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.

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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

One Little Push

The floorboards wheeze with each step, an asthmatic echo through the attic. Grace nudges a flimsy cardboard box with her toe, testing whether it will disintegrate on contact. It remains intact, but sighs a dusty breath. Grace sneezes and wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

Blankets and old, worn clothes sit in lazy piles. Mattress pads are like discarded melon rinds after a picnic. The whole place reminds her of a garbage dump, unused things collected to decompose and die.

Grace remembers coming up here with Ava when they were younger, trading scary stories and contorting their hands like origami figures, trying to cast the best shadow in their imaginary menagerie.

Ava always won. Grace could only manage birds, but Ava could bend her fingers and twine her arms together to make rabbits and camels and once, with the clever integration of tortilla chips, a dragon. It wasn’t cheating, it was damn clever.

Next-door neighbors, best friends, practically sisters. And Grace is the good one in the equation, coming home to take care of an ailing mother: Ava’s.

Grace ignores the fact that she’s being paid as a caretaker, and that coming home was her only option after she flunked out of med school and racked up student loan debt. She’s not a selfless, dutiful pseudo-daughter. She’s broke and desperate.

Grace plops down on the floor and begins her search for an old turntable and vinyl records. It’s to satisfy the latest in a string of odd requests, regret masked as nostalgia. Ava’s mother thinks classic rock and folk music will take her back in time, back to before she was a mother and when she was untethered, unclaimed, unencumbered.

Grace can’t blame her. She wants to go back in time, too.

The first box reveals a stack of photo albums, decorated with Ava’s signature glitter-glued spirals and squiggles. Grace opens the first one, even though she is not supposed to be looking for old photos.

Junior year. There they are, two mismatched twins joined at the hip. Grace’s long, tanned arm thrown over Ava’s shoulder. Short blonde hair, pulled back in a half-braid at her crown. Eyes the color of a foggy morning, deep and inquisitive. Ava’s long, dark hair tumbles down to her slim waist, her hazel eyes looking through the camera, looking into the future and meeting Grace’s eyes. Grace runs her thumb along the curled edge of the photo and blinks back tears. Her father’s sharp words ring out in the attic.

That girl’s trouble, Grace. You won’t get anywhere hanging around with her. She’s a bad influence. I don’t want my daughter turning out like that. You’re on the edge. She’ll push you off if it means you’ll go down with her.

And where’s Ava now? In Reykjavik, where her latest script is being lovingly shaped into a film. She doesn’t have to be there of course; the cruel twist of it is that she can be.

And Grace, good Grace who didn’t run around with boys or smoke pot or sneak sips of Bacardi her senior year, who buckled down and focused and told her best friend she was too busy studying or going to prayer group? She’s in that same attic from her childhood, and those scary stories are her life: sleeping in the same bedroom back home, single and not loving it, caretaker to her best friend’s mom, listening to her own father lament why she isn’t more successful.

Be good, but not too good. Have fun, but not too much. Grace was never good at chemistry or fractions or anything that required her to mix parts of a whole. She couldn’t find that balance.

She’s full-on crying now: loud, angry sobs that make her body shake.

What happened to that girl? The one that stood in the center of every photo and commanded attention? Grace didn’t know if she could ever be the girl she once was, but she hoped so.

“I wish,” she chokes out, and something by the window moves.

Grace looks over and watches something roll itself up from the floor. What she thought was a heap of old clothes was actually a figure sitting on the floor. A figure now in front of her, with dirty, scaly skin and copper eyes peering from under a navy hoodie.

Ava used to tell her the attic was haunted. A cute prank, one that neither believed. Grace would play along, pretend to be scared and nervous.

The figure feels too corporeal, too present to be a ghost. It stands, not floats; shifts, not wavers. And Grace is neither scared nor nervous. Something supernatural is before her, and all she feels is a beautiful lightness like endless possibility, like a balloon being filled with air and sailing up into forever.

“What do you wish?” Its voice sounds like the creaking floorboards she previously ignored.

“How long have you been here?” Grace asks, hoping the figure does not ignore her question.

“I don’t know,” the figure admits. “Maybe forever. Maybe no time at all. It does not matter.”

Maybe Ava wasn’t joking.

“What do you wish?” The figure asks again.

“To go back,” Grace says. “To do it all over again, from junior year until now.”

The figure lingers, considering the request. An appendage reaches out for her and Grace does not hesitate. Nothing claims her here. There is no post to which she can hitch herself. She is grounded entirely in the past.

Grace wraps her hand around what feels like soggy leather, a spongy knob protruding that could have once been the bone in a wrist. Grace nods, the unspoken question hanging in the air between them.

The figure siphons itself into her, a shadow in reverse. Grace feels the tight embrace of something curling itself around her, and the sick, sweet pain of release as she tilts forward and falls into infinity.

