We are staying in a house with no history. Or maybe it has too much of it—seeped into the wallpaper, hiding in the damp rot under the floorboards. Either way, it’s not ours. I don’t ask questions because answers are always worse than the silence.
Momma hasn’t moved from the bed in a week. Her breath rattles when I check on her, wind through the attic, but if she were dying, I decide that someone would have told me. I cook when Dad’s away. The stove is broken, so it’s mostly things I can make in the microwave— plain instant rice, stolen gas station ramen. John burns his tongue every time. Abby calls him stupid every time. It’s a ritual.
In the backyard, there’s a couch half-sunken into the cracked concrete, wet from last night’s rain, its stuffing swollen and mold-thick. It belonged to whoever lived here last, though no one bothered to take it with them. When I press my palm against it, my skin comes away damp and gray with something I hope is just mildew. Small salamanders flicker across its surface like restless ants, John spends many evenings catching them in plastic tupperware. As we try to move the couch for more space on the pavement, John lifts a cushion and gasps. A nest. Three birds.
“Well, clearly we have to take care of them,” Abby declares, hands on her hips a teacher scolding a class. “Their mom is gone. It’s our responsibility.”
“I want that one.” She plucks the leftmost bird from the nest, cupping it carefully in her hands. It makes a soft sound, something between a sigh and a sob.
“We should all have one,” she says. “There’s three, and there’s three of us.”
There’s five of us. Bella is always in bed with momma, too young to argue. I wait for them to fall apart.
Lauren, who hates the feel of feathers, digs through the house until she finds a scrap of fabric to wrap her bird in. “What should we name them?” she asks, not looking up.
They name them. We place them in the dollhouse in our closet, as if a house can be a home if you pretend hard enough.
Lauren’s bird is the first to go.
She crouches by the plastic kiddie pool, algae-slick and long since overtaken by vines, and lowers the tiny thing into the water. “I want to be a good mom and wash it,” she says.
She ruffles its feathers with wet fingers. For a moment, it twitches in her palm. Then the bubbles start.
“Wait, I think it’s drowning!” she exclaims, still holding it under, eyes going wide with the drama of it. “Help me! It’s drowning!”
She’s smiling when she says it. When she finally lifts her hands, the bird is limp. Its small, dark eye is a bead of glass staring up at nothing. Lauren cries.
John’s bird is next.
Three of us play poker on the concrete, betting with things we stole from the gas station– lighters, gum, peanuts. Lauren and Abby feed the peanuts to the birds absentmindedly, though they never eat them.
“John!” Lauren calls. “We’re about to start a new round!”
There’s a shuffle inside. A muffled “Coming!” Then, the sound of him running– too fast, too careless. The slap of bare feet against concrete.
The sick squish of something soft and wet underfoot. Silence.
John makes a sound low in his throat– somewhere between a laugh and a gag. The bird is gone, but its shape is still there, a smear of guts and wet feathers clinging to the sole of his foot. His face curdles.
Lauren cries, again. “You killed it.”
Abby tells him he’s an idiot, that he should be more careful, that he shouldn’t be allowed to have anything. John tries to take Abby’s bird in retribution. “It was an accident,” he argues. “I am a much better parent than all of you combined.”
John lies like a child. He really thinks they’ll believe him.
“Accidents don’t make things any less dead,” Lauren says.
The last bird goes the next day.
We are eating lunch when Abby sets her spoon down with a sharp clatter. “Well,” she says, “what do all good momma birds do?”
No one answers. She grins like it’s obvious. “They teach their babies to fly.”
So we climb onto the roof. The shingles shift under us, loose and crumbling, the wood underneath soft with rot. Abby has been playing baseball. She thinks she understands how throwing works.
She settles into the shingles, her shifting feet finding place. An arm curls into her chest, baby bird in hand, before arching backwards with her leg lifted off the roof, a flamingo. Her arm seems to misshape when fully extended, pushing far past what should be considered normal. The moment her hand releases, it’s entirely silent on the roof. It does not fly. It hits the ground an overripe peach. Blood bursts across the pavement in a perfect arc, almost pretty.
A nearly silent gasp comes from the hunched Lauren next to me, legs splayed out against the angled tile before the sharp crack of a cry. Reactions do not come from our sides, where John wipes off his dusty knees and Abby scrunches her face a disappointed child in a candy store.
The next day is for mourning. They drape themselves in grief, a fur-lined coat. They refuse to speak, as if silence fossilizes grief into something important. If grief were useful, they’d have something to show for it by now. The birds were always going to die. They just got there a little faster than expected. I would’ve done better.
Then the mother comes. Late, useless. She lands on the fence, dark-eyed and sharp-beaked, her feathers fluffed up like she’s something dangerous. I watch her. She watches me.
Then she moves fast, furious, a thing made of claws and hunger. She smells death on John, or she just knows a failure when she sees one. He screams as she tears at his hair, his skin. He swats at her, but she doesn’t care. I wait to see how long he lasts. Abby laughs. Lauren cries.
Somewhere, in the rotting dollhouse, the nest is still empty. Abby is now a mother. Lauren folds herself into the blankets, playing corpse. She’s waiting to be buried too. I don’t know who she thinks will come to mourn her. John is far away. And our parents are in the ground.
Aleksander Lindsay Dickens is a writer from Nashville, TN, who is deeply inspired by his study of neuroscience, disability & transness, and anthropology of paganism. His free time is spent whittling, playing music, and reading classic literature.