by Various
She glances up through long lashes. “I’m-I-don’t know how to – ”
I step forward and touch her skin as cautiously as I approached the macaw. She’s real. Her skin is the same velvet I’ve dreamt about.
She comes closer and our faces align. My knees buckle. I can’t look away.
Her breath on my cheek is ragged and hot.
I can’t breathe. I stop trying.
“I-I think – ” she stutters again.
I close the space between us and touch my lips to hers. My eyes open, gauging her reaction. Her mouth is soft and yields to mine. I shut my eyes, and blood runs thick and jittery through my veins. I don’t want to stop, but I don’t want Min or one of the others to find us here.
“Come with me.” I pull her out of the aviary, her elegant long arm a strand of ribbon connecting us. Us.
We stand behind the garden shed, and I peer out. No servants. No siblings. We run, breath puffing out in tiny clouds, heading toward the hidden sanctuary. Diana giggles as I drag her behind me, and I want so badly for her to clamp her beautiful mouth before we’re caught.
And then, Clarey’s deep-throated voice booms across the garden. “Alice. Father’s waiting on the eggs, but – ”
The three of us stop. Wind whistles through dried-out branches.
“Clarey – ”
“What’s going on? Who are you?” Clarey’s hard, dark eyes eat away at Diana’s smile until it shrinks on her face. Clarey cuts her eyes at me next. “What have you done?”
“It’s not what you think,” I explain. “Diana isn’t infected. The Plague is gone.” Neither Clarey nor Pollock inherited Mother’s empathy, so I know this cannot end well.
Her muscles tense. “Everyone is infected.”
Diana drops my hand and leaves a cold spot behind. “I’m not – ”
“Everyone is infected.” Clarey looks from me to Diana and back again. “You’ve damned us all.” Then she runs fast toward the castle door.
“She’ll tell Father.” The cloistered garden air is not enough to fill my lungs. It’s stale and oppressive, musty from years of confinement, and in this moment I can no longer breathe it. It’s spoiled like old meat.
Diana coos in my ear: “Inhale. Exhale. It’s going to be okay.”
I do as she says. It’s not helping. “You don’t understand. He’ll lock you up. Quarantined.”
“I’m a bird.” She smiles. Those red lips. Those crinkled eyes. “I have more elixir. I can fly.”
I look at the aviary. “This is a dangerous place for birds.” She doesn’t know Father. I haven’t told her about how his eyes have gone dead. How he still talks to Mother. How none of us can reason with him or predict his reactions anymore.
“Come with me, then.”
“I can’t.” What will they do when the food runs out? I’m the green thumb. The only one who plans for our future needs. Who will take care of them?
For the first time, Diana’s face betrays a hint of annoyance. “You want to stay here? Caged? This is not a life. We can have a life together.”
“We’ll meet by the hedges. It can be enough.” After tasting her kiss, I know I can sustain myself for months, powered only by the promise of more.
“We can’t do this through the hedges.” She entwines me in her ribbon arms, her rosebud lips on mine, and the dead garden drops so far away I think I’ve already transformed into a bird and I’ll come crashing down at any time.
She pulls two small green bottles from the leather satchel on her belt. She hasn’t mentioned my rabbit, but he’s still there. Safe against the curve of her hip. “All it takes is one brief moment of courage,” she says, “and you can change your life forever.”
My thoughts turn to Min, but even if his arms shake, he’ll hold himself together. I picture rain and swimming and open air. Snow and grass and the smell of pastured sheep. I miss being surrounded in things that are sparkling with life. And I want to keep feeling that soaring feeling encased in Diana’s kisses. I want her arms. Her hips. Her lips.
If Diana is right, that plague has disappeared from the High Counties, I could be happy on the outside. I’d be one less mouth for Father to feed.
Linking my pinky with Diana’s, I take one of her bottles and gulp it down before thinking any more.
Within seconds, my arms are scaled with red feathers.
Min’s small face appears in the castle doorway, his mouth dropped open. I wish I knew what he was thinking. How? or impossible or please stay.
