“Girl Meets Bird” by Gemma Kaneko

"Every day of her childhood she’d waited to stumble into another world. What if that door at Nana’s led not to a disused pantry but to a fairy congress where pixies & imps played politics and pranks."

Every time I’ve reread this story over the last couple of weeks, I have been struck by how every element feels like it hits its note just right. And then! There are these wonderful moments of character — the way she imagines answering questions and narrating her life, as if it a “phantom reporter breathlessly covering the Ava beat”; the way she’d grown up always dreaming and wanting for some kind of fantasy world like from fairy tales and children’s stories — that feel even more just right. The presence and element of magic is all so perfectly calibrated to both my tastes and the story itself. I only love it more and more with every read.

I’m also incredibly excited to again get to feature the art of Zoë Petersen! This is the fourth story Zoë has done illustrations for, and like she did for her dad’s story, “Cat Valhalla,” a couple of these are gifs. I am so excited about the marriage of story and art here, what feels a perfect pairing, a kind of whole being even greater than the sum of its parts.

—Aaron Burch

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“Girl Meets Bird”

The baby bird was not cute. No Disney-bright colors, no big eyes; it looked like a denuded tennis ball with a beak, sparsely covered with grimy feathers. Ava lifted it into a dish towel, afraid that it would pop in her hands. The membrane between the outside world and its organs was noticeably, distressingly thin.

She worried that touching it was a mistake, but then there was that article from last week or last month about how not touching baby birds was based on some kind of junk science. Lately it seemed like everything she’d learned as a kid was revealing itself to be junk science, so she didn’t trust anything she knew very much at all. Come to think of it, maybe the article was a reversal of a previous article that she remembered and once again the right thing to do was leave birds where they were.

Well, it was crying, she imagined herself telling someone later. (Who? The phantom reporter breathlessly covering the Ava beat?) I mean, I assume that’s what it was doing even though it was more like shrieking, like a tornado siren for dolls. And she was a helpful person, a kind person, a vegetarian even, so what was she going to do, leave the gummy little creature to be crushed by hailstones?

Once it was inside, the dish towel nestled inside a shoebox, the bird went quiet.

“I just moved in,” she told it. It seemed to follow her voice with its undercooked eyes. “That’s why it’s so messy.” The bird bobbed its head. It reminded her of that movie that had scared her as a kid, some kind of quest and evil avian magicians.

“I don’t have anything to eat, sorry. We can just watch TV until the weather gets better.”

She turned her phone on its side. The bird didn’t need a big screen, after all. They got through two episodes of Call the Midwife before the sky cleared. Pale sunlight crept through the clouds, painting stripes on her boxes. Ava brought the bird out onto the square of grass the real estate agent had called a yard. It wasn’t long before she found a likely-looking clump of twigs in the branches of the tree that hung over from the neighboring property.

“There you go,” she said, easing it out into what she hoped was where it had fallen from. “Good luck.” Who knew if it understood her. She’d been pitching her voice a little higher whenever she spoke to it, as though that might compensate for the fact they did not share a language or even similar sorts of minds. Probably the bird had been terrified and confused the entire time, if a bird could even experience emotions at all. Still, she did wish it luck, and hoped it would live.

It was no time for being out of the nest. All over the country, people were lining their homes with soft, bright things, because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Even Ava had packages piling up at her door, full of perfect items she had chosen just for herself.

Living alone pleased her. When her sister asked to come see her new place, she put her off. She told her friends she wasn’t comfortable hosting yet. But she imagined the phantom reporter typing “Girl Finally Has Some Space to Herself,” and quoting her saying she liked to spend evenings in her honest-to-goodness dressing gown, taking up the entire couch and sipping wine out of her favorite glass. She could listen to music in the mornings, she could even walk from the bathroom to her bedroom without a towel if she so desired. She felt like her life was spreading out, taking shape, a cake slowly rising in the oven.

Even so, she was having trouble sleeping. Apparently it wasn’t just her; the internet told her it was everyone. Everyone dreamt of escaping from some kind of art gallery complex in full Mission: Impossible style. Everyone dreamt of rain pouring down their windows until the water crept inside, filling their houses up to the attic. Everyone dreamt of skeletal leaves twining through their floorboards, ghostly white.

