Feathers

At the bird refuge the bird keeper introduces them to Octavius the owl.

“An owl can turn it’s head 270 degrees,” the bird keeper says. The owl looks right at the mother, never losing eye contact. Octavius is perching on the keeper’s arm, his stick-thin leg bound by medieval jesses.

“Is he heavy?” the son asks, because the bird is as tall as his torso and seems massive.

“No, only about five pounds. Owls are mostly feathers and air.”

The small crowd around the bird watches Octavius poop. It splatters in a white blob on the concrete floor and everyone laughs.

After the educational presentation, the mother redresses her kids in their outdoor wear, because it is still cold, still winter. She takes her thumb and finger and pinches off a slug of snot from the daughter’s nostrils, and wipes it discreetly on her sock.
At night, the mother puts the kids to bed, and a peace fills the house. The father puts on the TV but the mother dozes off before the show is done. Upstairs on her bed she notices about a dozen white, downy feathers around her pillow. She thinks so little of the feathers at the time. They fall slowly from her hand into the garbage.

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“But the show isn’t finished yet,” the children yell but the mother turns off the TV just the same. She makes them put on their boots. Outside the snow is falling thick from a white sky. The snowflakes are as wide as loonies, as soft as veiny clouds. Pieces of sky flake down and touch them until they are covered.

The next day the mother walks to pick the children up from school. The air is warm and they are overdressed so that as they walk home, her arms become full of moulted coats. They stop at the park, where the ground is soft and wet.

“Hoot...Hoot!” says the son.

“Hoot! Whoo!” says the daughter as they swoop toward her with arms wide open.They ask for pushes on the swing, and they go so high the chains slack.

                                                                                                          ***

Unbelievable things happen every day. She sits beside her son, and they munch carrots while they read a library book about nocturnal creatures. Part way through the story, her son jumps in and finishes the sentence.

“You can read?” the mother asks and the son brushes off her astonishment.

In the early summer, her children wake her up one morning, and the mother’s eyelids are so heavy they don’t want to open up. Something jostles her awake, and she is confused.

“What is this?” she asks. Her son and her daughter are both covered in white and grey feathers. They look at her politely, with no hint of a surprise. She tries to brush the fringes off like someone would brush flour off clothes but most of them stay put. It is unbelievable.

For breakfast she makes them oats. They have stopped eating it cooked like a porridge, and now wanted it raw like a muesli with bits of margarine and nuts mixed in. They play outside but come back in after to watch TV.

“What were you guys up to?”

“We were just looking for squirrels and mice,” the son says, and his pupils are large against his golden brown irises. It used to be so loud in the house, chaos reigning every day, but now the children move around like ghosts and all is silent.

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When she held her newborns tight to her chest, they reminded her of plucked chickens, ugly and pathetic, and yet she carried them everywhere. She felt an ache in her bones when they weren’t close. She even held nursing babies on her lap while she peed. She never put them down, those damn screaming toddlers; she balanced them on her hips.

Those souls had flapped and kicked the inside of her womb. Tiny bones had held her pinky so tight. The feelings weren’t just love, but innate desperation too. Before, when they were just her little children, they asked to hear her heart. She would kneel down, and each would take a turn pressing their ears up against her chest.

In return she got to listen to their hearts. The skin on their chests smooth and pale against her big ear, their ribs delicate as the bones of birds. They asked her to tap out the quick beats so the movement of fluid pumping became tangible and real to them. They could see the rhythm of those wings inside.

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One night in early fall, she climbs the creaky stairs to say good night, but the kids are not in their bunks. The bedroom window is an open maw; she sticks her head out and watches her owls perch on a sturdy branch of a Manitoba Maple. That her children had changed was undeniable. Their growth was thrilling and heartbreaking.

Her children had used her. They’d needed to because she’d birthed them helpless with undeveloped frontal lobes and no viability what-so-ever. She’d asked for it really, wanted them to pluck the very feathers from her back if they needed them. She felt something unnameable when her babies came out from inside of her. It felt the most like jumping-up, like pushing a weight against gravity. For a long time after their birth, she carried a tangible weight around with her. She feels a larger echo of that now, with her insides on the outside for everyone to see.

Written by: Elisha Stam

Photograph by: Phillip Wolt

Mercy

Dana was standing near the theater when he pulled up in his red BMW to ask for directions. He looked about her age, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, blond hair, golden tan, leading-role actor face, expensive-looking shirt. His overwhelming attractiveness made her instantly wary. Guys who looked like him didn't smile like that at girls with lank dishwater-blond hair, unremarkable faces, and dumpy bodies hidden under shapeless thrift-shop sweaters. They certainly didn't ask them out to the movies.

He introduced himself as John – no last name – just John.

Perhaps she could go with him, but head home right after in case this was a cruel prank or he was trying to recruit her for some crazy cult. Her friends didn't share her taste in movies, and it would be nice to have someone to go with for once, particularly someone so attractive. But she hesitated before getting into his car. She knew it wasn't a smart thing to do, so she scanned the vehicle's interior for signs, her gaze falling upon the photo of a beagle snuggled up to a kitten that sat on the dashboard.