My limbs shrink, my toes become sharp talons, and my dark hair molts onto the garden ground.
I can’t stop it now, even if I wanted to.
The castle drops away, my family turning into ants below. Flying is easier than I expected. My strong wings do all the work. It’s best this way, because if I had to really think about it, I might drop from the sky, heart too heavy to fly.
I push forward to catch up with the brilliant blue macaw. Diana. She leads me over lush green forest, and I dip down into the shady branches, letting crisp green leaves brush my wings. The fresh organic smell sings to me, siren songs of the world I’ve missed.
When I pop back out, we are cresting Dryer’s Hill, the old farmhouse not abandoned but thriving with cows and sheep munching sweet grass side by side. Father told us there wasn’t a living soul within fifty miles. Did he just not know?
Once over the hill, more farms stretch out in a patchwork of crops. Life everywhere.
He couldn’t have known.
Finally, Diana angles down into a patch of gray woods and we land in front of a ramshackle house freckled with peeling paint. The walls list precariously to the right, as though seeking out sunlight from the dark forest floor.
Diana transforms back with a squawk, leaving a bed of blue feathers at her feet. “Imagine arms and legs and all the experiences that are uniquely human. That’s how you turn back.”
I picture my wings becoming arms, but it doesn’t work.
“It might take a second.” Her smile is beatific.
My talons stay talons, despite memories of feet. I think of my family and the stone castle walls, feeling trapped. Then I think of Diana. Our conversations through the hedge, making up our own fairy tales to drown out the sorrows of our lives. Her velvet touch. My hand on the small of her back. Wanting to kiss her neck and whisper into her ear. Red lips.
I’m still thinking of her when I feel taller and realize that I, too, am standing on a bed of feathers.
“What did you think of?” she asks.
My face is on fire. “Arms and legs. Running. Dancing.”
Diana’s skin glows in the bare light that reaches us through the canopy. “I thought of you.”
Now, I wish I’d told the truth.
She directs me inside the leaning house. “It’s not a castle, but it’s everything we have.”
We walk into a small room with ceilings low enough to touch. Tattered red curtains frame slanted windows. An older woman sits by the fire, sewing a patch on a small pair of pants, and several children sit at the long table, playing cards. Toasted logs crackle in a fireplace, and it feels like a home. Behind the table, an intricate tapestry shows a pastoral scene with birds in flight above golden wheat fields. Two more kids rip into the room, chasing each other and laughing.
Diana introduces me to her family, and every one of them gives hugs to rival Min’s.
“Is this the girl?” her mother asks.
Diana nods, flushing red down to her neck.
“You’ve chosen well.”
Now I’m flushed, too. The children giggle. They’re always giggling.
As night slides down over the hovel, shadows creep over her beautiful face and we talk like through the hedges. Hopes. Dreams. Fairy tales. The rooms darken and Diana’s mother lights candles.
“We can live here,” Diana says, golden light flickering over her features.
I nod and smile, my eyes misting. I could really live here.
With my li
fe on hold, in a house of constant mourning, I’d forgotten how varied the shades of color could be. There’s the deep green of a turtle’s rough skin and the yellow-green of a sunlit valley. The pale blue of open sky and the clear, shimmering blue of clean water. Diana and I tour the countryside like we’ve never seen leaves or bugs or flowers.
We while away hours swimming, hiking up mountains, and finding tufts of grass to make our beds. Then memorizing the hushed trickle of a creek as we ghost our fingers across each other’s skin, from armpit to hip to thigh to calf. Dappled light pokes through the branches and plays across her creamy tan skin.
I can touch her. There’s no more fantasy or wondering. What does the inside of her belly button look like? I can look and find out. It’s a swirl of folded skin, tucked daintily in the middle of her stomach. Her back? A constellation birthmark. A long, beaded spine that bends with swanlike grace.
I almost forget Min. Clarey and Pollock. Father. Almost. Thoughts of them shiver in my periphery, mirages in the distance until Diana pulls me back in and drowns me in kisses. Until her ribbon-arms tug me to a mountain or a valley or our favorite: Cherry Lake.