Written by: Erin Justice

Photograph by: Skyler Smith

Life's a beach

A crashing wave rushes towards the shore, leaving a young girl curled up on the sand in its wake. The child opens her eyes and takes in her surroundings as the foamy water retreats to the horizon.

She pushes her elbow into the soggy ground and peels herself from the earth like the skin of an orange as another wave crashes in the distance. She rolls over onto her knees and trudges towards the Beachgrass gates lining the bright-white dunes.

She explores the terrain on all fours, astounded by every handprint and knee dent she leaves in the landscape. She giggles each time her tiny digits disappear beneath the supple surface that’s cradling her fragile figure.

The land hardens as the girl travels farther from the water line and her gleeful laughter turns into grunts of frustration. She pauses for a moment and studies the fading trail of prints leading back to the ocean. Her youthful smile morphs into a look of panic once she realizes her place between the water and the dunes.

She turns to the left and sees a young boy constructing a tiny castle from the same sand that’s resting beneath her. She lifts her hand and plunges her rigid fingers into the topsoil, signifying the groundbreaking of her new project.

She defines her property with a trench, much like the border surrounding her neighbor’s construction zone. She then piles the displaced sand in the center of her territory and contemplates what shape the elements should take.

Her eyes lock on a condominium towering over the coast. She makes note of every detail, from the scalloped columns spanning the height of the building to the golden lion statue eclipsing the sun from above the penthouse.

She shapes the mound of eroded shells into something resembling the colossal structure that’s casting shadows over the ocean like a sundial. Cloaked by the shade of the condominium, the little girl pats and smoothes the sand into a rectangle so tall, she’s forced to stand on her toes and blindly level the roof with her outstretched fingers.

The weight of gravity wears on her forefeet and she returns her heels to the sand, cursing her height for hampering her productivity. She sits with her back against her unfinished project and calculates how long she has until the salty waves breach her barricades. She crosses her arms on her knees, lowers her head and weeps, as if collapsing under the pressure of time.

Her sulking is interrupted by a hand on her shoulder. She looks up to find a tall girl silhouetted by the sun. The stranger’s braid ticks back and forth between her shoulder blades like the pendulum of a grandfather clock as she peers over the top of the castle. She effortlessly pats down all the unreached bumps and the little girl joyfully kneels and starts pinching cylinders up and down the sides of her tower.

The two girls laugh and sing as their building expands in every direction. Somewhere in the midst of all the digging and rezoning, their worksite merges with her pint-sized competitor’s. After a playful exchange of accusations, the girl and boy decide to join their castles into one massive estate.

As the sun fell from the clouds and the water crept up the shore, the young boy, the little girl, her taller friend and some newfound acquaintances continued inventing new tasks to ignore the persistent march of time. The turrets rose higher, the moat dipped lower and every wall of the castle was covered in embellishments reflective of their maker.

The little girl continued perfecting her masterpiece as, one by one, her colleagues were summoned to the dunes. She only allowed herself a brief moment of grief as she watched each cohort approach the bright light of the setting sun.

She kept busy until it was time for her tall companion to answer the call echoing from beyond the Beachgrass gates. The little girl watched as her closest friend walked away from their castle, her braid now resting motionlessly down the center of her back.

As she waved goodbye, the little girl noticed swells of wrinkles crashing along the back of her hand. She studied the ripples until the young boy took her weathered palm and helped her to her feet. He led her alongside their estate until they reached the frail sand at the foot of the dunes, each mound resembling the bottom half of a depleted hourglass.

They turned and watched as a wave from the rising tide cascaded over the edge of their boundary, occupying every crevice of the trench like milk on a tile floor. Another wave filled what remained of the moat as the young boy’s hand slipped from the little girl’s grasp. She stood there, alone, reminiscing on everything she and her friends had created.

As another wave surged towards her castle, the little girl searched for the condominium she had set out to replicate. She spotted the golden lion statue staring out over the water and began comparing the buildings. She was shocked by how far she had strayed from her blueprint, but even more so by how little she cared.

The endless layers of perfectly aligned balconies now seemed cold and lifeless next to the dissimilar terraces constructed by her and her friends. Even the great lion whose chin touched the clouds wore a somber expression without the luminance of the midday sun amplifying its features.

The little girl smiled. She took a final look at her castle, turned and walked peacefully towards the dunes. Waves continued battering the sculpted terrain until it returned to a flat patch of land with no signs of the little girl’s labor of love, hardship and friendship.

The sun rose the following morning and a crashing wave rushed towards the shore, leaving a young boy curled up on the sand in its wake. He opened his eyes, peeled himself from the earth and began his journey to the dunes.



Written by: Mark Killian
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe