The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  “Oh, thank God!” said Mom, and then she laughed, a half-nervous, half-relieved sound.

  Only then did it occur to me that we’d lost power simply because it was storming.

  Pete and I both went to the window while Mom lit a candle. It was starting to rain now, and the wind had picked up so much that the suet feeders were swinging like wrecking balls on their branches. There were no birds out there at this hour, of course. They were all off sleeping wherever it was that birds went to sleep.

  “I knew it was going to storm,” said Pete.

  The rain intensified for a moment before turning to hail, pea sized at first, but then marbles. The sound of it clattering off the porcelain birdbath near the front step reminded me of a similar storm we’d had the year before, and how Pete and I had run outside in our rubber boots with green plastic army helmets strapped to our heads, the hail becoming shrapnel from enemy fire, ferocious and deafening, and satisfying in a way that only maybe boys could really appreciate.

  I remembered how we’d danced around like idiots on the front lawn, with Mom and Dad smiling and shaking their heads at us from just inside the front door.

  That particular barrage had lasted only a few minutes, after which the sun climbed out from its bunker and crowned off the day with a rainbow so crisp and perfect that it might have been drawn and colored against the sky with some giant crayons and a mammoth protractor.

  There would be no rainbow tonight, but I smiled at the memory all the same.

  Uncle Dean turned his attention back to his slew of properties and his huge stacks of cash. He rubbed his hands together and grinned, looking altogether villainous in the candlelight. “Should we put the final nail in this coffin, or what?” he said.

  Our arms cast long shadows across the board, and the dice seemed somehow bigger now, more substantial. I felt strangely intimidated at the thought of picking them up, of rolling them, as if the numbers that fell would determine more than just my fate in the game. Not that my fate in the game was in any doubt. Dad and I were pretty much toast.

  “Not so fast, buster,” Mom replied. “Nobody’s nailing anything shut just yet.”

  And so it went on, the skies outside still rumbling and dumping rain as the car and the thimble went head-to-head. Ultimately the thimble would triumph, but Mom, being Mom, only smiled in her soft sort of way.

  Uncle Dean glowered in mock disgust. “Robbed, I tell you! I was robbed!”

  “As if!” Pete quickly chimed in. “You were the banker! Just admit it, Mom kicked your butt!” I think he only stuck around until the end to gloat on Mom’s behalf.

  “Fine,” Uncle Dean finally relented. “She kicked my butt.” He tipped his hat in Mom’s direction and then spent the next few minutes adjusting it and readjusting it on his head.

  As always, Mom and I did the cleanup, with her putting all the cards and pieces away while I sorted out the play money. Dad waited until we were finished and then announced that it was high time for Pete and me to head off to bed, which it was, although I wasn’t really tired.

  “But it’s still storming outside,” Pete complained.

  “Take a candle with you,” Dad replied.

  “But don’t set it near your curtains,” Mom added. “And blow it out before you lie down.”

  “Fine,” said Pete. He picked out the biggest and brightest of the candles that were already burning and led the way upstairs, but not before Uncle Dean warned us about watching for bogeymen. He had his own candle held up to his face, like a camp counselor with an upturned flashlight, planting seeds of fear in the darkness.

  Pete and I shared a room, but we each had our own side, the dividing line clearly marked by a long piece of duct tape that ran the length of the faded blue carpet. The walls on Pete’s half were covered with sports memorabilia and photos of hot rods that he had clipped out from various car magazines—probably ones he’d gotten from the library and shouldn’t have taken scissors to. My walls held only pictures of animals, the prize of the bunch being a big eagle poster that I’d won in a dart-throwing game at the fair in Paulson.

  Ten minutes after getting to our room, I was in my pajamas and under my covers. Not Pete, though.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  He had the candleholder in one hand and was quietly rummaging through the closet with the other.

  “I need some batteries for the radio,” he said.

  I almost told him just to plug the radio in, but then I remembered that we had a candle burning for a reason.

  It took a few minutes, but Pete finally managed to dig out four AAs, two from a remote-controlled jeep, and two from the remote itself.

  “Bingo,” Pete said. He loaded them into the radio and turned the knob. There was a click, and then nothing.

  “Dead,” I said.

  “Uh-uh,” Pete disagreed. “Just listen.”

  I aimed an ear in his direction and tried to hear past the patter of rain on the roof and against our windowpane, and sure enough, there it was: static. It was so faint that I thought the radio’s volume must be turned almost all the way down, but Pete shook his head when I asked him.

  “I think the speaker’s blown,” he told me, at which point he lifted the radio up onto his shoulder and pressed its single speaker right to his ear. He turned the dial to search for a signal. A minute or two went by.

  “Anything yet?” I asked him. The candle now sat on the dresser between our two beds, but I was pretty much ready to blow it out. I was tired and wanted the day to be over. Maybe tomorrow would be normal, aside from the fact that everyone would still be talking about how odd today had been.

  “Shh,” Pete told me, which I guess meant no. He then grumbled a little in growing frustration, which turned out to be the last sound I heard before I finally gave up and closed my eyes.

  The first shatterings happened a few hours later, while most of our town was sleeping. Most, but not all.

