Four and Twenty Blackbirds

She held there motionless, tugged only by the faint gusts that rustled the trees. The wind made her dress barely billow around her legs, so she must have been there, real in one way or another. Her face was as pallid and indeterminately hued as her dress, and her eyes were more of the same.

"Hey," I said, not to greet her but to get her attention. "Hey."

Her eyes rolled to meet mine.

She opened her mouth but did not yet speak. Instead it seemed every sound in the forest was pulled inside her gasping lungs and I was standing in the vacuum. I knew my friends were only yards away but I did not hear their small, fast feet shuffling through the undergrowth. No birds sang and no squirrels knocked winter nuts down into empty trees. Even the shadows stopped crawling across the rocks as the sky held the clouds above in place.

My breath snagged in my throat and refused to leave my chest.

Tears came to the woman's eyes and dripped to the forest floor unchecked. Her head swiveled slowly, looking past her left shoulder and then her right. Her choked, thin voice cried out to the others.

Willa, Luanna—she's over here.

Two other women appeared, one on either side of her. They had the same vaguely African features as the first, with hair bound into submission by scarves tied in loose knots. Their faces might have been round once, but their skin was drawn back and their wide cheekbones made shelves that shadowed their hollow jaws. Their teeth were exaggerated by fleshy lips robbed of their firmness, and when they spoke to one another it was a terrible sight.

There she is, his darling one.

His pretty one.

Oh, Mae, she's returned to you. She's returned to us.

Mae crouched low to examine me with her enormous, brimming eyes. My baby, she said, reaching one scrawny arm to my face. My baby. Miabella.

But when the back of her hand brushed my cheek, the horror of her dusty, dead breath broke the spell and my screams split the supernatural quiet that had descended over the mountainside. I howled until my cries went hoarse, and the women withdrew. Mae left me last, turning with a slow, miserable sob and vanishing into the crowded trees. The last thing I saw before I shrieked myself unconscious was her retreating back, slashed and stained with long, dark streaks that could have been nothing but blood.

III

It should come as no surprise that I ended up a regular patron of the school counselor's office. Mr. Schumann was short and wide, with red hair that grew shorter every year. His ears protruded north past the narrowing fringe, straining to listen even when his round blue eyes appeared impassive. He always watched me with squinty concentration, like the face a cat makes while trying to figure out a bathroom faucet.

"Why don't you tell me about some of these pictures you've made?" he began our last session together. "Mrs. Patterson thinks they're very good, but she wants to know what they're about."

I stared at my shoes. "I already told her. They're about the sisters."

"Yes, the women who died. You said someone killed them."

"Uh-huh."

His brown office chair squealed as he shifted his weight. He leaned forward and pressed his palms together. "That's a scary story to tell someone, don't you think?"

"It's for real. It's a for-real story. I didn't make it up."

"Where did you hear it? Did you see it on TV or in a movie?"

I shook my head, aggravated because I couldn't make him understand. "I didn't hear it anywhere. I just know it. It's in my head."

"But stories like that have to get into your head from somewhere. Where did you pick them up?"

"Nowhere. I came that way. I was born with the story. It happened to me before I was born."

He tapped the tips of his index fingers against each other, then reached for a pad of paper and a pen. "I've got an idea. Why don't you tell me the whole thing, then—from start to finish."

"I don't know the whole thing," I sulked. He still didn't believe me.

"Then tell me the parts you do know. I'd like to hear them."

I closed my eyes and saw flashes, frames of action disconnected and surreal. A house like the one I'd sketched for Mrs. Patterson, surrounded by swirling green-black water. The slick jerking motion of an alligator sliding off a bank into a fetid pool of stagnant backwater.

One.

Two.

Three women. Me in their arms, passed from one to another.

"My mother and her two sisters," I said, eyes still shut.

Mr. Schumann rifled through a folder before pausing to read something. I heard his asthmatic breath aimed down at the desk, blowing against his loose papers. He scratched his head with his pen. "Eden, it's my understanding that your mother died when she had you. I know you live with an aunt and uncle; is there another sister too?"

"Yes, but that's not who I mean."

"But you said—"

I balled my hands into tight little fists, squeezing the story out like toothpaste from a tube. "Not my mother now. My mother then. When I was his prettiest one. It was a long time ago. Whole lives ago since he killed them."

