Bird box

You add the details, she thinks. It’s your idea of what they look like, and details are added to a body and a shape that you have no concept of. To a face that might have no face at all.

The creatures of her mind walk horizonless, open fields. They stand outside the windows of former homes and gaze curiously at the glass. They study. They examine. They observe. They do the one thing Malorie isn’t allowed to do.

They look.

Do they recognize the flowers in the garden as pretty? Do they understand which direction the river flows? Do they?

“Mommy,” the Boy says.

“What?”

“That noise, Mommy. It sounds like someone talking.”

She thinks of the man in the boat. She thinks of Gary. Even now, so far from the house, she thinks of Gary.

She tries to ask the Boy what he means, but the voices of the birds rise in a grotesque wave, nearly symphonic, shrieking.

It sounds like there are too many for the trees to hold.

Like they make up the entire sky.

They sound mad. They sound mad. Oh my God they sound mad.

Malorie turns her head over her shoulder again, though she cannot see. The Boy heard a voice. The birds are mad. Who follows them?

But it no longer feels like something is following them. It feels like that something has caught up.

“It’s a voice!” the Boy yells, as if from a dream, his voice penetrating the impossible noise from above.

Malorie is sure of it. The birds have seen something below.

The communal birdsong swells and peaks before it flattens, twists, and the boundaries explode. Malorie hears it like she’s inside of it. Like she’s trapped in an aviary with a thousand madcap birds. It feels like a cage was lowered over them all. A cardboard box. A bird box. Blocking out the sun forever.

What is it? What is it? What is it?

Infinity.

Where did it come from? Where did it come from? Where did it come from?

Infinity.

The birds scream. And the noise they make is not a song.

The Girl shrieks.

“Something hit me, Mommy! Something fell!”

Malorie feels it, too. She thinks it’s raining.

Impossibly, the sound of the birds gets louder. They are deafening, screeching. Malorie has to cover her ears. She calls to the children, begging them to do the same.

Something lands hard against her bad shoulder and she yelps, wincing in pain.

Wildly, her hand grasping her blindfold, she searches the boat for what struck her.

The Girl shrieks again.

“Mommy!”

But Malorie’s found it. Between her forefinger and thumb is not a drop of rain but the broken body of a tiny bird. She feels its delicate wing.

Malorie knows now.

In the sky above, where she is forbidden to look, the birds are warring. The birds are killing one another.

“Cover your heads! Hold on to your blindfolds!”

Then, like a wave, they hit. Feathered bodies hail from above. The river erupts with the weight of thousands of birds splashing into the water. They hit the boat. They plummet. Malorie is struck. They hit her head, her arm. She’s struck again. Again.

As bird blood courses down her cheeks, she can taste them.

You can smell it, too. Death. Dying. Decay. The sky is falling, the sky is dying, the sky is dead.

Malorie calls to the children, but the Boy is already speaking, trying to tell her something.

“Riverbridge,” he is saying. “Two seventy-three Shillingham . . . my name is . . .”

“What?”

Crouched, Malorie leans forward. She presses the Boy’s lips hard to her ear.

“Riverbridge,” he says. “Two seventy-three Shillingham. My name is Tom.”

Malorie sits up, wounded, clutching her blindfold.

My name is Tom.

Birds strike her body. They thud against the boat.

But she is not thinking of them.

She is thinking of Tom.

Hello! I’m calling you from Riverbridge. Two seventy-three Shillingham. My name is Tom. I’m sure you understand the relief I feel at getting your answering machine. It means you still have power. So do we . . .

Malorie starts shaking her head.

no no no no no no no no no no no

“NO!”

The Boy heard it first. Tom’s voice. Recorded and played on a loop. Motion activated. For her. For Malorie. If ever she decided to take the river. Whenever that day would come. Tom, sweet Tom, speaking out here all these years. Trying to make contact. Trying to reach someone. Trying to build a bridge between their life in the house and a better one, somewhere else.