  NINE

  Get up!” whispered Pete, shaking me. “C’mon, get up!”

  I groaned and rolled over, looked at him through squinted eyes. “Why?”

  “Something’s happening,” he said. “Get dressed.”

  “What time is it?” I asked him. I could hear the alarm in his voice but it wasn’t quite registering yet. My brain was still partially trapped in a dream about small glass houses and huge black dice. The dice had been tumbling down a mountainside, flashing random numbers as they picked up speed.

  “Never mind that!” said Pete. “Just get up!”

  I glanced at the window and saw that it was just beginning to get light outside, which meant that it was probably around five a.m. I sat up, a sinking feeling settling into the pit of my stomach as a thought occurred to me, an explanation for why my older brother was being so serious so early in the morning.

  “Are they okay?” I said. “Did it happen again?”

  “Who?” he asked me, giving me a look of confused impatience.

  “Mom and Dad,” I said. “Uncle Dean.”

  “They’re fine,” he said dismissively, but there was a pause, as if he wasn’t completely certain but was just assuming they were.

  “Did you check?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not that. It’s something else.”

  “What is?”

  He huffed, like I was purposely making things difficult.

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  “It’s old man Crandall,” he replied. “And Charlie. I think they might have shattered.”

  I stared at him, not understanding.

  “I heard it on the radio,” he tried to explain. “They said it’s happening all over, to the ones who turned. They’re going to pieces.”

  “Pieces?”

  “Pieces.”

  I tried to imagine what that would look like, a person coming apart in the way that Pete was suggesting. There one second and then not, a man-turned-statue reduced to mere fragments upon the floor, a mess to be swept up lik
e a dropped cup or plate. It was hard to picture. Impossible, really.

  “How?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Just suddenly, they’re saying.”

  “All of them?”

  “Uh-uh, just some. Hurry up and get dressed.”

  I sat there for a moment, blinking and wondering what the world was coming to, where it was heading. Pete went to the window and stood there waiting for me, although what exactly he was waiting for, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like there was anything we could do that required jeans instead of pajamas.

  Nevertheless, I reached down to the floor for yesterday’s Levi’s, thinking they were probably still clean enough to wear again. There was something sticking out of one of the back pockets, flat and square and white along its edges: Mr. Crandall’s Polaroid photo. I’d completely forgotten about it.

  I took it out to have a look, expecting to see an image of Main Street, shadowed by the strange dark mass that had temporarily blanketed the sky. What I saw instead was the very same blur that had been in the photo the day before, when I thought it wasn’t fully developed yet. Obviously it had to be by now.

  I squinted my eyes and brought the photo closer, realizing only now that the dark blur had a depth and shape to it, sort of humanoid but featureless. A body of smoke and heat shimmer, hovering, it seemed, like an angel or a ghost… not of this world, but somehow in it, at least for the split second that the camera’s shutter would have been open. An icy shiver ran through me, followed by a strong compulsion to hurl the photo away or, better yet, destroy it. But first I had to make sure that what I was seeing was actually there, that my eyes and my mind weren’t playing tricks on me.

  “Pete!” I whispered. “Come look at this.”

  He turned around and raised an eyebrow at me.

  “It’s the photo,” I told him. “From yesterday.”

  “What about it?” he asked while stepping forward and reaching out for it.

  He took it before I could answer, before I could even think of how to answer.

  He pursed his lips and cocked his head a little, and then his face went suddenly pale. He let go of the photo so fast it was as if he’d been burned, but even as it fell to the carpet, his eyes never left it.

  “What do you think it might be?” I asked him, even though I knew that the best he could do—the best either of us could do—was simply guess. One thing, however, seemed clear to me: Whatever the blur might be, it was probably the last thing that old man Crandall saw before he turned to glass.

  Pete shook his head. “I don’t know, but it couldn’t have been there when the photo was taken. We would have seen it.”

  “What if it just blinked in and out?” I said. “Like that—” I snapped my fingers.

  He considered. “Maybe.” He flipped the photo over with his toe, as if worried that the blurred being might somehow escape. Maybe we would turn to glass then as well, me on the edge of my bed and Pete on the middle of our floor, a pair of preteen statues that Mom would eventually walk in on. I could just imagine how bad she’d freak out.

  “We should burn it,” I said, looking down at it. “Just in case.”

  “Definitely,” Pete agreed. “Let’s take it downstairs to the fireplace.”

  I nodded. “You can carry it,” I told him.

  “Uh-uh, no way. You brought it home. You carry it.”

  “Rock, paper, scissors,” I replied.

  Pete stared at me for a second. “Fine. On three.”

  We counted together, hands poised. “One, two, three…”

  Rock. Rock.

  “Again,” we said simultaneously. “One, two, three…”

  I knew from past experience that Pete rarely picked paper, and that he wasn’t likely to pick the same thing twice in a row, so I stuck with my closed fist.

  “Rock breaks scissors,” I said.

  “Best of three,” he said.

  “Fat chance. You take it down and I’ll get dressed.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But I’m using your ball glove.…”

  TEN

  I thought it would only take a minute and that Mom and Dad would never be the wiser, but as it turns out, Polaroid photos and fire don’t mix. Something to do with the chemicals, I guess.