Mr. Schumann held still for a minute. He thumped his wrist down on the desk and used his scritchy little pen to jot notes across his pad of lined paper. "Who is this 'he' you mentioned?" he finally asked.

I always saw the women so clearly, it seemed strange that I couldn't conjure his face. I felt his arms, broad and muscular when they picked me up to sit on his shoulders. I recalled the sweat and musk and tobacco smoke I smelled when I pressed my cheek against the crook of his neck. But these were only photographs.

I needed a scene. I cracked my eyes open enough to peek over at Mr. Schumann's fidgeting hands. They fumbled, disassembling the pen into pieces and placing them in precise east-west alignment with a granite paperweight and a letter opener shaped like a sword. Such anxious hands. Not like my father's at all. Not like the long, dark fingers so lean and strong and always sure.

My father's fingers held glass vials filled with funny liquids and powders, and he poured them one into another, another into a greater one, and another onto a small burner. One more bottle. Three drops of brown, smelly stuff on top of it all. When all was done simmering, he removed it from the heat with a padded glove and poured it into a Mason jar that might have otherwise held peach preserves.

His sleek back stretched a damp undershirt to its breaking point. He was at a rough desk, reading something from a book beside the vials. He leaned his head backwards over the chair and gripped his hair with both hands. Tight black wool.

He was frustrated, angry. Something was missing.

"Papa?"

"What are you doing in here? Get yourself away now."

"But Papa, I wanted to know where—"

"I said, get yourself away now."

"Papa?"

"Now!" He shouted it, rising out of the chair with enough force to throw it towards me. His elbow struck the book and knocked it fluttering to the floor. The pages flipped from beginning to end with a shuffling flap. Another flash: the shuffling of cards in my mother's hands before she laid them out in a cross-shaped pattern on a purple silk scarf. No. My father. His book.

I was fascinated by the yellowed, dirty pages as they waved back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth until the thick cover clattered still. And before my father could whisk the book closed and throw it back up on the table, I saw what was mounted inside.

Dry and nasty, shrunken and crooked, a black, mummified hand with a gold ring on each finger was fixed against the inside back cover of my father's book. Not a picture but a real one, with stick-fingers splayed open and lacquered shiny.

I screeched and popped out of my chair in Mr. Schumann's office, forgetting for a moment where I was. I only wanted to step on the hand, to squash it, to kill it, to destroy it somehow. But my father was gone, and his book was gone, and the only hands I saw were the counselor's confused ones that were putting his pen together again.

And his letter opener, conveniently shaped like a sword, was lying close to me. So close that I barely had to reach out to grab it, and it took less than a second to slam it down through his pasty white palm.

It took him almost a full second more to realize what had happened enough to join me in my screaming. Not until the blood spurted through both sides of the wound and sprayed his notepad and the pen fragments with sticky crimson did he find his voice enough to call out, and by then I was well on my way to running the mile and a half home.

Lulu was waiting for me at the door.

2

Lulu

Aunt Louise is a goddess. She's nearly six feet tall, with huge, melon-firm breasts and a tiny waist. From my very earliest inklings of sexual aesthetics, I wanted to look like Lulu. I wanted her black, spiral curls, her olive skin, and her deep brown eyes. I wanted men to fall over themselves for me the way they did for her. She was my mother's older sister, but only nineteen when she came to care for me. As Mr. Schumann said, my mother died when I was born and I was passed down along the maternal family members.

Back when I was a baby, we all lived with my grandmother and my mother's younger sister, Michelle. Lulu assumed most of the responsibility for my upbringing, and she took me almost everywhere. By the time I was two I'd been to concerts, coffeehouses, and poetry readings enough to scar me for life. But if Lulu had been a homebody, she would have never met Dave, and then where would we be?

Dave, shortly to become my uncle David, found me wandering away from Lulu while she investigated the meager Dashiell Hammett selection at a used bookstore. I'd found a display offering free fudge samples, and although I could not yet read, I understood enough to help myself. Dave worked at the store part-time, and when he finally peeled me away from the fudge plate, I was smeared with enough chocolate to frost a cake. But he didn't scold me, or demand to speak to my guardian. Instead, he propped me up on a pile of discarded books and left to get his camera.

Eventually Lulu noticed I was missing. She found me atop the pile, opening random volumes and pretending to read while Dave took pictures. What can I say? I was a doll. I did have Lulu's curls and her skin, and I was probably the cutest thing the bored clerk had seen all day. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">