Some of us want the light left on. But others of us want to surrender to the darkness. Everyone is eager for us to get over it. What we represent. What we are. What they sense. In our terror we become terrifying. But then we give in to time and we leave it behind, and that part of us dulls. Atrophies. We lose that particular sensory faculty. We abandon. It must hurt, when we do that. At some point, someone might decide to give chase, especially if the right call goes out through the ether.
We never actually thought we were summoning demons.
You only understand this later. You understand this when it’s too late.
* * *
They beat themselves against the door. The windows. I turn the lights off and place my back against the wall. The table is covered with those nonsense scribblings that I know are not nonsense at all. I cracked a door open. I didn’t realize. I thought it was just an exercise. I thought these were mines into which I could travel and return again to the light. I thought. I really did.
I have a knife. Pace. I close my eyes and sees rows upon rows of corn and through them the wind hints at wars and rumors of wars inside the head of a child. They cut down the corn before winter came. Didn’t the wind have to go somewhere? Didn’t the starlings need somewhere to nest?
How many of us, walking around and around and not knowing?
Endless feathered bodies, impacts, falling to pieces. What they carry inside, little bombs of blood and guts and bone.
A voice, rising above the fluttering and the cries and the sounds of the breaking bodies. For a moment I think it must be a lie; then I get to my feet and go to the window, pull back the curtain. The dark is heavy outside but the moon has risen—except wasn’t it always there, and only sometimes I could see it?—and the world outside is thrown into cold illumination. I see piles of the shattered bodies of birds, and I see blood staining the concrete and the grass, but most of all I see him, always here, always, standing a few feet from the door, his hands raised and reaching forward.
I can’t see his face. I know, I know, if I could I would see two ink-ball eyes and a beak ready to stab. In the dark, in bed, he was always looking back at me. He was ready. He was waiting.
What do you want?
Come outside, he whispers like rustling leaves. Come outside and run.
I want to. I lean against the wall and close my eyes. I haven’t slept well in days. Maybe weeks. Maybe, I think, I’ve never slept well, and every time I’ve believed I have has been a medicated lie. When I was small I lay awake for hours and poured myself into the dark. Looking for something.
I came close. Once or twice. I heard the voice I’ve been trying to reach. I’ve spent the time since then trying to find it again. I didn’t think. I didn’t think about what might happen when I did.
* * *
Pacing the rooms, banging my head against the brick. Alone and not alone; it’s very crowded in here. I’m going outside. We all know it’s coming eventually. Everyone watching with their glistening voids of eyes. I’m going outside because that’s always where I’ve been going, because I’m going to answer, because when you make a deal someone always comes to collect.
* * *
At first I can’t see, standing there in the doorway, feeling cold blast through me. There are no more bird bodies sending wet impacts against the house, there are no more cries or hisses or whispers. The night is silent but it’s a silence that threatens to break open. It’s like a cage made of glass, like reeds of it that would shiver and chime at the right sound. Chime and then shatter and scatter their pieces, cut through my face and arms and hands, my neck.
I’ve held on to that blood for a long time. This borrowed skin, these eyes.
I step out into the night and I raise my hands, and he comes for me out of the silence.
His feathers flutter in a sudden breeze. They whisper. His eyes glisten with a sourceless light and his beak is long and sharp. I could have killed him, I think, still and waiting for him. I could have killed him and all the time he was flooding that into me, lying there beside me and stroking me through the hours and the days. The years. Was he sent? Has he always been this way? Or did they take him?
I put out my hands and I feel the smooth, knobbed stalks of the bamboo. Smooth and knobbed as bone.
Your heart.
End it, end it, end it.
He spreads his wings. The world is still absolutely still but for that, but I’m sure I feel thousands upon thousands of eyes watching, boring into me like needles. I spread my arms in mimicry of him, I put back my head, and his beak cuts almost tenderly into me, splitting flesh and cracking bone. There’s very little pain, but everything in me stirs, rustles, hisses at me with a deep, old excitement. I lay my hands on my chest, run my fingers over the slash he’s made, and the world blurs away as he folds his wings around me. I pull. Stretch. I tug apart the cage of my ribs.
Out they come. Two, five, twenty, a hundred. They take to the air, embracing it, and the air around me explodes with wings and delighted whispers.
My knees are weakening but he holds me up, his beak caressing my cheeks, my throat. I feel the bowing of the bamboo. I feel warm slick on my chest. I look down at my hand and I see the glitter of steel, and for a single instant there is light again, my doorway, a figure standing there, eyes wide, shoving himself through and running forward.
No. No, you don’t understand. This is what I owe.
Paid in full, I think, all my starling children around me, bearing me up even as I fall. Running through the corn, filled up with the dark, all us little children who forget and need to be reminded. All us little children haunted, carrying the hungry dark, making of it what we can.
No more making, little children. Run. Fly.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Sunny Moraine
Art copyright © 2017 by Robert Hunt
Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color Page 2