Owl in Darkness

by Zoë Rosenfeld

  Bert starts another letter to Divina in her head: Dear Hoglet, I’m getting more and more sure that the owl I’ve been hearing is actually a great horned owl—a big one that eats rabbits and muskrats and snakes and toads and even other owls. In the book, it has a piercing look, as if it sees too much. And something about those big ear tufts: sometimes I think it can hear me lying in bed breathing at night. I keep trying to remember facts about owls—things I’ve heard over the years—but all I seem to be coming up with is myths and symbols. Owls as messengers and bringers of omens. Owls in ancient Egypt, maybe, as the essence of darkness and night. And the other day I remembered something I read years ago about how there’s some part of the world where the owl doesn’t even have a name and is known only as “the bird that makes you afraid.” Can you believe that? At night I think about the forest from a mouse’s point of view—the terror of something enormous swooping down from above, the night somehow condensed into animal form. And then I think about it from the owl’s perspective—looking deep into the darkness, scanning the forest floor for motion, then dropping down on something delicious. And I can’t figure out which one I like better, seeing things from the mouse’s perspective or the owl’s. If you were here, I’m sure you’d tell me to just write and stop thinking about all this crap, but there’s no one here to tell me to write, so I don’t. That’s my dirty secret: I don’t write a word. Day in and day out, I don’t write a thing, and I’m not sure if the cook and the night watchman have figured it out yet or not, but either way, I’ve started to become embarrassed around them. I’m sure if you were here you’d point out that it’s much easier to just write than to worry about all the ramifications of not writing, and I’m sure you’d be right, but still the days go by and still nothing.

  Including this, she thinks, because she can’t even bring herself to write down a single one of these letters she writes to Divina in her head.

  In the wake of her dream, Bert is powerfully drawn to the defunct springhouse that squats over the stream not far from the pond. It was once whitewashed and housed a natural spring but is now peeling and gray-streaked, the spring long forgotten. She crouches over it—a rough-hewn structure not much bigger than a doghouse, meant presumably to keep milk and butter cool in long-ago summers—and lifts the latch, lets the door swing open. She gasps and steps back, loses her footing, and almost falls into the stream. The springhouse water is nearly filled with the body of a giant salamander. It is so much bigger than anything she thought was possible: it seems like a freak, like something one should call the local paper about, but what does she know about salamanders and springs in this part of the world? She closes the door, replaces the latch, and tries to understand what she’s just seen. It seems to be almost the exact opposite of the glowing pages in the dream, and it takes her a moment to catch up. She screws up her courage to open the door again, just to be sure, and there it is, massive, with its blank face and its blunt limbs. Its body is dark, glistening, and looks to have the texture of jelly—disturbingly enough, it seems to be made of ooze through and through, seems almost not to have any internal structure. It looks like a quantity of primal muck poured into a salamander-shaped skin, in much the way old soup gone bad takes the shape of a plastic bag when you tip it in. Its flabbiness and blankness unsettle her. She knows she should walk away and leave it there, but somehow she feels compelled to go get a pail from the stable, dip it into the springhouse water, and scoop the giant thing up in the bucket.

  She doesn’t know quite why she feels the need to do this. Undoubtedly the salamander knows better than she does where it needs to live, but she tells herself it’s more hygienic this way, though of course in all likelihood no one has used the spring for decades. The truth is that the image of the salamander in its small room disturbs her. She’s not sure she can sleep thinking of it out there at night filling up that dark, cramped space.

  But once the salamander is in the bucket, it spooks her: the bucket is much worse than the springhouse. She can’t look in, can’t stand to see the salamander crowded in there. She sets down the pail and shies away from it, goes to fret under a fir a few yards away. She tells herself there’s nothing to be afraid of—the salamander is harmless, just big and very strange. Still, she can’t bring herself to go back and face it again.