One night, her brain deposited her in a forest straight out of a fairy tale. She thought Hansel and Gretel might walk by her any second, trailing breadcrumbs, or that an especially clever wolf might leap at her from the shadows. But all she could hear was birdsong, and then, a voice.

“You helped me,” it said, “and I want to thank you.”

I swear it sounded like James Earl Jones, she would have said to the phantom reporter. A big heated blanket of a voice. When she looked up, there was a bird perched in the shadowy branches. Somehow, she knew.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. The bird looked much better than the last time she’d seen it. She might have said it had a glow up. Did you say that about animals? Did other birds think this bird was hot now? “So your parents found you?”

“They did.”

They regarded each other.

“I also just moved in,” said the bird, its voice rumbling through the landscape of the dream. “Do you want... some seeds?”

Ava politely declined. They sat quietly. Her small talk had deteriorated rapidly over the past months. The forest filled the silence with its hums and chirps and whirrs. Finally, the bird spoke again.

“You saved me. And so I offer you a reward in exchange.”

“You don’t have to do that. It really was the least I could do.”

The bird’s head ticked back and forth. “Consider it a housewarming gift, then.”

“How will I know it’s from you?”

“You’ll know.”

Ava wanted to ask another question, but her phone’s alarm woke her up, slicing the dream trees to sawdust with each flat note. Today would be another work day, one more for the stack that was piling up into the sky. Ava found comfort in this. It was not unlike the pleasure of looking at a perfectly organized bookshelf. She always knew what would come next.

First she made her bed. Then she laid out her outfit for the day. After that came her shower, her four-step skincare routine, and then her electric toothbrush, thirty seconds in each quadrant. Breakfast was scrambled eggs and toast, plus whichever fruit was in season. Then she’d curl her hands around a cup of coffee and open her laptop for work.

Showered, cleansed, and dressed, she took two eggs out of the refrigerator. She tapped one against the rim of the bowl and the shell broke just like it always did. But there was no egg inside it, she imagined telling the reporter. It was full of silver feathers, just like a fairy tale. I tried another one, and guess what? Feather after feather fell into her mixing bowl, clinking softly against the ceramic.

Breakfast was toast only.

She sat in front of her computer, barely reading the words that elbowed themselves onto her screen. She was grateful to her fingers for taking her through the necessary motions of work when her mind was so utterly elsewhere.

Every single day of her childhood she’d waited to stumble into another world. What if that door at Nana’s led not to a disused pantry but to a fairy congress where pixies and imps played politics and pranks? What if, instead of a half-stuffed scarecrow, the center of the state fair corn maze contained a fox with a sword in his belt, waiting for aid in his quest? What if the clouds really did hear her when she begged for her soccer game to be rained out, and what if they’d considered lifting her up into their airy kingdom?

But all the doorknobs she’d ever turned had only opened into dormitories, offices, waiting rooms. Yet all the while magic had been there, lurking on branches and hiding in dreams, apparently practiced by capricious birds. It was just that until now, magic had wanted nothing to do with her. Here she was, tapping away at her keyboard, buying herself candles and sheet masks and vintage coupe glasses, when there had been actual enchanted talismans in the very same world she’d lived in all this time.

What was this feeling rampaging through her bones, making her hands shake and her eyelids twitch? Ava was sure it would chew through her bones like a horde of termites through wood, leaving nothing but splinters of what she had been. She thought she might scream or laugh or whistle like a tea kettle. Then she heard a sound in the kitchen, someone knocking on the back door. A few weeks of isolation had made no dent in the years she had spent being trained in good manners. She shoved the feeling aside as best as she was able and wrenched the door open, prepared to politely thank whoever had dropped by with welcome-to-the-neighborhood cookies. Instead, she found her sister standing in the backyard, heels poking holes in the grass. Even though she’d been working from home for months, Raina still dressed like she might walk into a boardroom at any minute.

“I wanted to see the new place!” she said, brandishing a bottle of sparkling cider like a sword slicing through any protest Ava might make. “I knew you’d be home so I figured I’d just stop by.”

Ava briefly considered opening her mouth and letting the entire day fall out of it, but she couldn’t take what would follow. Her sister always knew exactly What To Do. She was younger than Ava, for god’s sake, yet here she was getting paid untoward sums of money to “consult,” whatever that meant. For years she had kept a list in her wallet headed “Steps to the Future!” Crossed off: marriage, master’s degree, home ownership, daughter. Still to come: bank first million, cabin up north, son. She would take the bird and the feathers and reduce them to dreams, coincidences, or worse – action items.