The lake is a blob of water with uneven edges that cut deep into the forest and curve back anxiously, like a baby bird testing the strength of its wings. Above, a quiet bridge looks down on the biggest part of the lake. The waterfall, falling as if from the road itself, mutes everything outside of us. Us.
We’re at Cherry Lake when we hear them, even over the thunderous waterfall. Horses on the bridge. Gruff men’s voices shouting.
“Does he really think we’ll find his daughter? They were birds. They flew.”
“They could be anywhere.”
“Why did you promise him anything?”
“Did you see the sacks of gold?”
Father. He’s sent men out in search of us. Not his own men. He doesn’t have many left. I wonder how he found these men. Did he allow them into the castle? Did he leave?
We stay hidden beneath the waterfall as the men pass by on the road above and thoughts chip away at some truth inside my brain. Birds cheep from the trees surrounding us, and my thoughts streamline and fall into place. He spoke with these men. Father knows. The plague is gone and Father knows.
When we walk back to the hovel, we don’t take the road but crouch and hide in the shadows. Both of us quiet, though I’m bursting with questions: When did he know?
Why would he keep this from us?
How could he?
Father was not fencing out the world, but fencing in his family. Starving us. Until we could be with Mother. The realization shatters me. He was killing us.
Diana pauses as we round a tree and the hovel comes into view. She turns to me and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “I think it’s safe to talk now. If you want to.”
“Father knew about everything. He wasn’t our protector; he was our warden.”
She frowns. “What do you want to do?”
“Min, Clarey, Pollock. I have to go back for them.”
I borrow a sturdier gown from Diana’s closet, and it fits me like she does – perfectly. I tie one of her belts around my waist.
Diana tucks Mother’s little white rabbit into the belt. “For courage.” She links her pinky with mine. Her little finger is a counterweight, keeping my mind firmly set on the task ahead. I lean in and kiss her. Her mouth still tastes like freedom, even as we head back toward my former cage.
Our boots scuff the dirt road, fogging our feet with dust. All the hiking has strengthened my legs, and we come upon the Dryer’s Hill farm long before I thought we might. The road snakes past the farm and into the forest. The smell is still green and pure, all the freshness rushes into my brain.
We plod along quietly, and less than a mile later, the woods part and the castle gates tower above us.
No servant stands guard. Unusual. The few remaining must’ve formed part of the search party. The outer hedge is impossibly tall and thick – the middle fortified with narrowly-spaced iron bars. Precautions against the onslaught of plague. I once felt so safe inside the confines of our garden. Father showed me all the ways we were protected from outsiders. It’s eerie to know the truth. I finger the stuffed rabbit in my belt. We’ve been little rabbits since Mother’s death, caught in Father’s snare, and thanking him for our shackles.
The others need to know.
Just then, Pollock strolls by in his armed guard uniform. Father always let him patrol when guards were needed elsewhere.
“Lock!” I wave my arm through the wrought iron gate. “It’s me, Alice!”
Pollock isn’t close to the gate, but he backs away all the same. He glances behind me, at Diana, and his eyes widen. “Get out of here,” he hisses.
“I have news!” I call out. “The plague is over.”
He shakes his head, dark curls bouncing. “I’m warning you, Alice. Leave!”
My own brother, turning me away. But it’s too late. Father’s voice booms from across the courtyard as he storms into the gateway. “Open the gates!”
I barely have time to register Pollock’s betrayal and distrust before I’m rushed into the courtyard, Diana at my side.
Father embraces me. His heavy black mourning cloak falls off his bony shoulders and nearly pulls me under, too. He sighs. “Alice. My Alice.”
I pull back. Question myself. Maybe he really didn’t know. So, I tell him, “Father, it’s gone.”
His hand is heavy on my arm. “What’s gone, Little Dove?”
“Plague.”
He shakes his head and looks at Diana. His eyes narrow. “She’d have you believe that, wouldn’t she?”
