There was calm inside the skulls of the collected birds. But Jesse still felt a tidal wave of something close to panic, a wave in the distance, a shadow over ice. Inside the garage the jumper cables still sagged under the upraised hood of the car. Spider webs and the spent silk of exploded cocoons. Sometimes he shook a bird’s skull and listened: nothing but time inside. Other flatter birds he’d stacked on a pallet. They’d squawked when they’d made contact with his car going 80 (back when he could drive the car and go 80) sucked absolutely boneless by the radiator. Still, their feathers were shinier than oil all these years later—reflective as water escaped into an abandoned school’s basement, snowflakes hissing in through a long-broken window. The oily depths, he named such luster, the lucent blindness, a cul-de-sac of vane and quill, the shimmer of wind across an inhospitable landscape; floodwaters raging under ice, flames dancing back and forth on top of a frozen inland ocean, no reason Jesse could figure out as to why such a thing would ever subside …
~
Jesse’s mother was laid out flat on her bed, on top of the bedspread. Eileen was very much alive. Her breathing could be heard through a small pipe embedded in the roof, where crows sometimes perched, listening to it. The temperature in the house was always 43°. She remembered him when he was thirteen. How he’d closed his eyes in the field, floating away atop the snow drifts, over the creek where it split into branches behind him, where he breached the bi-furcated reflection of the moon that lay beneath him …
~
Eileen was tired. She was always tired. Eileen did not feel happy. Eileen did not feel sad. Like an unframed picture thumbtacked to a wall. But once a day she maneuvered through the house, roaming the halls without difficulty, without delight. She didn’t need or want all these extra rooms any longer. He wasn’t in any of the cold beds. He wasn’t in the chair beside the radio. He wasn’t in the casket beside his father’s in the library. Some of the spigots in the house worked. Some of them didn’t. One spit flames. One funneled only torrents of what appeared to be bone dust. Sometimes a skinny spider crawled out of a spigot and scaled a pipe. She’d never see it again.
~
His shoulders were even wider than his father’s. His neck muscled straight up into his skull. She moved through the hallway, disturbing piles of beetle shell plates in her wake. Jesse opened the two white cellar doors that led outside and stood in the winter sunshine. His breath steamed into the air. He felt as if all he had to do was lift one foot and he’d start moving with incredible speed. He held tightly to the rope. He knew he could make it all the way across. All he had to do was decide. A few remaining birds had been peeled from the grill of the GTO’s radiator. He’d rolled them up with the others, secured them with twine, and gently pressed them into large Band-Aid cans. He threw the dried skulls into a burlap sack. He wasn’t going anywhere without them. The sun disappeared behind a wall of smoke. He leaped onto the sheet of ice.
~
Eileen heard only the wind blowing across the acreage. She remembered the long rolling hill down into the valley—the market, the tannery, the knife sharpener’s A‑frame. She decided to survey the neighborhood after all. She wanted to feel flabbergasted one last time. She floated across the filthy kitchen floor and then hovered before the window. She often forgot there were no longer any buildings left after a weekend’s worth of napping. She looked out across the solid, flat sheet of ice extending out toward the horizon. And there he was, her own flesh and blood, rappelling toward the forests of flames.
~
David Dodd Lee is the author of ten books of poetry, as well as a forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems, and original poems, entitled Unlucky Animals.