The Bird

“I saw a bird today.”

Her voice emerges from the cocoon of yellow foam and matted blankets on the other side of the platform. Shapes of the scrapyard cast shadows that slice my sister’s face into strips, and her one eye falls perfectly in a stripe of orange glow from the burn barrel in the pit.

It’s staring straight into mine.

“No, you didn’t. Go to sleep.”

“Yes, I did.” I can hear Lace and Carver speaking in hushed, yet fervent tones down below. This is the third day in a row without dinner and everyone is feeling the pricklies more than usual.

“You don’t even know what a bird looks like,” I snap at Bridget. I turn over on the mat.

The pricklies are amplified, no longer just the usual itching we can usually ignore. The pricklies have erupted into hot, burning needles sprouting underneath our skin. I rake my splitting nails across my neck without thinking and suddenly the side of my face is on fire. I groan and shove my head into the mat.

Bridget falls silent and I allow myself to hope that she’s gone to sleep.

“Yes, I do,” she grumbles.

I rip the netting off my body and stare back into her one eye, shining like something at the bottom of a well.

“No, you don’t. All the birds died long before you were even born. Shut up and go to sleep.”

“I can prove it.”

“Fine. Prove it.”

“I have to show you.”

I realize that Lace and Carver aren’t speaking anymore in the background. Maybe they’re listening. I don’t want them to climb up here and make the pricklies worse. I motion to Bridget. We sit in silence for one moment, her orange eye half-closed, listening.

Finally the voices pick back up again. Lace says something about the Bloodletters. There’s a crash as someone smashes a glass bottle in frustration. More voices begin to layer, building waves of discord. The pricklies ripple across my spine.

“I can show you,” Bridget says.

Curses escape my gritted teeth. My stomach is a dark, empty, gnawing thing and I want to tear off all my skin. Sleep isn’t happening tonight anyways.

“Fine.” I whisper. “Show me.”

Bridget’s empty-tooth grin appears in the orange stripe of firelight.

“But you know the rules,” I tell her. “You wear your locket. I wear mine.”

As I say this, I am grabbing the silver heart-shaped locket by my tattered pillow and folding it around my neck. Where the chain rubs up against my skin, it is agony. But I don’t care.

Shoes are tied in the darkness with shaking, burning fingers. The grownups are now fully screaming at each other inside the pit. Scrap metal clatters as they scuffle in fury. Bridget and I seize the opportunity to shuffle down the ladder and make our way down the path through sagging automobiles and piles of crushed aluminum cans.

As we scamper away from the light of the burn barrel, the scrapyard gives way to total darkness, but we know the path by heart. With Bridget in the lead, we know exactly where to leap over the razor wire traps, how to crawl through the tunnel in the hollowed-out cement mixer. As our feet pound our way through the rotting, rusted graveyard of disposed, forgotten things, I am temporarily distracted from the burning in my eyes and my toes and my teeth by getting lost in the lackluster luxuries of a time before ours.

Before scavenging. Before pricklies. Before.

By the time Bridget finally slows down, we are at the edge of the dump. The border is lined with a barbed wire fence, but there are pockets you can slip through if you know the right place to look.

A grey incandescence from above faintly illuminates the other side of the wire, and Bridget’s face is crisscrossed with the resulting shadows. Her one eye looks up toward the sky.

“Is that the moon?” she whispers.

A halo appears beyond the veil of ash and dust swallowing the horizon. It is barely there — like a dying breath. But it is there.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never seen the moon.”

As Bridget stares transfixed, I glance at the emptiness around her neck.

“Bridget. Where is your locket? I told you that you had to wear it!”

“I have it!” Bridget whines. “It’s just in my pocket.” “You have to wear it around your neck! I told you!”

“I can’t fasten the lock!” Bridget produces the silver heart from the pocket in her jacket that is much too large for her. The sleeves sag around her wrists and almost hide the locket in her palm completely.

“Let me do it for you.” I move her scraggly hair off her neck — the little that is left — and snap the locket in place.

“You know what to do if you’re captured by the Bloodletters, right,” I say, a little nervous. “This is our only form of protection. You need this to be immediately accessible. In your pocket is no good.”

“I’ve heard you tell me a bazillion times,” Bridget grumbles.

“Not enough, apparently.”

“Do you want to see the bird or not?” Bridget snaps, her strained voice echoing against the darkness. I roll my eyes.

“Shush. It’s probably not even a real bird.” “You’ll see,” she whispers, tiny fingers peeling a pre-cut piece of barbed wire from one dark corner of the fence, and lifting it just enough to create an opening. We flatten ourselves against the cold, black earth and emerge on the other side.

Once we’re past the fence, we know we’re in Bloodletter territory. We fall silent.

Bridget leads me by the hand toward the north end of the train tracks. The rhythm of our feet sync up against the rails, each one just spaced out enough to be reached in a single stride, almost like they were made for us. But they weren’t made for us. They were made for people before our time, for vehicles that could take you from one end of the continent to the other in a couple of hours. Now, we walk.