“I think we should sit outside,” said Ava. She held her body across the threshold.

“Seriously, you were living with me like seconds ago! It’s definitely fine if I come in. Plus, my feet are tired and you don’t have any chairs out here.”

“I can bring out the kitchen ones,” but when she went in to get them, Raina followed her inside. Her sister was already picking up spices, moving the baking timer to the other side of the stove. She went through the cabinets like she was thinking about moving in. The bowl of feathers was out of reach. It looked decorative on its little shelf and Raina paid it no mind.

“You should get the fridge that Scott and I have! You know, with the water filter built in!”

“Well, I’m just renting.”
“Were these glasses here when you moved in? I really like this print on the wall, but maybe you should move it. If you leave the curtains open, the sun might wash it out.”

“It’s fine where it is,” said Ava. The volume of her voice surprised her. “Sorry, I’m just... work was hard today.”

Raina took her hands. It was something she’d learned in some self-improvement class. Ava had always hated it. How was this sort of contact something she hadn’t abandoned? She pictured her clinging to the gesture, reaching her hands out under her desk and trying to make meaningful eye contact with a face on video. What are your true goals, she would ask. Or What are you really saying? It always worked, or at least people seemed to feel like her questions had changed them enough to keep paying her to pose them.

“What are you really saying?” Raina asked, and Ava wanted to turn into the smallest dot of ink and hide away in the print that was hung in just the right place. No creature showed up to grant her wish. She stayed herself, her sister’s eyes unrelentingly sympathetic. Ava mumbled some easy complaint and forgot what she said moments after the words left her mouth. I thought about telling her, Ava told her reporter, the whole story, with evidence, but I just—

“Ava, I think if you look for things to be wrong, you’ll find them.”

She nodded. With Raina, it was always easier to agree. She asked about her niece, about Scott, about the house. Raina answered happily, giving her answers in shining handfuls. Her life was a polished mound of treasure. Every day she woke up to its familiar glitter.

“There’s one more thing I wanted to tell you.” She turned toward Ava, a hand resting on her abdomen. The light embraced her, settling on her shoulders like a golden mantle. It gilded the soft swell of her belly. It was going to be a boy, Raina said.

As soon as her sister left, Ava reached into the bowl of feathers and let them slip through her fingers. What was she to do with them? It was sort of a fairy tale predicament. A deserving, good-hearted peasant did a selfless thing for a stranger and then was blessed with some windfall of precious metal. Then, happily ever after. Now Ava wondered how that worked. Did the peasants melt it down and sell it? To whom? Was she supposed to find a blacksmith or something and then buy a fridge with a built-in water filter? She picked up one of the feathers and put it in her mouth, letting it rest on her tongue. It tasted like nothing at all. She spat the feather into a glass of water. It emitted a faint glow. She rolled her eyes. You’ll know, the bird had said. Fine. So she did.

Every night she waited to return to the forest. There, the bird would console her. It would explain to her what to do with its gift, how she might use it to unlock a door to another world. This was how the stories always went. A normal person did normal things until one day the plot took off and lives were changed. Not Ava’s. She worked, she ate, she ignored Raina’s texts. At night, she chewed melatonin gummies into a thin paste.

She started taking walks around the neighborhood to make herself feel like she had somewhere to go. One day as she was returning home, the sky began to darken. She quickened her steps, though by the time she was at her front door the sun was bright as ever. At least, one side of her face was warm. She looked at the house to the left of hers. She looked to the right.

I know it sounds crazy. It was like in Charlie Brown, you know, where the one kid carries around his own dirt storm, she’d tell the reporter, but the other way around. The sky over the other houses was still heavy with clouds. Not the sky over her’s; it was clear and bright. She held her breath, waiting for the rain. Twenty minutes passed and nothing happened. She was just a girl standing on her porch being feasted on by mosquitos. Eventually she went inside.

The days got longer and the heat got heavier. Gloomy weather still avoided her house, even when it poured elsewhere on the block. She was afraid to call it to anyone else’s attention, afraid to make these unprecedented times even more unprecedented. Nothing was wrong, at least not in an ecological way – somehow her grass was still green and her plants were still alive. At night, the glass with the feather in it shone at her from the counter. She couldn’t bring herself to move it.

