One day, the light shifted—or perhaps the thin man or the rough, forgetful girl had accidentally shifted the cage. In any case, on the wall behind the caged bird, another bird appeared: a dark, shadow bird, in a shadow cage.
Shadow bird, said the caged bird: look, your cage is only shadow. You could leave at any time. Open your wings, shadow bird, and fly.
But the shadow bird did not move.
Shadow bird, said the caged bird: My cage is iron bars, but yours is made of nothing at all. It is only the dream of a cage. The window is open, I smell the street and the dirt and the trees outside. Fly away.
But the shadow bird did not move.
Do you stay for me? asked the cage bird. I think you do. I think you came to keep me company, and you stay so that I am not alone in this place, so far from Sky. If birds could cry, the caged bird would have cried with gratitude. Not to be alone was more than she had hoped.
To show her gratitude, the caged bird raised her wings the few centimeters she could raise them. In response, the shadow bird raised its wings much higher, much fuller. The shadow bird’s wings were bigger even than the shadow cage itself.
So things seemed almost a little better for the bird, for a little while. And then without warning, they were much, much worse. Because one day, for fun, little girl put glue on the caged bird’s perch. The bird pulled and strained in agony, trying to free herself.
Just then the thin man, running late and impatient to leave, strode in, opened the cage, seized the bird, and pulled hard. The bird shrieked in pain, and as the cage swung through the city, the blood from her talons trailed across the street.
And when the hat was smacked, and the bird was flung out before bright lights and roaring crowds, she could fly no more than a few inches before she fell to the ground.
The crowd laughed.
When they got home, the thin man tossed the bird and its cage furiously onto the table. The bird’s ruined feet could not bear the perch, so she lay on her side on the the cage’s filthy floor, facing the wall and the shadow bird. The shadow bird lay down, too, in its shadow cage. They held each other’s eyes.
In the room, the thin man and the rough girl screamed at each other.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Except cost me money and reputation with your stupid tricks! The bird’s useless now!”
“It isn’t my fault, it’s the stupid bird’s fault!”
And then maybe—because by now the caged bird was feverish, and its head felt too full and light—maybe the cage door was yanked open, and a small hand pulled her out, shouting. “Fly! Fly, stupid! I didn’t hurt you so bad, you’re just lazy!”
Maybe the small hand flung the sick, wounded bird into the air.
And then—at least it seemed to the caged bird that this happened—then, somehow, the bird found strength in her battered, half-feathered wings. She pulled at the air, and the air carried her up. She flew near the top of the ceiling, and then she turned and faced the man and the girl.
“See—“ the child began, in triumph. But then—or so it seemed to the feverish bird—the child’s eyes widened in fear. The bird-no-longer-caged could see herself, she thought, reflected in the child’s black pupils. She could see herself, and she could see her own bloody talons outstretched, and her sharp beak open.
She could see herself, as she stabbed and stabbed at the child’s soft face and throat, until those pupils could not see through the blood.
And when the thin man came at her, snatching at the air around her, waving his wiry arms—then it seemed to the bird that she served him just the same, over and over, and over and over, until his face and hands and hair were as bloody-red as his coat.
The man and girl lay still and quiet on the floor, then—oh quiet, quiet, quiet.
That is what the caged bird thought, at least. But if you were the policeman who entered the room, after neighbors reported terrible screams, and then terrible silence, you would have seen a bird in a locked cage, lying on its side, facing the wall, still and cold and dead.
On the floor, you would have seen a child in a blood-spattered, frothy purple frock, and a thin man in a red coat, their faces and throats pecked into bloody mess.
And you would see, if you were a noticing policeman, a shadow of the dead bird’s black cage against the wall.
But you wouldn’t see the shadow bird. Because the shadow bird was gone. The shadow bird had flown. The shadow bird had done what it had come to do, and had returned to the Sky.