That night, Ronia dreamed that the girls lived in a nest at the top of the chimney. Their hands gripped the edges of the rocks like talons and they peered down at the people on the path. When Ronia walked along the path looking for her children, the girls threw bits of twig and feathers and dry grass at their mother, but it did not reach her. It blew up in a twisting wind and vanished over the edge of the empty trees. She called to the girls to come down, but they were no longer girls. They stared down at her with large, complicated eyes, their gentle antennae clasping and unclasping, their long, thin, green legs folded under their bodies, ready to spring. Ready to fly away. And they did fly. Over her head, her girls, or her grasshoppers, or her grasshoppers who once were her girls, vaulted across the sky in a buzz of leg and song.
When she woke, she did not remember the dream.
“I had the strangest dream,” she told people.
“What was it?” the people asked.
“No idea,” she said.
5.
The police were called, more than once, although no one could tell them why they called. People dialed the emergency number and found themselves staring at the place where Ronia Drake once lived and breathed, but now did not. One man vomited on his phone, ruining it forever. A girl tried to explain what she saw, but she fell to her knees and began speaking in tongues instead. An older woman began to have heart palpitations, and asked the dispatcher—a kind woman named Eunice—to send out an extra ambulance while she was at it. When the ambulance arrived, the EMTs found the old woman seated under a tree, her legs stretched out in front of her, her body pressed to the trunk of the tree as though pinned. She had faced herself away from the remains of Ronia Drake, which seemed sensible enough, but had died anyway, pressing one hand against her eyes and one on her heart. The girl remained in the center of the path, kneeling, her hands and face pointing to the sky. Her voice had gone hoarse by the time the ambulance came, and the second ambulance, and the fire truck and police car. But her lips continued to move.
One paramedic knelt by some of the remains of Ronia Drake. A severed ponytail, a bit of T-shirt that said “Mama.” The paramedic picked up the ponytail and brought it to his nose. He smelled bread and long-limbed children and cut grass and a curved pink lip exposing white teeth that had been sharpened to points. He smelled bright green grasshoppers tenderly washing their faces. He smelled a slim, long-legged deer, bending sweetly to feed upon the damp grass. A deer with two grasshoppers balanced on her delicately boned head. A deer with a blue eye.
“Ronia Drake,” he said to the others. “Her name was Ronia Drake.” He did not explain how he knew this, and no one asked. The others began looking for any kind of identification, though they would find none. They did find a shoe, ten toes (in ten places), a shoulder, a blue eye. Each part was sliced cleanly, as though with a scalpel. There was little blood. “And this,” the paramedic said, picking up the two hands clasped together as though praying. One hand was red-knuckled and quick-bitten. The other was pink-tipped and pale as pearls, with a diamond that would have gleamed were it not for the drop of blood that had landed on the stone. “This,” he said, “is not her hand.”
Above their heads an unkindness of ravens gathered and dispersed and gathered again. They landed on empty branches, on signs declaring which path was for biking and which for walking, and on the wet ground. They opened their black beaks and called to one another, and back, and back again. The paramedic looked into the glinting eye of the biggest, shiniest of them all. Although he knew it was crazy, he could have sworn the ravens were calling “Ronia, Ronia, Ronia.”
6.
The stepmother locked herself into the bathroom.
“You,” the girls said on the other side of the door. They did not knock or bang.
“Shut up,” the stepmother whispered, her voice like glass in her ears.
“You,” the girls sang. No, screeched. No, sang. Sang like birds—no, like bugs. They sang with the voice of something small. Something scuttling. Something with a damp, satiated mouth.
“Tzzz, tzzz, tzzz,” they sang, their voices reverberating on the tile and porcelain, shaking the walls, vibrating the stepmother’s perfect house.
The stepmother covered her ears, felt the coagulating blood gum up on the side of her cheek. Her left hand was bloody still, and still not her own. Ronia Drake’s hand. Ronia Drake’s hand missing a pinkie and a thumb. With the hand that was her own, she gripped at her belly, swollen so taut and tight that it threatened to split down the middle. The child inside did not move. It had not moved all day.
When Ronia Drake was pregnant, the girls’ father said, her belly twisted and rumbled from morning to night. He said that the girls were a constant tumble of arms and legs and wings. He said that if you placed your