She spent one of her Sunday mornings experimenting with a new vegan muffin recipe allegedly so good she wouldn’t miss eggs at all. She was just filling the tray for the first batch when the doorbell rang. It startled her enough that her hand shook, muffin batter spattering the counter. Who rang doorbells? Even delivery people just tapped on the screen once and went about their days. Canvassers, maybe, but it was the middle of summer. She remembered a rash of Jehovah’s Witnesses in her neighborhood when she was young, well-meaning pairs of people gently insisting that there was good news.

Ava looked through the peephole. It was an older woman in a fitted gray dress and a rose cardigan, not a pamphlet in sight. A strand of pearls shimmered around her neck like a rope of miniature stars, her hair an impeccable snowy knot. Like a piano teacher, she told her imaginary reporter. A piano teacher out of a childhood that only exists in books. No one with posture like that came to offer neighborhood hospitality. She turned the doorknob. Were her flowers the wrong color? Her grass the wrong length? She waited for the dreadful verdict.

“I live next door,” the woman said, her voice tightening at each word. “I wondered if you might know why it is that your house… seems to get all the sun.”

Ava invited the neighbor into the backyard. Since Raina’s visit, she’d acquired a pair of lawn chairs, but they were secondhand and bent into the shapes of other bodies. The neighbor’s dress was so fine Ava thought it might audibly protest being made to touch fraying plastic. She began to wonder what the woman was doing on a block like this, living amongst renters when she was so clearly a person who knew how to own.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to hog all the sun.” Then the story poured out of her, urged on by her rising guilt and mortification. She didn’t want the woman to think she was selfish; she didn’t want her to think she was delusional. She spent most of the telling looking at the grass beneath her chair. But she didn’t stop, not even when she attempted to describe the way the bird’s voice sounded, or when she explained what had happened to her breakfast the morning after the dream. Her throat felt raw with the telling, as though the words themselves were rough. She found herself promising proof, letting her feet carry her into the kitchen and back out again with her artifacts on a tray.

Right away, the woman reached for the glass with the feather. She turned it carefully in her hands. Even in the bright afternoon, Ava could see the silver glow on the woman’s palms. She felt her shoulders loosen. She was not, as far as she knew, imagining things, unless the woman was made up too.

“When I was a girl,” her neighbor began, “I had an imaginary friend.”
“That’s not—” but the neighbor held up her finger, and Ava’s voice shut off like water from a tap.

“I had an imaginary friend, as many children do. When I think about it now, I wonder why, if childhood is such a time of wonder, I needed such a friend. Shouldn’t my discovery of the world have been fascinating enough? Why did I create another person, an entire second child, from whole cloth? You see, the world is really rather tedious when one is young. One is always being shuffled back and forth on the whims of various grown-up people. My imaginary friend did what I wanted to do. She filled the endless afternoons and kept me company in all the places I was made to go. And then one day I suppose I simply forgot about her.”

The neighbor peered into the glowing glass, an oracle scrying for a possible future. She turned it in the light, watching the sun slice through the water.

“Was that magic? Not like the kind you’ve told me about. But what good would magic have been, knowing that all this,” by which she seemed to mean something much bigger than the thing that dominated newspaper headlines every day, “was coming for me? If the child I was could see this moment, she would wonder what on earth had happened to her.”

“What kind of magic would you have liked?” Ava asked. She knew her own answer: girl discovers secret magical world, and with great bravery and wisdom saves it from evil, bringing peace that she herself might enjoy away from the more tedious demands of reality. The neighbor said nothing. Instead, she passed Ava the glass.

“Have a sip,” she said. This was the point in the story where the heroine (was it Ava, after all?) would have remembered some piece of wisdom from long, long ago, a lacey piece of poetry or fragment of a prophecy that warned her about accepting beverages from relative strangers. Or she’d drink it and fall asleep for a hundred years. Would that be so bad? She raised the glass to her lips.

Nothing happened. Her lips were not even wet. Immediately she felt foolish, cheeks reddening. Could a person forget how to drink water? The neighbor looked at her intently, and then with satisfaction, as though she had overcome some great trial.

Ava looked at the glass. There was water in it, but when she tilted it towards her mouth, the liquid did not move in the right direction. The surface shivered and that was it. She held the glass away from her and slowly turned it over. The water should have rushed out onto the lawn, drowning the ants. The water stayed exactly where it was and the ants were spared another day.