  She heads to the edge of the woods to collect herself. She finds it absurd that the salamander unnerves her as much as it does, so she decides to willfully ignore it for now. She wanders around the edges of the woods, pulling up long stalks of dead weeds and thinking of anything but the dark shape in the bucket, its body doubled back on itself. She sits down on a flat rock and twines the dead weeds together in a chain as if they were daisies (though of course the daisies are still weeks away and she’ll never see them), then loops them together until she has a circle. She puts the chain on her head and sits under the gray sky with this skewed weed crown on—a grown woman on a rock with her knees tucked up under her chin like her daughter. She sits like this for quite a while, not thinking about the salamander. She knows this feeling well, knows too well how a thought persistently pushed aside begins to give off a faint whine of static, like a television with the sound turned down, a relentless drone that cuts through.

  She stands, shakes out her legs, and walks slowly toward the paddock. Xerxes comes over to the gate to nose her pockets, and she scratches the star above his eyes, then puts the weed crown on his forehead. The horse looks at her with a sad, regretful look, seemingly sorry that he can’t find this more funny. I am the only animal who doesn’t make sense here, she thinks. I’m the only animal who doesn’t even know what it’s doing here. Because even the rabbit, skittish as it may be, belongs here as much as any other creature.

  She finally brings herself to go check on the salamander. As she approaches, it flops in the bucket, and she almost loses her nerve. She has to steel herself to get close to the pail, to take up the metal handle. She tells herself there’s no way she’ll end up accidentally having to touch the salamander, but still she’s terrified of that touch.

  She lugs the heavy bucket from the springhouse to the pond and pours the salamander in. She turns her head as it plops into the water. Tomorrow, she thinks, she’ll be able to come out to watch it move around the pond and it will seem manageable, more on a normal scale. In the morning, the salamander will still be freakish and huge, but in the pond it will at least seem within the realm of possibility.

  The next day, she puts on her cape and walks down to the pond. The swaying branches with their fuzz of future buds reflect in the surface of the pond—branches, sky, a few slick, decomposing leaves breaking up the clouds. She walks the perimeter of the winter-shrunken pond looking for the salamander. She’s a bit afraid to spot it lest it seem too big even here, something transposed from a dream. She walks slowly, peering deep into the pond, though there’s not much depth to peer into. She makes it all the way around without seeing any sign of it. She keeps going, circles the pond again. Nothing. She walks more slowly this go-round, taking the time to study every shape in the water, but as far as she can tell, the salamander is gone.

  She heads to the springhouse, figuring it must have made its way back home (she can’t think about this too much—the image of the giant thing heaving itself out of the pond and crawling through the night to the spring). But when she opens the door, the springhouse is empty—just ancient spiderwebs sighing in the corners and a water beetle on the wall.

  Maybe the salamander buried itself in the dead leaves on the bottom of the pond. Maybe it found a new wet home somewhere. Maybe it took to the sky. Or perhaps it lost its shape and turned back into muck—a fertile, germinating muck, fragrant and full of spores—and married the kind of dark where all things are created.

  Through the window, from the woodpile, Bert watches Allison, the cook, put on her down vest and scarf and stand by the kitchen table with a pair of hand-knitted mittens in her fist, staring into space. Just then she plunks down heavily at the table an
d heaves a visible sigh. She seems to have lost the energy it would take to finish putting on her layers and leave the house.

  Bert turns away from the window and continues around the side of the manor. The branches scrape against the windows and the outside walls with a sound that makes her glad the night watchman is always nearby, walking the property in the dark.

  On an afternoon not long before she’s due to leave, Bert finds the night watchman’s daughter sitting on the back step with her chin in her hand staring blankly out at the disintegrating sheds, her doll tilted against her, and in a rush of need, Bert asks her in for tea. She fears the invitation will emit a vapor of desperation that will scare the girl off—she remembers the eerie perceptiveness of kids at that age—but to her surprise, the girl looks up at her and says, “OK.”

  At the kitchen table, Bert asks the girl her name, which is Rosemary, and talks to her a bit about school and about the town while the water boils. She’s happy to be distracted from the hopelessness of once again taking the kettle down from its hook. Bert finds out from the girl that the last cook was fired for stealing rare books from the manor, which she finds intriguing. When the water sings, she pours out the tea, sets out the milk and honey.

