the gloves. For a moment Mother stared into her eyes, searching, then she gave a full smile and left. Marlene watched the indention Mother had left on the bed raise up and fill, but she did not move until she heard the faraway wail of the vacuum begin to heave in heavy sucks.
In tears, Marlene ran into Brother’s room. When she looked at his shirts hanging up in the closet, she felt the same affection for their cloth as for his skin. She buried her face in them, ran to his bed and ruffled his sheets, begged him to appear, appear. She did notice his guitar was missing. Had Mother cut it up as well?
Winter came and Father seemed to retreat into his woolly skin. He never pressed for further answers about where Brother was staying, but he often wished aloud for his son’s return.
After dinner, as Mother and Marlene sat by the fire, it became common for Father to excuse himself and take his pipe outdoors. All the while he would stare at the juniper tree, whose branches were growing new berries despite the cold.
Mother peeked out the curtains and watched his every move. “How I think I’ll take the ax to that tree,” she’d remark, “so that Father might stay with us by the fire.” Whenever she passed a window that looked out upon the tree, Mother made an upside-down cross with her gloved fingers and extended it toward the glass.
One night, right before she fell asleep, Marlene rolled over to find a feather on her pillow. The moment she touched it a deep dream began.
At first she saw nothing, and when she was able to see she realized the eyes were not her own but the eyes of a bird. She looked through them like two holes of a mask, the bird’s long beak jutting up into her line of vision.
Underground, in a hollow space made of earth, she and the bird were pecking Brother’s parts back together. The beak came down in small strikes that were a form of stitching. Occasionally it would stop and grab berries from a stockpile, using them to fill in holes where Mother had taken away meat. Pieces of pecked-through garbage bags were scattered everywhere like tissue paper. When finished, the bird cried out until Brother’s body started moving.
The bird jumped ahead, leading Brother through a tunnel up into the juniper tree. Marlene watched as its trunk cracked open like an egg filled with light.
She and the bird flew up while Brother crawled out, and the tree closed up behind them.
Marlene then saw the sky and the roof of their home, and occasionally caught glimpses of Brother, naked far below, his flesh white and cloudy like a ridge of ice. Even from the air, she could make out the violet grafts on his arms where berries had patched his skin. When Brother walked into the house, the bird flew to Brother’s bedroom window and waited.
Brother appeared in his room minutes later, gaunt and confused. He dressed in the dark, lifted his guitar, and left.
The bird flew very high until Brother became a silver-blond dot on the road below. A truck stopped and he entered it; the bird flew for quite a distance to follow him. There was the familiar sound of fluttering, the sound Marlene heard on the night she buried him, and there were long stretches of darkness that told of passing time. When the bird’s eyes went black, Marlene heard a flapping noise, like musical paper, as the sound of wings sped up into an echo.
Finally the bird perched above a small tavern. Marlene could hear music and see Brother inside, a blanched shape performing a song on his guitar. She saw flashes of him in many towns, on many stages, and could feel his confusion as he wandered; his memory had been reduced to a vague longing, and this came and went spontaneously like strange desire. Just before she woke she saw him standing at a sidewalk storefront, eyeing a pair of red shoes that resembled the ones she wore every day.
When Marlene woke again she was in her room; the feather was floating in the air just inches above her pillow. Her hand reached out, but at the slightest touch it turned to ash in her fingers.
The dream caused Marlene to feel weary and flu-like. Even the next night, she was still shaky when she sat down to dinner with Mother and Father. Light organ music played on the radio, and Father was cutting his meal into tinier and tinier bits. “Can’t you make the sauerbraten again?” he asked Mother, looking down at his plate with distant eyes.
Just then, the music on the radio abruptly stopped. Marlene’s hand froze around her fork; a fluttering noise poured through the speakers. After a brief minute of static, a very peculiar song came on. “My mother, she killed me,” the voice sang. “My father, he ate me. My sister, she saved my bones, tweet, tweet. ”
Mother crept over and turned down the radio’s knob with her rubber fingers.
“Some quiet,” she snipped. She then scowled at the radio and began to examine it carefully, as if it might be something more than it seemed.
The very next night Mother did indeed make sauerbraten, but this time it was not to Father’s liking. He excused himself to go outside and smoke, and Marlene turned on the radio as Mother made a fire. They sat and listened to an organ’s cheery song as flames seared the logs a deep white.
Just as Father came back inside the house, the radio’s song turned to static. This slowly gave way to the sound of wings, then music.
“Mother killed her little son; what a beautiful bird am I. Father ate ’til meat was gone; what a beautiful bird am I. Sister saved my bones; now I sing and fly. ”
Mother’s eyes stared straight forward, wide with terror. “Looking at this fire,” she remarked in a flat and breathy voice, “I feel like I am burning up.”
Marlene awoke the next morning to a loud and constant wailing. Neither Mother nor Father seemed able to hear it; Father went away to work as usual and Mother spent her day on the patio killing bugs. Marlene desperately searched for the source of the noise, but she couldn’t tell where it stopped or started. Was it Brother’s room? The juniper tree? The basement?
The sound grew so loud that Marlene began to see small gray dots; occasionally it seemed as if birds were flying just beyond the corners of her vision.
For most of the afternoon, she lay in Brother’s room listening to records and getting sick into a bag.
When her parents insisted she come down for dinner that evening, Marlene did not think she’d be able to accept the smell of food. But as she sat down, the deafening static leaped from the inside of her head onto the radio. “My mother forced me quick to die.” Brother’s voice rang out inside the kitchen. “My father ate me in a pie.”
Mother leaped up and started her bony fingers toward the dial. “Some quiet,” she said, but Father interrupted.
“Some music might be nice tonight.”
“Perhaps a different tune, then,” Mother suggested. But as she flipped the knob, she found that the song was on every station. “Only my sister began to cry.”
Father stood up and squinted his eyes toward the window.
“Is someone walking toward the house?” Grabbing his pipe, he excused himself from the table to have a better look.
Mother slowly backed away from the radio, her eyes fixed upon the fireplace, her hands twisting. “When I look at the fire,” she stammered, “I feel as if I’m being burned alive.” Her smile grew lopsided; she began to unbutton her dress.
“But there isn’t any fire, Mother.”
Mother’s gloved hands grabbed the radio and threw it to the floor. It split into as many pieces as Brother, but the song kept playing. Her gloves started ripping at her clothes; she buried her head beneath the faucet of the sink and began to shriek.
Panicked, Marlene ran outside to Father. But when she saw the pale figure coming down the path, her heart leaped. “Is it Brother?” she cried aloud. Hopeful, Father began to wave a hairy hand, and Mother burst from the house topless with soaked hair. Marlene’s eyes flew to the ax Mother clutched in one yellow, gloved hand and the large Bible she held in the other. “I’ll chop them all down,” Mother screamed, her torn dress blowing off her body. “The tree and our visitor as well!”
But as Mother arrived beneath the tree, all its new berries rained down upon her and she halted in shock. The
