The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  The leash limp in my grasp and Chestnut lifts his leg. “What’s going to happen?”

  “I wish I could say, baby.” Her voice thin. Steam from her lips. “But as long as we’re together, it’ll be all right.”

  “The Great Shut-In.” Shut windows. Shut doors. Not even Chestnut is immune, the five-by-ten-foot enclosure my father’s erected off the back stoop, a wooden frame and a tarp that snaps in the wind, dead grass and the stench of urine. Another scent inside our house, the odors of meals and bodies and uncirculated breath. In a few weeks, the war’s shock ebbs into melancholy. Dates lose their meaning. Weeks blur. I reset my bedroom clock after each rolling blackout until the afternoon I curse the blinking 12:00 and pull the plug, the time from then on marked only by my state of mind. Clingy days. Days I cry. Days I bitch and snarl, a sister of the Wolf Pack. Days I barely get out of bed. The walls upon me, and beyond, the promise of a greater smothering. A diseased sky. The horribleness of my kind. A memory—I am four, the darkened bedroom of our old house. I hold a flashlight and, in the beam, my father displays a tennis ball. He moves the ball, explaining shadows and moon phases. Now I see the ball again and think of half a world in darkness, and I wonder why I was allowed to stay in the light.

  There’s a theory in the field of problem solving which proposes even the most complex decisions contain at their heart a binary Ur, a yes-or-no which has the power to trigger an all-changing chain reaction. And if I can burrow to my core, I must believe the Shut-In has left me with a pair of default filters. One is a dread I am loathe to voice, the fear that speaking the horror’s name will feed it, and that soon, it will outgrow its cage. The other is boredom, a lesser evil, the Shut-In’s white noise, a restless note lurking in every frequency. I’ve never been bored before—I had parents keen to rescue me with hikes or excursions to the river, I had my imaginings of parallel and hidden planes—but the Shut-In has changed that. The itch burrows deep in my spine, a parasite to my host, and the contagion seeps out until its static reaches my head and the shrinking space I fight to keep as my own. These same rooms. The same faces, none more galling than the one waiting in the mirror. The girl with sallow skin and searching eyes. The one so weak she’s discovered new realms of self-pity. The stillness all around encountered by the upheaval within, the swelling in my hips and breasts. The tedium of unchanging window views and a sunless sky. The sting of recognizing my pettiness in this time of want, my gifts of food and shelter, a family I love more than myself but who are also conspirators in my suffocation. A thousand alternate realities crowd under our roof, and on the days I find myself suffocating beneath the press of my parents’ bodies and stories, I lock my bedroom door and curse myself and my fate. I plead, scream into my pillow, hold planks until I collapse, my arms too jellied to wipe my brow’s sweat. When the itch redlines, I storm my room’s cramped space. My hands punch the air, the tears hot on my cheeks. Then, in time, acceptance—or surrender—I can’t say which. Decompression, and the bands across my chest loosen, and my march slows. I rub my eyes, and as fatigue descends, I collapse onto my bed. Spent. Hollow. The sleep that follows deep and black. Naps that steal hours in a room where time no longer matters. Narcotic dreams, and half paralyzed, I struggle to call out—but my lips have turned to stone, my mouth stuffed with feathers, with rocks and dirt. The pages of my dream journal fill.

  After, I drag myself downstairs, sluggish yet my senses on fire, everything too dim or too bright, too quiet or too loud. I lash out. My parents—who else do I have? Their kind words and suffocating questions. Their worry written in every glance. I accuse them of complicity in their generation’s sins. The blinders they’ve accepted. Their allegiances to a corrupt system’s profits and wealth and power, the currencies of fear and war. Then the personal attacks. A sharing of pain. The hurt in their eyes proof I’m alive, that I still have a say in this asylum. My words honed, arrows aimed at their most tender spots. My mother’s clutter. The inane pop songs she loves. The poems no one reads. My father’s fey obsession with plants while the world burns.

  In time, the haze lifts, and with it, a boomerang pain. Acceptance, surrender—again, I can’t choose—and with it, a plummet back to my parents’ orbit. The ensuing days where their absences trigger panic. Where I’m underfoot more than Chestnut. I curl next to my father on the sofa, not caring what we listen to or talk about. I beg my mother to brush and braid my hair. Anything to be near. Anything not to be alone. The TV off or else I’ll cry.

