A (4:26)
Hollow by Sam Lejer My basket is almost full. I push deeper into the copse, peeling back the layers of undergrowth. Looking around me, the woods begin to change, coming alive as the suggestion of light works its way into the tar coloured sky. I find what I'm looking for on a sawn off stump. The wood is old and rotted, filmed with moss ants, their tiny bodies bright as dewdrops in my flashlight's beam swarm around my prize. I pull on my gloves. There is an art to this. Not all that falls from the sky is still pure. Not everything that I find is fit for my purpose. Some are rotted by the time I get to them, their bodies already claimed for the forest. Others are diseased in a less corporeal way, threaded with some intangible taint that stains my hands beneath the skin. The ants are a bad omen. Still, I lift the dead songbird from the stump and turn it over in my fingers. On the surface, it's a perfect specimen of a starling. Feathers sleek and healthy, wings whole and unbroken now, dull, eyes clear of any sign of sickness. I brush ants from its body and search for wounds, but I can't find any obvious reason for it to have died. I bring it to where I set my basket beneath the tangled branches of an old poplar. Within are the other fruits of the night. A wren, a goldfinch, and a house sparrow. I place the starling among its brethren and pull the fabric cover into place. As I walk home, I mark the progression of the evil. Although much of it is intangible, the places where it anchors itself are marked. An oddly wet stain on the side of one house, jagged shadows flickering behind the windows of another. A tree being eaten away from the inside out. Gardens gone rank and foul. I mark the people, too. They are the ones it is truly after. They are the ones it wants for nests. I can see it if I look just right. An early morning jogger with long thin shadows like insect legs twitching beneath her skin. Cars leaving phantom slicks of darkness in their wake. Children with vast and empty eyes. Every time I make this walk, it's a little bit worse. Worked a little deeper into the fabric of this place. The urge to help them, to rip that curse out of them with my own hands, makes my fingers tighten on the handle of my basket. When I'm home, I go straight to the shed at the back of my property. Only once I'm safely ensconced within the walls, with the door latched behind me, do I put down my basket and lift out the birds, laying them carefully on my work table. The powerful array of LEDs set into the ceiling casts everything in a flat yellow white glow, turning my hands, my tools, my birds, two dimensional. My shed is larger than it looks. I stand in the small front section, occupied only by a tool chest and a modest work table curled against one wall. The majority of the space is taken up by the work. It hovers over the dirt floor, suspended from the ceiling by spider strands of fishing line. Vaguely humanoid, with long simian arms and twisting many jointed legs. It's about the size of a large dog. Every piece of it is composed of my finds. Built of soft wings, beady eyes, pointed beaks, tiny grasping claws. It is almost perfect, though the head is still incomplete. Light splinters over it, catching on the exposed mosaic of delicate bone. It is our salvation. It is almost done. I get to work. The first task is akin to ordinary taxidermy. Splitting open their bodies, cleaning them, removing what needs to be removed, filling them with bundles of dried herbs. I use the bones when I can. The excess I bury. I decide that the starling's wings will go toward fleshing out the chest. As my hands begin the familiar tasks of cutting, stitching, attaching, smoothing, I think about signs. The birds were the first one, of course. They usually are dropping from the sky like stones. No apparent reason for death, littering the streets with small puffs of feather. Next came the gardens. Plants going soft and rotten. Leaves veined with grey and red roots, coated with a foul smelling black ichor. Dogs went lame. Children cried in the night. Streetlights died with unprecedented frequency. Then it started sinking its teeth into the populace. Most people are blind to the signs. I see them going about their day, oblivious to the fact that it crawls beneath their skin. I don't blame them for this. Their ignorance isn't their fault. I will help them. I will protect them. I am the only one who can keep them safe. Later, I stand in my kitchen, looking out at the street. I watch through the window of the house across from mine as the family eats their dinner. The filaments of sickness threading their food, pulsing. I've seen them on the street. The rot already gums beneath the father's nails and twines around the mother's wrists. Night settles among the houses like water sinking into sand. One by one, the lighted windows go out. The streetlight directly across from me flickers, illuminating for just a moment some skulking shadow before sputtering into darkness. It could have been a fox, or perhaps a stray dog. I leave the family to their meal and draw the curtains closed. Something strikes the window. Around me, the house is still and silent, familiar shadows making comfortable shapes in the dark. The curtain flutters in the draught. The quiet is vast and unending. I flick on the porch light and step outside. Beneath the kitchen window, a cardinal twitches his feathers the colour of spilled blood in the dark. Kneeling, I cup him in my palms, looking for injuries. Nothing seems to be broken, and already he's shaking off the shock, his small eyes bright and animal. From the direction of the shed, something unfurls. A feeling, a sound, a presence, a shadow song composed of wings and bones. It presses against my