The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  You open the window beside your bed. A sliver, and you bring your nose close. Fresh air. The world’s greens and your father’s garden. The crickets’ thrum. The radio announcer lost in ecstasy, a tirade your mother would have chided. A playing to fear and hatred of the other. The mistaking of volume for truth. “This is a rebirth! A new beginning for us all and a glorious—” Frayed wires circle your gut, a thorny current. A current you surrender to, and you rock in time. Tremors in the box spring. The clock’s digits the bright red of your father’s riverside bloom, his hands cupped beneath the plant, tender, careful. “Victory is ours. The shining city on the hill awaits—”

  You yank the plug. Silence. A black display. You lie down and hug your knees, a child’s pose, your fist at your mouth, your knuckles bitten. Close your eyes, and in the dark, images as clear as photographs. The projector hums. The pictures cup your heart. The pictures rip your spine.

  Morning. A vigil by the bedroom window. This narrow view. Minutes of nothing but sidewalk and street. Then a passing car. A boy on a bike, a lazy pace, his backpack sagging from his shoulders. You think of school—bells and the cafeteria’s din. You imagine your empty seat in a half dozen classes and wonder if your teachers still call your name. You imagine voices and drama and the cold morning you punched Missy Blough in the mouth. All of it slipping away, notes in a larger fading. What is and what was and what’s lost forever.

  Downstairs and you open the backdoor, checking for neighbors before letting Chestnut out. “Don’t be long,” you whisper, a kiss between his ears, his favorite spot. Chestnut sniffs his way around the rabbit fence and shed. His funny stride, a mystery of his stray’s life, a secret you’ll never know. The air cooler, autumn’s chilled dew. The next-door neighbor backs his car from the garage. Chestnut bolts to the back gate, barking, hackles raised. You crouch, your voice hoarse and low. “Chestnut! Come!” The car hesitates then rolls off. Chestnut returns, tail wagging, a meandering route. A gimpy ascension of the porch stairs.

  A turned knob and the bolt slides into its sleeve. The note a period, an ending. Helen’s not coming back. The notion sudden. Obvious. She isn’t coming back—at best, not soon. Perhaps never. The things she knows, the people she could expose. Then another understanding—you have to leave. Mail will pile in the box. The man next door will wonder about Helen’s new dog. A boy will tiptoe through the gate to retrieve his football. Neighbors will notice the empty driveway and uncut grass. A knock will come. A good Samaritan. A busybody. Slater. The door will push open, and the world will flood in, and you’ll be powerless to halt the tide. Have a plan.

  You take inventory—the offerings of the refrigerator and pantry, the understanding that even if you’re not hungry, your journey will require fuel. Chestnut on your heels. Eyes of watery black, patient, intent. Your search extends to other rooms, and you sift through drawers and cabinets. A new vision, one keen to appreciate the overlooked and forgotten. Calculations of a hundred different futures. You fill your pockets—a Swiss Army knife, matches, a pen flashlight, a compass. Bookending this, another perspective, and you pause before framed pictures and run a hand over upholstery, pick up the shelves’ knickknacks and puff away the dust. You think of a life interrupted. We are all energy—your father’s words. All sunlight. All stardust. All conjured from a single handful of elements. You wonder what happens to a candle snuffed so quickly. Wonder if its energy simply leaves or if it lingers, making its peace with this world before moving on. You know which answer you think is true and speak out loud, “Thank you, Helen.”

  You climb the stairs. The weight in you. You’ll eat later. You’ll push aside your throat’s gag and refuel. You enter Helen’s room and set the dog on the unmade bed. Chestnut sniffs, a tightening circle until he burrows beneath the blankets. A dresser, a drawer open, a tangle of bras. Socks on the floor, a pair of jeans. Atop the bureau, hand cream and moisturizer. A crumpled receipt. A shopping list. Two more framed pictures. Helen and another woman sitting in a sidewalk café. An older photo, its color faded, two children in white gloves and Easter bonnets. The window’s shade drawn, and from its side, a sunlit sliver stretches across the rumpled bed.

  You lie next to Chestnut. The sunlight cuts across your belly, and you surrender to the drift. Numbness claims your toes, your legs. Vines of sleep climb from your pelvis and into your chest. Your fingers on Chestnut’s side, and the rise and fall of his breath meets yours. You think again of Helen, her disappearance and the stillness left in her wake. You think of your mother and how all that matters now is to find her. Your hand slips from Chestnut’s side and reaches out, a slow glide over the covers. You’ll rest now, and when you wake, there’ll be work to do.