  Weeks of this. Months.

  I’m doing pushups in the family room. I’ve already washed the breakfast dishes and completed my online assignments. Math concepts I mastered in third grade. A paragraph response I doubt will ever be read. My mother dozes, Chestnut on her lap. The Civil Defense Network on TV, a tutorial on indoor games for preschoolers, the instructor’s perky chatter, a tone that belongs to a different world than the headlines running across the screen’s bottom. Food riots in Cairo and Madrid. The local RAD count. Another pushup, a challenge I give myself, one more and one more after that, and with each rep, I play through the alternate scenarios I might find myself in when I talk with my father.

  He finally enters, truck keys in hand. I squeeze out a last rep then kneel on the floor. “It’s yellow,” I say.

  “Yellow’s not green.”

  “It’s not a bad yellow. See?” Catching my breath, I point to the screen, the latest RAD count for our sector.

  “It’s medium yellow.”

  “It’s not high.”

  He considers his sleeping wife. “It’s really cold.”

  “I’ll have an excuse to wear my new jacket.”

  He sighs. “Come on.”

  Our back porch mudroom has become a portal between in and out. The mudroom windows locked then sealed with plastic and a new caulk border. Hooks for our goggles and masks, our rubber boots lined by the door—father, mother, daughter—and I smile again at my mother’s Goldilocks joke. Jackets then the hooded raincoats we rub with bleach after each return. I lose myself beneath the layers, the raincoat and mask, the goggles’ warped view.

  Out the back door, and we stoop, our shoulders scraping the tarp of Chestnut’s shelter, the space’s shade and urine stench, our slouch staying with us as we hurry-step across the lawn’s snow. A thud in my chest, the thrill of anticipation for my first trip to the distribution center. Even beneath my mask, I hold my breath. The fear of poison all around, and even if the count is low, no one knows when an inhaled microbe could implant itself, a time bomb’s first tick, and perhaps the cells are already dividing beneath my skin. McNally’s new administration has temporarily suspended the Fourth and Sixth Amendments and commandeered the airwaves, but the Internet has proven harder to restrict, its mingling of distortions and lies and truths. Radioactive rain and miscarriages. Epidemics. Irradiated crops and looming famine. Rivers thick with dead fish. The rich sitting comfortably, their hoarded goods and country estates, their hired mercenaries better armed than the police. The hinterlands controlled by ragtag militias who promise rebellion if the authorities confiscate a single gun. The National Guard patrolling the cities, tanks and armored vehicles. Reports of looters shot on sight. For a moment, I question my decision to come, the world so changed, our house cold and claustrophobic but at least knowable. My misgivings countered by the thrill of escape, by the deeper breathing possible amid the landscape’s expanse. I pause before climbing into the truck. My eyes vexed by so many places to focus. The oak’s bare branches clatter. The wind swirls beneath my coat, and with it, a bitter touch, the spasm of muscles. I climb into the cab and shut the door.

  “Can I take the helm?” Last summer, my father let me drive down a riverside dirt road. The seat pulled up and the gearshift wrestled, a series of bucks and stalls, curses under my breath.

  He smiles. “You’ll be back behind the wheel soon enough.”

  The truck’s rattle paints a blurred edge around all I see. The shaking born in the engine mounts my father was going to
repair before the Shut-In, and the vibrations intensify my shivering. Every other Tuesday is our sector’s supply pickup day, and early on, I wrangled a standing promise to join my father if the RAD count was green. Today’s yellow concession a small victory in a time when victories are rare. The streets narrow, plowed paths, and along the curb, the vague outlines of snow-buried cars. A ten-minute drive and we park outside the makeshift center that’s been set up in the gym of my old elementary school.

  The outside guard beetle-like beneath his body armor, an M-16 held across his chest. Our ration card disappears in his gloved hand. He waves a metal detector over my outstretched arms, and my reflection stares back from his curved mask. He raises a hand, and the door opens behind him. A second guard pats us down after we remove our masks and goggles. My body stiffens as his hand roams over my belly and legs.

