Feathers

The first feather began to grow on the second full moon of the year. Two days after Helene’s last treatment. I felt it poking through my scalp, an itchy little protrusion I mistook for a tick. I worried often about getting Lyme disease, so I'd been checking religiously for the little buggers.

When I pulled it out, I realized it was a calamus, the quill part of a feather. And I wondered how it had attached to my skin, thinking nothing of what I might have done to cause it.

I suppose I was so caught up in caring for Helene through the chemo, so desperate to keep her here, that I failed to anchor myself to the world. I was stretched thin like rice paper. Translucent and tired. I should have known better than to pour from an empty cup. But hope, it's a dangerous fog that rolls in and smothers you until it's all you see.

The truth is, I didn’t mean for everything to happen the way it did. Not that I would change it now. But it was just supposed to be a ritual. An old wives' tale that Granny Lavinia used to tell me. I didn’t even know if I fully believed in it. But I'd always favored Granny Lavinia and her witchy ways. Making potions in the sand and talking to the moon and stars. Sometimes, I even imagined they talked back. Helene would laugh at me, ever the practical science lover, but I knew I held a sort of power that she couldn't understand. Sometimes, I could feel my own fingernails grow, I was so in tune with things.

"Seek the owl's wisdom and you'll find a way to turn night into day," Granny Lavinia would always say when we went on our nature walks.

When I asked her what it meant, she said that if you called out to an owl in the night, they would give you the answer to turn something bad into something good. But you had to want it with the purity of love, she’d say. It couldn't come from a place of darkness and hate. “All magic should come from something pure,” she’d tell me.

And my love for Helene, it was pure. After all, she was my twin. My other half. And I so badly needed to turn Helly's diagnosis into something good. I needed her to live, whatever the cost. Even if that cost was me.

The funny thing is, no one ever tells a caretaker how to take care of themselves. Which is strange, considering the word itself. I should have been able to care for myself too. To stop the transformation before it was complete. But I was too invested in Helly to see myself.

It's why I barely slept and spent my nights walking on the ranch our grandparents had left us. Where Helly had said she wanted to spend her last days right after she started chemo.

"Don't say that!" I'd yelled, the lump in my throat making me sound a bit like Kermit. She'd laughed, and played it off as if she were joking, her dark humor more intact that ever. It was something I’d always loved about her, but it was a hard thing to swallow then. My fear was settled just beneath my bones, and I could hear it whisper to me in the silences, eating at my flesh.

So I started walking at night. Filling up my lungs with the moon’s air. Talking to the stars. Begging for them to guide me to an answer. And that's when I heard the barn owl calling me. Sometimes, when I would go too deep into the woods, it would screech overhead. Warning me to never stray far from Helly's side. Sometimes, it would call out softly, a lyrical puzzle I could never quite figure out. As if there was a question behind its song, an answer only I knew but couldn’t quite grasp. It could feel my desperation by then.

Then I remembered what Granny said.

I knew then that I would do the ritual. I was that desperate. On a full moon, I took the herbs and crystals to the painted tree stump Granny Lavinia had always called her altar. I burned an incense, and I started chanting things I’d heard Granny say sometimes. I lit a small votive candle and I prayed to the owl of the night to help me turn the darkness of Helly’s cancer into a bright sunny day that she would wake up for every day until she was old and gray.

After an hour, I heard the owl’s wings flapping, watching it in the moonlight as it flew from the barn roof to the fence just a few feet away. There it sat, eyeing me for far too long.

It was cold, and I could see my breath as I sat there. Me and this owl in a showdown of magic and power. Finally, it turned its head, hooted into the night, and then looked back once at me before it flew away again.

A month later, that first feather showed up. I’d picked at it until it began to bleed. The next day, a full feather had grown there. I plucked that one too. And then the next day, there were three feathers. And they kept growing.

I hid them from Helly for as long as I could, but when I had a full head of feathers poking out from beneath my beanie, she knew something was up.

“Luna, what on earth are you wearing?” The color in her cheeks had started to come back, and her own hair was growing again. She was starting to look like the old Helene. Helly BC, I called her. Before Cancer.

“I’m not wearing anything…” I said, not elaborating. But she knew. I was becoming something else.

She was getting better, and I was getting worse.

Four days later, both of my arms were full of feathers and I could only turn my head left to right.

Helly didn’t understand. She was scared. But I knew what I was.

At night, I would go out and sit on the fence, screeching into the night. Talking to the stars in a new language. And I could hear them replying. I could hear the world and nature and the forest. Everything was talking to me.

I could no longer go with Helene to her appointments. It would raise too many questions. She kept me locked in the laundry room, so I wouldn’t fly around and break things. When she came home from her last checkup, she fed me two mice and stroked my feathers. She told me that she was in remission.

Two weeks later, she set me free. She cried, but I knew she’d be okay. I flew to the top of the barn, watching her through the kitchen window. Just like I do every night.