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But I don’t have anywhere to take it, or anything to carry it in. So the chances of a dog scaring the shit out of someone with it are high.
“What happened to you?” I murmur, turning it once more. I’ve looked at enough diagrams and seen enough bird skeletons to know what it would look like if I were to strip the feathers and skin away. Thanks to Aunt Kathryn, I also know what it would take to taxidermy a crow, as weird of a skill as that might be.
But for all the things I’ve studied and looked at, I cannot figure out how the birddied.
Well, apart from the obvious.
But birds don’t have a habit of just dropping dead in the woods with a broken neck. At least, not from what I’ve seen in my life.
I push the crow around one more time with the stick, my fingers coming close enough to almost brush the bird’s feathers. Maybe it was old, or sick, or just…fated to die today.
“Sorry buddy,” I mutter, straightening with my hands on my knees that yet again pop under my fingers. One day I’m going to pay the price for the years of dance, more than I already do. If I don’t have a knee replacement by thirty, I’ll consider myself incredibly lucky.
My eyes catch on something moving as I stand, tracking it in the near-darkness of the woods. At first, I think it’s a coyote that smelled the bird and came to get its dinner. Or some neighbor’s dog intent on showing its master the cool thing it’s found.
But the movement is too tall. Too graceful for that, and the footsteps that reach my ears are definitely of the human variety.
Words catch in my throat. Hooking the inside of my esophagus as my lips part like I’m going to say something, or warn the person walking through the woods about the bird they’ll most likely never see. Nothing comes from my lips, and the person keeps walking as I drop the stick and stay where I’m standing.
If they turn, they’ll see me. I realize that when their silhouette is highlighted in a break of the branches above. Auburn hair sparkles in the dying, orange sun like a flame; though it’s extinguished seconds later when he moves into the darkness of the trees again.
I don’t know him.
Well, I don’t know his name.
It takes me only a second to realize it’s the boy Phoenix had come here with. Yet now he’s here, skulking through the woods, instead of with my dead best friend’s brother.
The thought of Daisy is unexpected, and my brain takes my moment of weakness to pile on all the things that I try never to see.
Daisy is pale, her lips are blue. She doesn’t move when I shake her—
My leg hurts, and when I press my knee against the searing snow under me, I can see red blooming around my skin like a poinsettia. Just in time for Christmas, and—
“What do you mean she’s dead?!” He shakes me, holding my arms too tight, but I don’t have an answer for Daisy’s brother. I don’t have an answer, when I don’t—
I close my eyes hard and consider picking the stick up again to whack myself in the face with it. The pain would help, and to that end I dig my nails into my palms until I can feel the tender skin beginning to give under the sharpness of my nails.
I can’t do this today.
I can’t have her face in my mind this close to going home.
While I don’t know when I closed my eyes, the moment I open them again, I look for the stranger who’d been in the woods. My gaze finds the place he’d been before, and the sunlight that had lit his hair like a pyre. It’s fading now, the sun dipping further in its descent as the coolness in the woods picks up to swirl around my arms.
He’s gone.
Sometime in the last minute, when I’d been battling bad memories and thoughts I try to keep out of my brain, he’d disappeared into the trees. I can’t even say if he’d gone deeper into the woods, or back toward the fairgrounds.
But I do know that I can’t keep standing here with a dead bird for company. I hesitate, glancing down once more at the creature, and nudge its wing ever so slightly with my shoe until it’s on its back, wings spread, like some artist’s rendition of a crow against an earthy background.
There’s something gorgeous about it, in death. Something almost surreal that threatens to pull me back to my knees in the dirt to play with dead things.
But I have to go home.
Girls shouldn’t play with dead things, as my mother so often reminds me whenever I make the trip to my aunt’s house by the river. So I force myself to move, to take the steps on crackling knees, protesting the day’s lifting and bending from setting up at the fairgrounds.
The trees lessen as I go, thinning so that I don’t have to look for paths between them. Soon enough I’m out of the forest entirely, though my eyes rove over the grounds to look for my parents…or Phoenix.
For my own presence of mind, I refuse to think that I’m looking for my dead best friend’s brother in the Halloween-themed rows of booths and vendors getting ready to go home now that there’s not enough natural light to see by.