  I follow my father down a hallway lined with low-hanging artwork. Watercolors and crayons, ill-proportioned people, swollen heads and feet lifted from the ground. In each, a sense of stalled time, the weeks before Christmas break and the excitement of children, the past a dream for them and for me, a reality I wish I could wake to. How easy it had all been and how much I’d taken for granted. I peek into a classroom. The lights off, an array of tiny desks and neatly shelved bins. The calendar waiting to be turned to January. Nametags hung over the coatrack’s empty hooks, and what, I wonder, will they make of all this when they return.

  We enter the gym, and the push of memories slows my steps. A high ceiling and thinned acoustics, voices that rise and thin and then fall back like a lazy snow. Cages for the windows and lights, and across the floor, multi-colored tape patterns—kickball bases, dodge ball’s no-man’s land. I was a child here but now I understand that even in the quantum world, life is full of boundaries that can never be re-crossed. Tables command the perimeter, and for each, a waiting line. Lines for toiletries. Lines for canned goods. Lines for rice and pasta and cereal. I divide the gym into quadrants, make a count and multiply by four, an estimate of a hundred twenty or so, a crowd but not crowded. I spot my health teacher and old bus driver. A pair of sisters from my team. The rest strangers. I wave, say hello, but I stay by my father’s side. I overhear snippets of small talk and gossip. My father asks if I’d like to talk with my teammates, but I say no. It’s enough to be standing in a different space, to breathe new scents. To look into new faces and contemplate lives that aren’t my own.

  Slater scurries by. His gaze down, figures scribbled on his clipboard. I tug my father’s sleeve and whisper, “Is he the boss here?”

  My father grins. “I don’t think so.”

  I can tell by his tone that my father is being kind, an attempt to not voice the obvious—that Slater’s regalia of a policeman’s hat and epaulets and a braided shoulder cord make him look like a buffoon. I think of Missy Blough and the Wolf Pack’s red bandannas and the need of some to belong and command. Slater’s shoes click across the hardwood, his gait a battle between his thick middle and thrown-back shoulders. His commands strain against the gym’s acoustics. Orders for straight lines and for all to keep moving, even if moving means a single, shuffling step. He grunts a distracted “Hello” as he punches our ration cards, an exchange cut short by a whisper from one of the machine-gun-carrying guards.

  We reach the last station. In my hands, a cardboard box, a wedging of cans and bottles and boxes. Another quick calculation figures the probability of our exact combination of goods to be around one in three hundred thousand. The guard walks off, and Slater beckons a bald man I recognize as the school custodian. Slater talks, gesturing to the hallway, but the custodian shakes his head. Slater’s volume and vehemence flare as the custodian turns his back. Slater abandoned with his anger at center court.

  Our boxes at our feet, my father and I don our coats in the main hallway. Slater brushes past. In one hand, he carries a toilet plunger, the other steering a mop and rolling bucket with a wheel that twists and shrieks and requires continual redirecting nudges. Backing up, he pushes open the boys’ restroom door, the wafting stink cut short as I don my mask.

  My mother hums along to a radio song from her youth. She takes my hands and swivels her hips and shoulders, but I remain still. The beat is catchy, but the lyrics might as well be a communiqué from another planet. My mother drops my hands and pouts. “You’re no fun.” She turns back to her mixing bowl. “This was a big hit when I was your age.”

  I scour the silverware drawer. Both of us in sweatshirts, the floor cold through my double socks. The thermostat at fifty, the new decrees rationing gas and heating oil. “Sounds like a lot of partying and groping and shallow rebellion.”

  “And your point is?”

  I retrieve the long chef’s knife and shut the drawer with a nudge of my hip. “Just wonder when someone will feel like writing a song like that again.”

  I lean into the knife and cut slivers from the hard block of cheese, another casserole, potatoes and tinned meats. This past week of red days, announcements after every other song. The proper ways to seal doors and windows. The maintenance of one’s government-issued respirator. The punishments awaiting black-marketeers. But last night brought a shift in the jet stream. The poisons pushed south and the weatherman predicting wind chills near zero.