“What the fuck,” said Ava, and then, instantly, “I’m so sorry for my language.”

“I would say it’s quite warranted,” said the neighbor. Together they looked at the miracle of physics in Ava’s hand. No. Neither a miracle nor physics. Magic. “It seemed, as I looked at it... but I wondered about my eyesight. Or even my mind! As one gets older, one worries, you know.”

Ava couldn’t stop turning the glass over, watching the water dip and move. The meniscus stayed firm, a lid of light. “What do you think is happening?” she asked the neighbor.

“I never had much of a head for hard science,” she said. “The rules of it seemed fictional to me, arbitrary as any other rule. I don’t believe nature can be peeled back, stripped down to its laws like some tawdry court case. And the men who made so many ‘discoveries’ seemed ridiculous to me. It wasn’t so strange to think that they had simply made all this up to justify all the time they spent in labs ignoring their families.”

Ava laughed. She never thought of science much at all, and was glad other people had figured out enough of it to keep her from getting cholera from tap water. She would have said it all seemed sound enough, and the universe certainly knew what it was doing. But then lately, reality hadn’t seemed quite so stable.

“When I was a girl, it seemed the only women who talked about science were talking about how it made cakes lighter. That wasn’t interesting to me either. It wasn’t anything I wanted to do.”

“What did you do?” She wasn’t sure how this answered her question about the glass of water, but she was willing to see it through. She might be surrounded by signs and warnings, if only she could put them together.

“I was, and am, a ceramics restorer.” There was a tinge of scolding in the neighbor’s voice, as though Ava should have known better than to put her question in the past tense. “So I am well-versed in time, even though its mathematical and scientific nature eludes me.” She carefully folded her hands in her lap and fixed Ava with a stare, eyes bright as clean steel. “I cannot tell you how or why, but I think that in this glass, time has ceased to pass. Perhaps it has lent its effects to your house as well.”

Then she stood from her chair, stacking her spine straight, and dipped a finger into the water. Ava saw her nail refracted, enormous. The neighbor stroked her cheek and stepped back. Ava pressed her hand to her face. It was completely dry.

A few days after the neighbor’s visit, Ava came home from the park to find Raina’s car in the driveway. Cold sweat broke out on the back of her neck before her mind caught up and told her that of course she’d locked the door, why wouldn’t she have locked the door, she had never in her life left a house without locking the door behind her. But she was still unaccountably terrified of walking into her home and seeing Raina’s eyes lit by the feather’s otherworldly glow.

She didn’t even go in through the front door, afraid to allow even one point of entry. Instead, she walked directly into the backyard.

When Raina was pregnant, she never broke out, she never felt nauseous, her feet never hurt. She simply became more vibrant than anyone else around her. Reality was stronger where Raina was, the saturation turned up as far as it could go. Even now, she made the secondhand lawn chairs look newer, cleaner, somehow happy to be of use.

“How does time work?” Ava asked, stomping across the grass toward her sister.

“Hello, Raina, how are you feeling, is how I think this is supposed to go.”

“Well,” said Ava. “I asked a different question.” Time, time, what was time? Ava distantly remembered a lecture hall, a man comparing time to a fabric distorted by the weight of a tennis ball. Time passed differently at the top of a tall mountain than it did at its foot, something like that. It seemed impossible that she didn’t know more, that she hadn’t been taught something so essential about being alive.

“In that case, time is what passes between me sending you texts and then showing up at your house when you don’t reply to enough of them.” Raina was simply pulsing with well-being, delighted with her own cleverness. “What, you don’t like hanging out in groups or something?” She pressed her hands into her stomach and laughed.

“OK, what would it take to feel like you didn’t understand the world at all? Think about when we were kids,” Ava pressed on. Shouldn’t her very own sister understand what she was trying to say? “What if you tried to explain your life now to yourself at six years old? Wouldn’t the little you think something completely horrible had happened?”

“I mean,” and here Raina’s voice got gentle, the way she talked to her daughter, and not to an adult who was, in fact, older than her, “is it horrible? Or is it just growing up?”