"Your pets?" she asked.

"Yes."

She jumped into his vehicle and then cursed her naiveté as the door shut with an ominous click, trapping her in an enclosed space with a stranger. She rolled down the window to provide an escape hatch.

"The movie doesn't start until seven," she said.

"Is there somewhere we can hang out for a couple of hours?" he asked, flashing his perfect teeth at her.

Perhaps he was just looking for easy sex and assumed that a homely girl would be a quick and easy lay, she told herself to crush her pathetic hopefulness.

"We could go to the lake," she said. "It's only a couple of miles from here."

The lake was actually just a large pond surrounded by a few dilapidated cabins and farmhouses, pretty in a rough sort of way. As they made their way down to the surrounding grass, John looked up at the trees as though amazed by them, stopping to stroke the rough bark of a willow.

While he gazed at the tree, she examined his face, searching for the imperfections that make faces interesting, but his skin told no stories. Everything was symmetrical and immaculate.

After they settled on the grass, he asked about her favorite movies and she described the cheesy sci-fi epics and thrillers she loved.

"So, you like movies where everyone dies?"

"It's funny, because in real life, I can't stand it when anyone is sad. I think movies are my way of facing the darkness in a safe place."

He gazed at the murky pond, frowning. She willed her foot not to twitch. He was so calm and still.

"Are you nervous?" he asked.

She bit her lip. "A little."

"Why?"

"Because I like you."

Her treacherous mouth had released the words before she could stop it, and she wasn't even sure why she liked him. She didn't really know him at all.

"I like you, too," he said, but he wasn't smiling and she couldn't read him. She'd seen attraction on boys' faces a few times in her life, a dilation of the pupils, a quickening of the breath. John showed neither of these signs. Maybe he was gay and wanted a woman to hang around with for cover so that he could stay in the closet. She looked at her watch to escape the awkwardness.

"We should head back."

They rose from the grass. On the way to John's vehicle, Dana spotted something peering through the grimy window of a broken-down barn.

"There's a chicken in there," she said, scanning the surrounding buildings. The place was obviously abandoned. "I need to rescue it."

"Don't you eat chickens?" he asked.

"I'm a vegan. I don't eat anything from animals." she replied as she sought a way into the barn. The only entrance she found was an old gate secured with a rusted padlock.

"Why?"

"Just because you're smarter than something, doesn't give you the right to exploit it. And I'm not even sure we're smarter than them, at least not in the ways that count. I need to break this window."

"I'll do it," he said, unzipping his sweatshirt and wrapping it around his fist. He struck one of the panes with a quick, sharp jab, then watched with evident fascination as Dana coaxed the weak, scrawny bird toward the opening and lifted the little body into her arms.

"My aunt runs an animal sanctuary," she said. "I can bring the chicken to her tomorrow morning."

"Sanctuary," he repeated thoughtfully, as though tasting the word.

"I'm sorry," she said with a pang of regret. "I can't do the movie, now. I have to get food for her."

"What do they eat?"

"Grains, seeds, stuff like that."

"I have sunflower seeds at home. I live nearby."

"That would be awesome!"

This guy is dangerous, she thought. I could fall in love with him.

She'd expected something fancy and intimidating, so she was surprised when he pulled up in front of a decrepit little cottage with flaking paint surrounded by a neglected, overgrown garden. They walked along the broken cobblestones, the yellowing tendrils of wild plants snaking around their ankles. Nothing about John matched up, but she was happy that he lived in a place like this. She could imagine sitting with a second-hand book in the wild chaos of a garden where each plant was allowed to do whatever it wanted. Perhaps she and John weren't so different as she had initially thought.

He opened the door to a dark hallway, and she followed him until it gave way to a room that didn't make sense. Was this a meth lab? The place was full of scientific equipment arrayed on long, shiny, stainless steel counters, so at odds with the rustic exterior of the cottage. Then she spotted the shackles bolted to the gleaming metal table in the center of the room and a scream froze in her throat.

She turned to see John advancing on her. He was holding a long, slender metal object that had to be some sort of weapon, and her last thought was regret that she would die so absurdly, killed by a mad scientist while holding a starving chicken.

There was a flash, and everything went black.

                                                                                            ***

797097 was back on the ship, reporting to his superior officer.

"The meat is no good."

"Full dissection? You conducted all the tests?"

"Yes," he lied. "Very toxic. No usable parts."

"We'll need to find another source, then."

                                                                                            ***

Dana woke by the lake with no memory of how she'd come to be there. She'd been in front of the theater and now she lay on the grass with a scrawny chicken nuzzling her open palm. Had she hit her head? She didn't have a headache. Perhaps she'd fainted. She should go to a clinic and get checked out, but first she would take care of the pitiful animal at her side. For some reason she couldn't fathom, she wanted to name it John.

Written by: Jennifer Copley

Photograph by: Phillip Wolt