  I set the pan in the oven. A new song plays, a girl going to a party in a new dress, the boy she hopes to dance with. Yes, I promise my mother, I’ll go right to Fran’s and return before dinner. No, I won’t call and beg to stay the night. Fran my backfield line-mate and best, perhaps only true, friend. My mother follows me into the mudroom, Chestnut between us, looking up, hopeful. I zip my long raincoat over my parka. My mother hands over my goggles and a book for Fran’s mother. A joke about deep-sea divers and kiss before I adjust my mask.

  “There and back, OK? And keep your gear on, no matter what.”

  I salute, my voice muffled. “Aye-aye, captain.”

  I step outside. The touch of my skin buried, my vision warped by my goggles, my mother’s sea-diver comment no longer a joke. I walk slowly and take nothing for granted. My grid fades beneath the day’s panorama. The stretching clouds. Gutter icicles as long as my arm. The snow less white than it used to be. An openness that makes me feel as if I’ve been cast adrift upon the ocean.

  I shed my raincoat and boots and mask on Fran’s back porch. A glimpse through the window, and Fran pogoes on the balls of her feet, waving for me to hurry. The purple streak in her blond bangs has faded since my last visit. Fran is rarely allowed to go out, even on green days, her father’s belief in the Internet’s conspiracies. Gene mutations. New cancers. The RAD counts higher than the government is willing to admit. A plot to thin the population. The waiting future of scant supplies.

  Hugs inside and the oven’s warmth. The book handed to Fran’s mother. Fran’s cat sniffs my feet. Fran and I talk in bursts, laughter as we run up the stairs and the bedroom door slammed behind us. This little space. A nation of two, if only until dusk. We sit facing each other on Fran’s bed, hands held, a crisscrossed, two-handed grip. Confessions and complaints and the relief of abandoning the filters we have to wear around our parents. We curse our boredom. Curse the world. We surf YouTube for music videos and skateboard fails, but our chatter stops after we click into drone footage of a smoldering city. The scene paused when we spot a lone figure in the mist. Fran turns the computer off.

  She grabs her hockey stick and takes a ball from her shelf. A date and a score written in black Sharpie, a hot September afternoon when we shared the field. My toes curl with the memory of standing on grass. Fran balances the ball on the flat heel. The ball rolls, hiccups Fran counters with shifts of her wrists, her gaze intent. “Is it weird I’m more afraid of when this all ends?”

  “No.”

  “It’s like I don’t know what’s normal anymore. Maybe this is normal. Now. Maybe before was the weird part and we just didn’t realize it.”

  My gaze upon the ball. A world balanced. “Maybe. But maybe norma
l is just living. Getting through.”

  “My dad’s so freaked.”

  “Everyone’s freaked.”

  “Not like him.”

  “He’s just worried about you and your mom.”

  “Is your dad like that?”

  “No, but they’re different, you know? They were different before. But I think both are coming from the same place. The same priorities and everything.”

  The ball drops, a thud dulled by the carpet. She hands me the stick, but I shake my head and stand. “I’ve been practicing. Ready?”

  “Am I bracing myself for amazement?”

  I step back until my shoulders touch the far wall and tuck my hair beneath my collar. “Amazement might be a reach.” I put my hands down and lift my legs. My raised toe taps the wall, a testing of my center before I stride forward. My arms shake, and with the first shifting of weight from one hand to the other, my hair escapes, a cascade that flows to the floor.

  Fran’s disembodied voice enters my upside-down world: “Total and complete amazement, sister.”

  I make my way across the carpet. My shoulders strong, these weeks of pushups and planks, set after bored set. Blood runs to my head, pressure in my ears, and in my chest, the struggles of muscle and balance. Perhaps Fran is my best friend because I can do a handstand in front of her and feel like a normal girl doing a silly stunt and not like a math prodigy stepping out of her role. Another lurch, then another before I tumble just short of the bed. I sit, splayed and flushed. I push the hair from my eyes. “I wish I could stay the night.”

  “I could ask. It would be great.”

  “Told my mom I’d be back. She doesn’t want me overstaying.”

  “She never minded before. How many nights have I crashed at your place?

  “It’s different now.”