Ava wanted to shout. She wanted to yell loud enough for her voice to be heard through the walls next door. She didn’t mean she missed being a child. She wanted to shake off the oily gloss of Raina’s pity and fling it back in her face, to make her understand what it was that was bothering her. When she was six, things seemed to happen all the time. There were birthdays and Christmases and even Raina, who had burst into being where once there was simply space. Time moved quickly, relentlessly, and even though no talking animal had ever chosen her for a quest, her life still had motion, or the semblance of it. Now she was simply photocopying days, each one very much like the last.

“Let me try again,” she said. “Is this what you thought life would be like?”

“Well, I did have that Olympic gymnast phase, remember? Even though I never wanted to go to practice.” Raina looked down at her from her lawn chair palanquin. “I mean, I always thought I’d get married and have kids, if that’s what you’re asking. And if this is all coming up because of my new pea in the pod, I totally get that’s not the path you’re on, and it’s really ok.”

She couldn’t stand to be misunderstood but neither could she make herself clear. Instead, she gave in. She cooed over pictures of her niece and asked appropriate questions about her soon-to-be nephew, carefully stepping around committing to the baby shower. She wondered how her sister didn’t detect the perfunctory note in her oohs and ahhs, then she thought, what if she expected it? This was what people did, this was how the hours got filled. Everyone practiced their lines. Sounding rehearsed meant you cared enough to play your part.

After Raina left, the neighbor returned. She was there the next day and the day after. Soon, they spent every afternoon in the sunny backyard. Ava invested in a small weatherproof table for the glass of water, along with beverages they could actually drink. She discovered her neighbor had a taste for gin and tonics, and would, if prodded, tell stories about the people she restored ceramics for. One afternoon it rained on the rest of the block while her yard stayed pleasantly dry. She and the neighbor watched the water fall around them, safe in their cloche of summer.

She had never learned the neighbor’s name, and by now it seemed impolite to ask. I mean, how could I even bring it up, you know? (The reporter would nod understandingly here, inexorably on Ava’s side.) I’m sure there’s an etiquette rule. You can’t ask someone their name after weeks of conversation. She knew the neighbor had been briefly married in the seventies, and that she had a sister and even a grand-niece who was interested in art.

“A very tiresome sort of art,” said the neighbor. “I hope she grows out of it and makes something interesting one day.”

Every day after the drinks were finished, one of them would try to empty the glass. Every day, it refused to be emptied. It was a ceremony that struck atheist Ava as vaguely religious. One day she asked the neighbor if she thought they were at risk of turning into a cult. The neighbor said she wasn’t interested in attracting any followers, and she didn’t think the yard would hold them, anyway.

Life fell into an easy rhythm. Ava restocked her gin, started and dispatched petty work dramas, watched marshmallow-light TV shows, learned to cook new egg-free recipes, read books she’d bought and never opened, went on walks, sent texts, took out the trash, brushed her hair, slept easily and dreamlessly. When she tried to update the reporter in her mind, all she could think to say was, and then everything was fine. Then nothing changed.

A reporter needs a story, and stories need events, things that happen in a somewhat linear order that can be reasonably assumed to be caused by one another. One Weird Thing Happened That Had No Observable Effect was not a great headline. It didn’t grab a reader. No one would text that to a friend, no one would even tweet a screenshot from the article beneath it. So there was magic in the world? So what? Like everything else, it was kind of boring after a while. A person could get used to anything if it stuck around long enough.

But things keep happening. That’s part of the answer to how time works. Cells multiply and die, dust particles collect, atoms change their location millisecond after millisecond. Brains put everything in order, one word leading to the next. Stories need events, even this one.

So this is what happened: The summer began to wind down, and all the heat left in the year squeezed itself into the beginning of September. Ava stopped cooking, eating yogurt and granola and salads full of raw, undressed vegetables. Her backyard remained miraculously temperate, as lovely as the day she’d first put the feather in the glass. She and the neighbor sipped their cocktails, the ice melting at just the right pace to keep the gin cool. It felt like living in a postcard, the best part of the season captured eternally.

She still went for walks, and one sweltering Sunday she returned home looking forward to her capsule of perfect weather. There was a car in the driveway—Raina’s—and she realized she had completely missed the baby shower, even the part where people could call in on camera. She had sent a present, she knew that, only she couldn’t recall what it was. She imagined Raina in her impractical heels, sinking into the grass, holding some kind of unsuitable onesie in her hand, a look of disappointed tolerance all over her face. She wouldn’t accept “time got away from me” as an excuse, because what was there but time, time, glasses and glasses of it?