  Rosemary goes on, telling Bert about the termites that almost ate the manor’s foundation and about the bat that once got into the parlor. Toward the bottom of her cup of tea, the girl looks curiously at Bert, sideways, and says, “So what do you write about?”

  Bert takes a breath and says, “Actually, I never write.” She meant to say something like, “Actually, I haven’t written a word since I got here,” but this is what came out instead. Either way, she can’t believe she’s said it.

  The girl just looks at her and says, quite simply, “But you’re always writing.”

  Bert stares at her as if she’s lost her mind. Something about this answer is almost creepy to her.

  “What do you mean, I’m always writing?” She tries to make this sound lighthearted and curious, but she can see she’s failed at this by the way the girl lifts a shoulder and shrinks away from her slightly.

  “I don’t know. That’s what my dad said. He said that’s how it is with writers—that they’re always writing even when they’re just walking around or doing dishes or looking at the sky.”

  Bert leans back, amused. The girl’s answer is suddenly very sweet to her, and in a flash, she feels so much better. She can picture perfectly one of the manor writers having said this to the night watchman. Someone who, like her, hadn’t written a word, had only watched the birds and the sky and walked in the woods.

  She thinks about explaining this to the girl, who seems quite intelligent, and who (who knows?) could possibly become a writer herself someday. In which case, Bert thinks, she can figure out for herself how true it is that writers are always writing. Eminently debatable, Bert thinks.

  Bert stands and gathers her teacup, saucer, spoon, and the pitcher of milk. “Well,” she says. “It’s an interesting question.” But she says this as though the case is closed. She brings the tea things to the sink, lays them down with a gentle clink, and brushes off her skirt.

  The girl understands that the conversation is over. She picks up her teacup and saucer and puts them in the big sink next to Bert’s, where they sit exactly as far apart as they had on the kitchen table, as if the tea party has moved to the sink. The girl picks up her doll, its hair a matted mass, one eye half-closed, and thanks Bert for the tea.

  “It was my pleasure,” Bert says, and is surprised as she says it by how intensely true this is. She has had no one to talk to about bats and termites and thieving cooks for weeks and weeks on end, and finds she’s profoundly grateful.

  She sits under one of the hammock trees, looking up at the sky. Patches of blue show through the gray, and the wind rocks the hammock ever so slightly, the ropes creaking with the faintest urk. She can feel things beginning to grow in secret—the humid, new, bright-green feeling of things being cooked up inside trees and down under the dirt, sweet and obvious as an ill-concealed love. The grounds around the manor are as barren as ever, but underneath, she knows everything is changing. Buds and tendrils and roots and insects are waking up, and she’s going to miss all of it. She’ll be long gone by the time the fever sets in for real and the car in the woods goes green with creepers and the birds really begin to sing in the new leaves.

  She can see it clearly: weeks from now, on a night lush with new growth and crickets, the night watchman will step out and be swallowed by darkness—realm of the owl, of the revolving head and the secret message. In darkness the owl will call to him from its branch—repeatedly, insistently, as if calling to one of its own. When he hears the cry, the night watchman will pause for a moment, listening. Then he will stroke his beard, push back his sleeves, and continue into the night: moving through the dark unafraid, walking the woods’ edge under the black wing of sky, doing what he’s there to do.

  Reading Guide Questions

  1. What is the role of fear in the story? What exactly is Bert afraid of?

  2. Is there a connection between the salamander in the springhouse and Bert’s writer’s block? If so, how are these two things connected?

  3. To what extent is it true what Rosemary quotes her father as saying—namely, that writers are always writing? Is it true for Bert?

  4. What do you see as some of the factors that contribute to Bert’s feeling of block while at the manor? Do they feel universal, or specific to her?

  About the Author

  Zoë Rosenfeld is a writer and editor. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Bullhorn and Transfer, her poetry was included in the anthology New American Underground Poetry Vol. I: The Babarians of San Francisco—Poets from Hell, her reviews have appeared in Esquire, Biography, Us, and Paper magazines, and an essay of hers was included in the anthology Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, published by Bloomsbury. She is also the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in fiction.

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