senses, filling my head with white noise, and I understand. I tell myself the cardinal would have died anyway. I tell myself it's for a greater cause. I tell myself a lot of things. The next morning I can't find any birds, alive or dead. The trees are barren and stark against the empty sky, the wind devoid of its normal trickle of song. It's not the first time I've returned with an empty basket since I started my work, but it is the first time I see the birds nests on my way home, abandoned, the chicks inside either very quiet or gone. Meanwhile, the shadows cluster more thickly around the bases of the houses. Meanwhile, I can taste the rot seeping beneath the skin of the town, feel the pulsing, writhing thing that has no right to be here. Then something makes me look up into the hard glare of the morning sky, and I see it. It hangs above the town, a serpentine helix, an inward turning cloud, a flock of birds so many that they blot out the sun, flying and flying and flying in interlocking circles, twisting rings, undulating waves. As I draw closer, I hear their myriad wingbeats, like the sound of an insect hive, but so much louder. I begin to run. When I reach my house, I shove open the shed door and switch on the light. The draft pushing in from behind me makes the snapped ends of the fishing line dance and flutter, the harsh leds chasing away the shadows. It stands in the middle of the shed. With a liquid whisper, it takes a step forward, feather sliding against feather, sliding against bone. Hundreds of black eyes fix on me, gleaming in the light, leaking in from outside. Its head, still just a labyrinth of exposed bone, tilts almost like a dog's. It takes one of my arms. I look down to where its fingers curl around my arm, and I see what it sees, what I should have noticed a long time ago, a pale shadow twisting beneath the skin. Bile rises in my throat and I want to scream, to beg for forgiveness, to claw it out. Before I can do anything, though, it brings its other hand up and presses against the festering thing. Small claws, like the kind found on songbirds, emerge from the feathery mass of its palm and pierce the skin, skewering the foulness beneath. Its fingers are gentle as blood begins to leak from the wound, and it slowly pulls its palm away, taking with It a sliver of diseased meat infected with the evil. I created it to excise as it releases me. I think I understand. The evil did not come from outside and sicken the town. It came from us. It was always us, with our impurities and imperfections. Cleansing the place will not be enough. It came from the people. I built the solution of absences, the empty bodies of birds and their empty hollow bones. It understands the necessity of removal. It will do what is needed. Weeks later, I kneel in the soft earth, gardening. Never have my flowers reached this high, the poppies vivid as cardinal wings, the black calla lilies as darkly shining as starling feathers. All along the street, gardens overflow with health and bounty, lawns trim and perfect, houses as picturesque as postcards. The morning is clear and silent. Starlings sit like stones in the tree in my yard. Their black eyes follow the movements of the people, and I know they watch for the pale shadow that stains eyes and hands and teeth. As keenly as I do, I know what they serve. Across from me, a family goes by, all wide smiles and manic eyes. Their happiness has the air of a performance, and though they do not look at the birds, I know they are aware of them as they walk. One sleeve rides up the father's arm, exposing a row of still, healing scabs, the kind left by small talons. The skin beneath looks puckered and sunken, like something beneath is missing. They keep their heads down and do not look at me. After they're gone, I take some herb cuttings and bring them to the shed to dry. The dusty floral scent that permeates the space ever since I started using it for storage is still undercut with the faint whiff of dead things. No matter how many times I clean it, I return to my house and wait. It happens. After nightfall. I stand in the kitchen facing the street. The family across from me eats their now clean dinner, teeth flashing in the light, their smiles split their faces in two. I turn. It fills the doorway. No longer the size of a dog, it towers over me, cloaked in shadow. Its long arms dangle by its sides, legs twisting unnaturally beneath it. Our salvation. When it first walked, it practically floated over the floor, slight and insubstantial, its songbird claws capable of getting beneath the skin but little more. Now its feet move with the lithe step of a predator, quiet but firmly on the ground. Bird bones are hollow. They hold the sky within themselves. Crafting it out of their bodies gave it purity and a small amount of strength, enough to get beneath the skin the materials it deposits on the floor are not bird bones. I kneel and begin sorting through the pile. It stains my hands red, the red of poppies, the red of cardinal feathers. Here there is no waste. Everything it removes, it repurposes once added to itself. And if it takes slightly more than necessary, who would blame it? We owe it so much. It refuses to go back into the shed, so I keep my tools in the house. As I begin the familiar tasks of cutting, stitching, attaching, smoothing, I think of how the evil runs much deeper than the skin, and how much deeper it will reach to truly complete its work. Then I feel its multitude of eyes on me, and I stop thinking of anything at all. It freed itself before I could finish it. Now its body is thick and strong with borrowed flesh, but it still has not told me what it wants for a face. It is almost completed. It is so very beautiful. I am so very afraid.