  The pool frozen, and you’re skating, the slash of metal beneath you, but it feels like flying. Or perhaps you’re flying, just a bit. You’re chasing a man, his back to you, a winter coat and old-fashioned hat, but as you near, your right arm grows so long it drags beside you, and the ice beneath begins to fissure and the groans fill your ears. You skate harder, escaping the cracks that threaten to swallow you. You skate and skate and skate yourself right out of your dream to discover Chestnut licking your hand. The sun gone from the window. You consider the bedside clock and wonder if your team has a game today. The tap of the ball on your stick, the sun lower and your shadow stretching, the grass crisper as the season goes on—you yearn for these yet no longer feel their claim. Your playing, one of the cornerstones of your days, just another element of your abandoned life. And around you, Helen’s abandoned life, a shell you inhabit, and you think of your father’s stories of interloper species. The hermit crab. The cuckoo. The poor magpie.

  Downstairs, and you make peanut butter on crackers. Mouthfuls forced down, a gagging you temper with sips of milk. The food a betrayal, an acceptance of all that’s happened. Yet you need fuel. You need to get to work. The basement next. Chestnut sniffs the silent furnace. You open boxes, scour shelves. Your take gathered in a canvas shopping bag. A length of clothesline. A box cutter. A long screwdriver.

  You latch onto the safe room’s shelving unit, and with feet planted wide, pull. The door heavier than you imagined, a strain in your shoulders. The shelves inch back and with it, a breath of must. You cross the threshold. An inside handle makes the door easier to close. Chestnut’s nails scrape as he tries to stay ahead of the door’s swing. His eyes on you until the eclipsing slam of metal and wood.

  Darkness. Not even a doorjamb sliver. Your feet and hands lost. You picture the room, a locked box within a locked box. You picture the twists of the hermit crab’s shell. You listen to your breath, and in this blackness, who’s to say the space before you isn’t a thousand-mile vista or a rooftop’s ledge.

  Chestnut’s barks muffled, his frightened call. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” you say. You open the door, and Chestnut squeezes through. A welcoming rub against your shins. You pull the light cord and scan the shelves. A set of keys, a fire extinguisher coated with dust and cobwebs. You tiptoe to reach a rusted tin can on the top shelf, and inside, an envelope stuffed with cash, bills limp and faded. Behind the can, a plastic shopping bag. The bag weighty, and you realize it isn’t a single bag but many. You peel away layer after layer. The plastic flutters down, and Chestnut sniffs the soft pile at your feet. A flutter in your chest. The object’s buried weight growing more certain until the final bag drops.

  You’ll leave at midnight. This is your plan, but the in-between hours twist in your brain. You pace, visualizing your excursion’s stages yet the details fade in uncertainty. Connection proves elusive, and you veer between the things on which you need to focus and the nightmares you’re desperate to forget. You talk to yourself, mutterings like the mad woman you thought Helen to be. You punch your sternum, a hard smack. Focus, you scold. Focus on the horizon’s distant light. A light of control. Of having a say in this madness. You check the clock again. You’d scream if you weren’t afraid of waking the neighbors. Your fists clench and release. The checking and recheckin
g of your provisions. 11:25, and another moment inside will tear you in half. You prop open the basement door with an old paint can and step outside.

  Three times Chestnut follows you up the well’s steps. Three times you pick him up and bring him back. Three times you fight the desire to nuzzle him, to whisper assurances. If something happens to you, you don’t want him trapped, starvation, abandonment’s slow death. You put him down and speak sternly. “Stay.” Your finger held up until he sits and you back away. “Stay.”

  Pause at the yard’s edge. Shadows all around, and you remember what it was like to step out after the Shut-In, the sensation of losing yourself beneath a suddenly open sky. You make a final check for Chestnut, his whimper tempered by the crickets. With your first step onto the alley’s macadam, you become a diver knifing into deep water. A plunge. A new reality. A new identity. You carry a black trash bag, your steps hurried, a cool breeze. You strain to picture the moment beyond the moment and the moment beyond that. The jeans Helen bought for you a size too small, and with each stride comes the nudge of the pistol tucked into your waistband.

  The earth soft beneath your old oak. The years of shade and dropped leaves. Your grill missing, its cover a formless pile. The shed doors flung open, and on the lawn, a broken rake, your first two-wheeler. A rabbit picks amid the garden’s toppled pots. The half-moon shines on the house’s unbroken windows. The picnic bench strewn with a trowel, gloves, and bag of soil, and in a pot, the riverside’s closed red bloom. Your flip-flops slap, the flagstone path you could walk blindfolded.

  Dogs bark, and you think of Helen’s stories, the city’s roaming packs. For you, in this one and only moment of quantum possibilities, reunion and the paralyzing confluence of memory. The baking weeks you watched this house rise. Your scrambles down these back steps and the door’s thoughtless slam. A thousand moments as preserved as the bio department’s riverside diorama, scenes ready to step into and re-inhabit. But the girl from those memories doesn’t feel real tonight, and in you, the discomfort of being lost in the place you know best.

  Four concrete stairs. The porch’s elevation allows a glance over Slater’s fence. His house quiet. The haze of return fades, and you slip into a moment vivid and real. His brow’s sweaty sheen. His booming commands in a living room where voices were seldom raised. The drum’s beat fueled your grip, and you rub your forearm, the place where your pulses met, and if only you’d held on, been stronger. A trading of your father’s pained face for Slater’s. A trading of fates and the wish you would have choked the life out of his dark, greasy heart.

  Your father’s voice next and the image fades. Have a plan—and you recount the list of what you’ve come to claim. Clothes, boots, food. A set of car keys. In ten minutes you’ll be on the road. Moonlight on the trees. Chestnut by your side, the passenger window lowered, his snout testing the country air. You’ll find your way to your grandmother’s house in the country, the route pieced together from years of backseat memories. You’ll fall asleep at dawn and wake to the call of woodland birds. You’ll help your grandmother can her garden harvest. You’ll catch fish in the stream, thankful for the squeamish memories of your uncles and their gutting knives. You’ll cry as you tell her about the mob. And at the end of every thought, your mother. A waiting reunion, each of you poised to save the other.

  The door swings back, the mudroom, then the kitchen. The penlight’s thin halo ripples over the floor’s broken dishes. Chestnut’s bowls overturned. Scattered silverware. The air still and hot. Flies, the buzzing near then far then near. You cover your mouth, the garbage, the windowsill’s rotting tomatoes. The refrigerator and stove gone, gap-toothed spaces your mind keeps filling, hallucinations of reflex and memory. The family room next. The TV ripped from the wall. The stereo gone. The bookshelves toppled, their falls arrested by the mounds of spilled books that didn’t interest the looters. Volumes on flora and fauna, some books kicked into far corners, others splayed open and trampled and creased, the intricate drawings that had once fascinated you. You lift the penlight’s tip. Red spray paint on the wall, a cross within a circle.

  The dining room next then the foyer. Uneven footsteps. The path cluttered, papers, books, chairs. The front door askew, its top hinge yanked from its mooring. Glass fragments capture the penlight’s shine. The car and truck keys gone from their hooks. A peek out the door’s crooked window. The curbside and driveway empty. Just the streetlight and its cone of white. Your pulse spikes. Have a plan.

  A steadying grip on the stairwell handrail. The past a mist that breaks over you with every step. Voices so clear it seems impossible you’re alone. You reach your room, the window allowing its angle of streetlight. The looters here too, and you pick through the mess. The plastic bag whispers as you gather your wardrobe’s remains. Your laptop and phone and jewelry box gone, your dream journal left behind. You kick off your flip-flops and slide into socks and sneakers. Your parents fading and now strangers all around, and you shudder in their presence. You change into jeans and a black, long sleeved T-shirt. Your hair tied back. The gun tucked back in your waistband.

  The doorway of your parents’ room, and you think of Lot’s poor wife and the price of looking back. The penlight’s shaft sweeps across the clothes and upturned drawers. The bedframe smashed, the mattress tossed aside. A glimmer by your feet, and you stoop and pick up the necklace your mother sometimes wore. A silver cross barely an inch long. A piece of jewelry she received on her confirmation, a delicate chain with hints of tarnish. You slide your hands beneath your hair, secure the clasp, and as you do, you feel the touch of her hands, the braids she wove, the intimate talks where your eyes never met. You lift the cross. The metal a breath against your fingers.

  The stairs, and the cross taps the base of your neck. A pause at the steps’ bottom. From outside, a dog’s deep bark. You don’t belong here, not anymore, and in you, a reversing of poles, the pull of home now a revulsion. You fall in your scramble to leave, the floor’s littered mess and a hard strike to the knee. Your hand finds a broken vase. Dirt on your palm, a fern your father wanted to transplant before the first frost. You right yourself and kick through the debris. You picture the room’s shards and flotsam swelling in your wake, the shattered mess rising. A tide destined to swallow you if you stay.

  Catch your breath at the picnic table. The house’s unbroken windows dull eyes upon you. You walked those floors when the sky stretched blue and wide between the roof’s first beams. You helped your uncles mix mortar. You woke in the comfort of your room, your parents’ voices nearby. Miracles you didn’t appreciate. All of it gone. You pause at the alley trashcan and open your bag. Your dream journal held for a moment, a palm gliding over its cover, before you let it drop.

  Then the drums. A sudden springing to life, one, then another. Voices from the street. Sirens. You hide your bag beneath the picnic table and crouch behind the azaleas. A fire engine passes, a sluggish turn of wheels. Red lights, bloody swaths across the faces of men and boys hurrying in the same direction.

  You wait until the street empties. Then a dash between houses. A backyard path. A ducking of clotheslines and low branches. A landscape of shadows. Sidesteps around a sandbox, a forgotten wheelbarrow. Gather yourself beside a paint-peeling garage. The drums louder. The earthy scent of September gardens. The sting of smoke.

  The alley meets the road, and the flow masses at the next intersection. You press yourself to the garage’s side. In the street, boys you recognize from church and school. Todd Abbot and Billy Stafford with their lingering pool tans. The boys joined by men, everyone charging forward. The drumbeat in the garage’s wood, and the throb calls you to witness. Beside you, a tall trashcan. You sit upon the can’s lid and pull your feet beneath you. A steadying breath and a straightening of legs, a measured extension until you stand upright. A reach, a grasp of the roof’s ledge. With a scape and a grunt, you lift your leg. Your heel finds purchase, and you pull yourself onto the roof.

  My little monkey.


  I don’t think I want to be called monkey anymore.

  A twelve-by-twenty tarpaper patch. You move on hands and knees, and beneath you, the crunch of leaves and cicada shells. You squat behind the front’s small peak. The tarpaper against your palms gritty and warm. From here, a clear view of the intersection and the mob’s circling of the opposite corner. A house with its second floor ablaze, and how many times have you passed, never noticing the porch’s loveseat swing, the silver wind chimes? The first flames poke through the roof’s shingles. The crowd roars.

  The drumbeat faster. You hunker down, your eyes just above the peak. A brick flies. Gunshots and the shatter of glass. A fire engine eases forward. The engine’s horn bleats, and the mob shuffles back. Knotted flames from the upstairs windows, more holes through the roof. Gutters warp and sink in long frowns. Smoky torrents darker than the night. Showers of sparks. The firemen turn their hoses on a neighboring roof. Flags wave, the circle and cross. Strobes and firelight flicker over the mob. Most with their backs to you, others with faces that balance shadow and light. Their cries build with the drums’ beat. “Come out or burn! Come out or burn!”

  A new commotion in the yard beside the garage. A girl screams. You shift, belly pressed against the tarpaper. The yard dark, a border of shrubs. Two men, bald and muscular, their hands on a writhing girl, pulling, wrestling. The girl jerks free, a kick to one man’s shin, a scrambling escape. The chains of a child’s swing set rattle, and the three of them stumble and grope until they collapse in a heap. Tangled limbs and curses. Her top rips, their hands on her breasts, her short skirt pulled to her knees. You gasp, and one of the men turns. You draw away and roll onto your back. A hand over your mouth. The gouge in your spine. You arch onto your shoulders and slide out the gun. Your insides a wasteland wider than the stars’ reach. A two-handed grip on the gun. The butt hard against your chest. Firelight on the chrome, the trembling barrel aimed at a sky of coiled smoke. You lie still, the occupier of a plane parallel to the girl in the yard. You strain to hear but can’t above the voices and sirens. You’re fearful you’ll be betrayed by the mechanics of lungs and pulse, by a cough, the smoke fouled with burnt plastic and foam. The fire cut from view but not its sparks. Orange flecks, orphans on a current that rises then fades. Cinders fall, ashed flurries still warm to the touch. You aim the gun toward the roof’s edge, waiting for a face, a horizon’s horrible moon. Everything louder, the mob’s screams and chants, the drums. You rest a finger on the trigger, and you wonder if firing it is as simple as it looks in the movies. You want to help the girl but you’re afraid, not just of the men but of the violent tide that’s claimed so much of your life and spit you into this nightmare.