  “Whoa!” said Pete, waving his hand in front of his nose. He took a step back, which probably wasn’t far enough.

  “Don’t breathe it in,” I told him. “It might be toxic.” Taking my own advice, I closed my mouth and waited for the fire to finish the snapshot off, all the while thinking that it was taking far too long, and that the noxious smoke was sure to make its way up the stairs and under the door of our parents’ bedroom.

  But aside from that worry, I was glad to see it burning, glad to know that no one else would have to see what Pete and I already had, especially Mom, who might decide that the strange dark blur was a demon or something… which maybe it was. Maybe the terrible stench wasn’t chemical at all. Maybe it was brimstone.

  The photo shriveled, blackened, and finally dissolved into ash. My eyes continued to water from the harsh fumes. I wondered belatedly if the photo might have been one of a kind, and if we might have just watched a crucial clue to the global mystery go up in smoke.

  “Maybe we should’ve just buried it,” I said.

  Pete gave a small nod of agreement. “Maybe,” he said, and then his head turned quickly sideways, as if he’d heard something, perhaps Mom’s or Dad’s feet hitting the floor upstairs, or maybe just their voices.

  “What?”

  “Shh,” he said, still listening.

  I didn’t hear anything, but my first reaction was to get back upstairs and into bed. I would have, too, if Pete hadn’t stopped me.

  “Just wait,” he told me. “I wanna check something.” He reached out and turned on the TV.

  Normally, it would have been strange to think that anyone was even reporting the news at this time of day, let alone watching it, but I guess the glass plague had finally made round-the-clock coverage useful. And Pete had been right—something was happening.

  I listened for details about the so-called shatterings, but what I heard instead was the sound of Dad’s voice, booming at us as he came down the stairs in his sweatpants and muscle shirt, his hair flat on one side of his head and sticking up on the other.

  “What in God’s name are you two burning at five o’clock in the morning?”

  “Nothing anymore,” Pete replied, which, although true, wasn’t at all the right answer.

  “A photo,” I quickly chimed in, figuring it was wisest to come clean before Pete made things any worse. “A Polaroid photo. Mr. Crandall took it, just before he turned into a statue. I had it in my back pocket, but then I forgot about it.…”

  Dad narrowed his eyes, clearly not following.

  “There was something in the photo,” Pete explained. “A weird dark thing. Ben freaked out when he saw it, so we came down to burn it.”

  “It wasn’t just me,” I said, glaring at Pete now. “You were freaking out, too.”

  Dad shushed us. “What do you mean, a weird dark thing?”

  “A blurry figure,” I told him. “Dark and blurry, like a ghost.”

  “It didn’t have a face,” Pete added, a fact that Dad appeared relieved to hear.

  “Those photos don’t always expose properly,” he said, his anger dissipating now. “Sometimes there are dark spots, blotches.”

  I immediately shook my head. I’d seen the kind of photos that Dad meant, the ones that got messed up during development. “Uh-uh,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. Something was there on the street when it happened.”

  “But nobody saw it?” asked Dad. “Even though everyone was looking outside?”

  “It might have only been there for a second,” I said. “Like a split second.” I looked to Pete, thinking he’d back me up, but he didn’t.

  “Maybe Dad’s right,” he said. “Maybe it was just a splotch.”

  I stared at
him. “What are you talking about? You saw it.”

  “I saw something,” he admitted, “but maybe it wasn’t what we thought it was. Maybe we didn’t look close enough.”

  “You wouldn’t even touch it! You had to use my ball glove to pick it up!” He was actually still wearing the glove. He pulled it off as soon as I mentioned it, as if he’d never needed it at all and had only been playing along, humoring his little brother. I felt like punching him.

  “And why the hell is the TV on?” Dad continued, his hand reaching for the remote control.

  “Wait!” said Pete. “People are shattering!”

  Dad hesitated, his eyes on the screen now instead of on us, his expression changing as what he was seeing began to sink in. “Shattering?” he said. “What the…?”

  “Maybe we should go and check on old man Crandall,” Pete suggested. “Make sure that he’s okay. Mrs. Crandall, too.”

  I understood then why Pete had flip-flopped on me so quickly, and why he’d told me to get dressed in the first place. He’d already been thinking ahead, planning to wake up Dad to tell him the news, his assumption being that Dad would probably hop in his truck and drive to the general store to find out if the petrified old man was now just a pile on the floor. If we were lucky (and if we were already up and dressed and ready to go), Dad might take us with him.

  The dark shape in the photo really had scared Pete as much as it had scared me, but now that the photo was gone, it no longer mattered. Best to just forget it and return to the plan.

  Pete should have known better, though. It wasn’t as if Dad ever let us tag along to any of the accident scenes that he went to as a first responder. Why would this be any different?

  “We aren’t going anywhere,” Dad said. “You two shouldn’t even be out of bed, never mind starting fires and watching TV. Now, get upstairs and back in your room, and stay there until I say otherwise. Got it?”

  He was using his firm voice, but there was a shakiness in it that normally wasn’t there.