The grey halo of light gently illuminates a fog that slowly envelops us. The damp, cool air is the only comfort against the pricklies that threaten to boil my blood and leak venom out my tear ducts. That, and the feeling of Bridget’s hand in mine are the only things keeping the waves of excruciation at bay.

We walk for what feels like hours.

The meditative stamping on the rails begins to lull me. There is nothing for my eyes to focus on, save for the swaths of grey in front of us. Every step forward looks exactly like the last. My eyelids quiver. My stomach reminds me with a pang that it is hollow, like an old bone, like a hole in the ground.

Suddenly Bridget stops. I lurch forward, not expecting the abrupt stillness.

I am about to scream at her for not warning me, but her eye glows with the grey light in the most peculiar way. She pulls her hand out of mine. Her finger moves to her lips, and then to an old telephone pole on the other side of the train tracks.

“There,” she whispers.

A tuft of fog passes in front of the top of pole, revealing a massive clump of sticks, wires, and netting, sticking out in all directions — like a blockage catching debris in a river filled with trash. The accumulation balances on the tip of the pole in a way that seems impossible — yet it doesn’t seem unsteady in the slightest.

The pricklies catch my eyelids and they twitch uncontrollably.

“That’s not a bird, Bridget,” I say. “Are you seriously this stupid?”

“There,” she hisses, fist tightening around my arm.

A tiny, domed head emerges from the clutter on the pole. Its face ends in a subtle point. Its eyes are black. They dart back and forth between Bridget and me. Chrrr? It emits a sound, like a velvet bell. Bridget and I jump backward. Bridget’s one eye bores into mine.

“I told you,” she whispers, her toothless grin absorbing her whole face.

I look back the bird. With one flutter of its large black wings, the bird hops out of the nest and glides along the fog, in the direction of where the train tracks are leading. As my hands find Bridget’s again, the creature tosses one last glance at us. It is the first bird I have ever seen alive.

A deafening pop explodes in front of us. Bridget and I stumble backwards, and whatever mirth had been filling our bodies is instantly sucked out through our mouths. It is replaced with a thick and immovable fear.

Suddenly the bird falls to the ground in front of us with a soft thud. Its body is contorted in pain. Its wings flap uselessly, until they don’t. The whole time, the bird doesn’t make a sound.

“Bloodletters,” I whisper.

My heart is hammering into my ears so hard I can’t even feel the pricklies anymore. Bridget and I are already bolting in the direction we came from, feet pounding on the rails, but everything feels as if we are running in slow motion — as if we are running through a thick, toxic mud.

We can hear the voices howling behind us. There are so many of them. More pops explode around us, punching holes into the wall of fog. Bridget is falling behind. I reach out for her hand, pull her forward. A violent gust flies past us, narrowly missing my head — pop — followed by endless cackling.

I realize, all of a sudden, how small Bridget is. It only just occurs to me. Her legs are short, spindly things as we race into the fog and she is hyperventilating. Wheezing. She keeps falling behind, and I know we have miles to go. The voices are closing in. Their footsteps are on us like they are own shadows.

“Bridget,” I gasp through the pain.

The pricklies are back, and this time, nothing can shut them out. The burning with every breath. The stinging all over, now coming into laser focus. With every step forward, I feel a thousand knives slicing at my throat, my lungs, my heart.

She can’t respond. She’s breathing too hard. With every breath, a small whine escapes from her tiny body. She’s struggling to keep up. “Bridget, you have to run ahead,” I pray she can hear me against the cacophony behind us — the shots — the maniacal laughter.

“I’ll distract them. You hear me? I’ll keep them.”

“No,” she whines. It is a pitiful sound.

“I’ll be okay,” I fight my hardest to sound comforting. I feel fingertips grazing my elbow.

“I’ve got my locket. Remember?” I try my best to smile at her. Her one eye gazes back hopelessly at me. But she doesn’t protest.

Maybe she doesn’t have the breath.

“Ah!” I purposefully buckle one knee. It slams into the metal rail and I lurch forward, rolling uncontrollably down the tracks. The voices hit a crescendo of madness, blazoned with triumph over their prey. My chin is split and bleeding on a rail and the skin on the palm of my hands tear against the gravel.

My eyes open. I see Bridget disappearing into the fog. Nobody is following her. Hands layer over my legs and start to drag me backwards. The hot spittle from the maniacal shrieks rain on my body.

My raw and bleeding hands find the silver locket around my neck.

My fingers grasp at the smoothness. I pop open the metal heart and find the tiny cyanide pill inside.

No more pricklies. No more hunger. No more nothing.

“Goodbye, Bridget” I whisper as the hands rip at my clothes, pull at my hair.

I swallow the pill.

The pricklies subside as my mind fills with the flapping of a black bird’s wings.