“I saw it with my own – ”
“Vile temptress,” Father spits the words as he motions to two guards behind him. “Take her to the north turret.”
“You can’t.” Locked away from the rest of the castle. Windows barred. No escape. I grip Diana’s hand. “Stop.”
“Alice.” Her eyes are full of questions. Confusion. Fear.
My heart feels rubbed raw, every beat blisters in my chest. I try to hang on to her ribbon-arms, but the guards wrench her from my grasp. “Diana.” Before I can chase her, two other guards flank me, their sturdy hands cinching my wrists together. “Father, what – ?”
“I can’t risk it, Little Dove.” He won’t look at me. “You could be infected.”
Pollock stares on, helpless. Tears in his eyes. He’d been trying to warn me. The guards drag me between them. “I’m not. I’m not infected.”
“We shall know in time.”
Food is scarce in the south turret. I only hope Diana is being fed at all. Being away from her is like missing a limb.
I get bird food. Scraps of near-rotten meat, carrots, and cabbage. One of the guards apologizes to me. Says it’s all he’s allowed to give. Father doesn’t want to waste proper food if I’m to die anyway.
It’s been several days, and so far, only Min has come to see me. He slipped fresh boiled chicken and carrots beneath the door. I inhale them greedily.
When I’m done, I see that his shadow is still there outside the door. “Min.”
“Alice.”
“You have to know I’d never bring plague into our home. I’d never risk the family.”
“I know,” he whispers.
“Father is letting you die. Letting us die.” A knot in my throat strangles my voice. “To be with Mother.”
Min doesn’t respond. His body shuffles around outside the door.
“So it’s not – there’s no one infected at all? Out there?” His voice shakes, confronting the giant crevasse between the world we thought we knew and the one that really exists.
“It all looked the same. It looked better than the same.”
I hear his body slump against the door. “Tell me about it.”
I tell him about the river we found, rocks worn smooth from water. The acrobatic fish tossing themselves into the air. I paint a picture for him with as many colors as I ca
n name.
“I’m afraid.” His voice is tiny. “Will Father really let us die?”
“You should go. Take Pollock and Clarey. You all should have a life.”
Min doesn’t respond, and I know it’s because he can’t. He can’t respond because he can’t leave. He won’t leave me.
“Can you bring any food to Diana? Do you know where she’s being held?”
“In the north turret. I brought her my breakfast this morning. The guards aren’t allowed to bring her anything.”
My eyes melt into tears, thinking of his dinner I just polished off. “But what will you eat, Min?”
Nothing. That is what he’ll eat. We both know.
“We all missed you,” he says.
I poke a finger under the door to touch his hand. “I missed you, too.”
The next night, he brings Clarey and Pollock, and they each pass slivers of cabbage under the door in exchange for my stories. I regale them with descriptions of the waterfall at Cherry Lake, careful not to dwell on my swimming partner for fear of bursting into tears.
I painstakingly describe the meal Diana’s mother cooked us over the fire. Fresh fish. Salty and light. Fish was one of Mother’s favorites.
They weren’t sure whether to believe me, but when Clarey asked Father about the rumors – that the plague was gone – he struck her across the face. And then they knew.
“Tomorrow is chicken pie. I’ll bring you my slice,” Min says.
I want to refuse, but I am weak from hunger.
The next evening he comes alone and makes good on his promise. Chicken pie. His shoes click away as fast as they approached.
I bite into the pie, and my teeth quiver on something hard and metal. I dig it out – a key.
The key is loud in the lock. Clanging, metal on metal. At night, no one is around to hear it. I creep down and down the spiral stairs until I come out near Min’s rooms, and he slips out to meet me. I don’t even have to knock. He must’ve been waiting.
We pass Clarey’s room. Min taps once on the bottom of her door, and she quietly comes out to joins us. Then Pollock. They fall in line behind me, a string of somber ducklings. We waddle toward the north turret, and there on the bottom step, clutching a key of her own, is Diana. My Diana.