Ava did not want to go home. She wanted to go back to the park and sit in the shadow of the big historic oak tree until night fell and Raina gave up, but she didn’t want to miss her date with the neighbor. The thought of disrupting their ritual made something fizz in her stomach, like she’d swallowed a slow-burning firework. She’d make the appropriate apologies and hurry her sister away, so that the cloudless sky and cocktail glasses would be ready for the neighbor when the time came. Resentment was already sneaking into the lines of her face. She tried to iron it out as she walked around to the yard.

Raina was sitting in one of the lawn chairs, fanning herself with a newspaper. Ava gaped. Even though the person in the chair couldn’t be anyone other than her sister, Ava didn’t recognize her for a long moment. Raina did not change. Things changed around Raina, at Raina’s best. And now! She couldn’t ask what happened. She knew what happened. She couldn’t say did you get more pregnant even though those were the words curling under her tongue. She was so pregnant it was cartoonish, like a kid at a sleepover shoving pillows under their shirt. She was sweating, there were bags under her eyes, and even her ankles were swollen. Ava swallowed.

“So you are alive,” said Raina. “You know, people worry about you sometimes.” She looked at Ava with tired eyes and asked for a glass of water. Her mask hung limply from her wrist. Unlocking the back door, Ava scolded herself for her thoughtlessness. If only she had just gone to the damn baby shower and stood six feet away from her parents’ friends and Scott’s terrible in-laws, this all could have been avoided. Raina was only worried, not an annoyance to be swatted away. She’d let the ocean wave of her days lull her into a spell of selfishness. She’d forgotten that sometimes you needed to do things for other people. Raina would never forget that. Just look at her, baking in the backyard, waiting for a chance to speak to her.

Ava opened the cupboard for one of the nice glasses. She pried ice cubes out of the tray. If she had cucumbers, she would have sliced them. As it was, she had a basket of limes. Were pregnant people allowed to have limes? Were they too acidic? She stared at the fruit in her hand for what could only have been seconds. Then she heard the sigh, a deep, satisfied one, like a stock sound effect in a seltzer commercial. She turned.

Raina had followed her into the house, eerily silent in her new flat shoes. She was putting a glass of water onto the counter, a glass of water now half-drunk.

At the bottom, the feather glinted.

After Raina left, baffled by her sister’s brusque and almost panicked behavior, it started to rain. It was a late summer shower, quick and fierce. Ava stood in the door to her backyard, watching the drops hit the grass like darts. Water speckled the backs of her hands, flicked up into her face. Then it was over, as if it had never been.

The neighbor didn’t come over that day, or the next, or the one after that. A few weeks later, a moving van showed up outside the house next door. She watched strangers lifting pieces of furniture and packing boxes and looking for her neighbor imperiously directing them to be careful, but she only ever glimpsed a sleeve, a sneaker, the back of a head. She thought of ringing the doorbell during her lunch break and then thought better of it. She didn’t even know the woman’s name.

Once, just once, Ava put another feather in a glass of water. She tipped it over and it soaked through her socks.

Trees began to lose their leaves. The wind at night got colder. Raina had the baby, a boy, of course, but the news was more dire by the day so no one was invited over to meet him. Then it was winter, and the long summer afternoons felt like scenes from a movie she’d seen several years ago. The feathers gathered dust. Icicles grew and shattered. The year ended, the year began. The sun began to last a little longer, feel a little warmer. It happened again and again, year following year following year. Ava quit her job and started a new one. She moved to a different state. Then she moved back. There were birthday parties and dates and weddings and funerals. Time kept pace with her, tugging her along by the wrist. She’d stopped looking at the feathers, but she never stopped waiting for magic. One day, she thought, one day she would wake up to the sound of hundreds of birds in song, and then at last everything would change.

STORY:
Gemma Kaneko is a writer who lives in Brooklyn with all the other writers. Her work has appeared online in no tokens journal, and onstage at the Connelly Theater, Ars Nova and the New Ohio. You almost certainly do not recognize her from her performance as Jeb Bush in True Right, her adaptation of Sam Shepard's True West. Please clap.

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ART:
Zoë Petersen is an illustrator from the Desert Southwest. She loves to knit and believes there is power in the term "grandma craft." Until Craft Grandmother can be her official title, she'll keep making pictures for stories.

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Read Short Story Long’s interview with Gemma about this story.

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