NIGHT BIRDS by Amy Sayre-Roberts
Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird.
– from “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The mother of all dead girls wore a crown of blackbirds. Crows and jackdaws mobbed her skull, vying for space while the displaced circled above and read the sky for disquiet. Murder vibrated the wings of a bird with a soft shush, the song of skin rubbed raw over concrete.
The mother of all dead girls flocked across the empty Midwestern sky as indecipherable as ink over asphalt. She shadowed the strip malls, and swallowed acres of cornfield and blacktop by the mouthful. She haunted every bend and tuck in the Illinois River, and skated the surface of the Sangamon, fluid as a water bug. Hometowns with names like Fishhook, Waverly, and Ashland were tattooed on the palms of her hands, Beardstown, Pittsfield, and Hillsboro blended among others.
All the dead girls came from such places: river towns, grain-bin-populated, one-gas-station stopovers lit by flickering diner signs. Towns built on customs – drivers waved to everyone they met. They didn’t know why, they might not even like each other very well. But they did it. People stopped to help one another with a flat tire or smoking engine, any car pulled over to the side of the road was an opportunity to help. Not for friendship, not for courtesy, but because no one wanted to be known as the kind of person who drove on by. These same people attended funerals of girls they barely knew to comfort parents they never really liked. Customs were law in these towns.
The mother of all dead girls never stopped searching the right of ways, those long strips of abandoned railroad tracks grown over with native grasses. Dead girls were often left there for her to find. The crossroads where subdivisions crept to the edges of cornfields was a favorite kind of leaving place. Bodies waited in places like that. Then in a flutter of darkness and feathers she moved on. Dead girls were meant to be found and if she stood in one spot for too long, the soles of her feet sprouted kudzu vines strong enough to strangle an oak.
God named the mother of all dead girls Precious Mistress Black-Wing. He called to her for a century before realizing she never answered and the dulcet tones He heard in response were merely the echoes of His own voice. One October morning, the mother of all dead girls paid God a visit. She declared her name, singular and self-given. The only name she answered to was Star Preacher.
“You can keep Precious Mistress Black-Wing for some princess of moths or a frog’s giddy offspring,” she said. “I do not traffic in flattery or flower petals. I am nettle and fearsome.”
God was unable to deny her claim. Her voice was choked from the throat of every girl she held in her arms. Saints wept when she spoke and angels covered their ears. Even God was not immune to the sound. Long after she departed, the scent of diesel fuel and decay clung to the heavens frustrating the finer nature of cherubim and seraphim who complained to their maker of her foul shadow’s stench. God commanded them, “Be silent and read her as she passes. Her every move is a scripture.” And because angels believed everything God told them, they did so.
Star Preacher did not frolic. Her gait was that of the broken pelvis, the shattered tibia, and hair wrenched from the root. Her belly was covered with scales so she might move quickly lying face down, she of the perpetually bloody chin and slithering spinal cord. Star Preacher was born between the gap in God’s teeth and grace, thought made form. She gathered girls broken between virginity and violence, and sucked away their shame becoming all they had suffered, torn flesh and fingernails caked with soil.
Mending was her art and she went gently about her work. Sipping away the blood and bodily fluids that did not belong and snapping bones back in place. She loved her girls. But while a body healed, a soul festered. Star Preacher restored them right for the journey ahead. How long they stayed with her was an equation somewhere between time and eternity. Souls were long in recovery. And while a good mother knew when to let go, her children did not.
October was epic for dead girls. The autumnal glow of sunshine drew their souls around the rooted knuckles of corn and curling pumpkin vines. Girl-child spirits burrowed under piles of leaves scented with the fathers who raked them. Men infused with the tang of daddy-laughter and grief. The slightest whiff of father to a dead girl ignited such glory and sorrow that blackbirds shed tears at the sight. Every October, the souls of dead girls escaped the way station and ran back to Star Preacher. She soothed them with dark-winged lullabies.
“It won’t be long now. You’re almost ready. Soon you’ll be golden, child. Golden again and forever. Patience,” she counseled.
Early one evening with twilight’s mantle laid across the prairie, the crows began singing a dirge. Crows recognized tones unknown to human ears, like the brush of a girl’s soul against cornstalks. Crowsongs mapped Star Preacher’s path to a dead girl with summer still in her mouth.
An irresistible, heartbreaking girl. A teenage girl shimmered by the wings of blue-bottle flies.
Even with gums carved away from teeth, her expression held the memory of dandelions. The dead girl wore a turquoise and yellow woven bracelet on her wrist, and a dirty pink running sock on her left foot. Her right foot was bare and bruised. With one empty eye-socket and one clotted lid, she appeared to be winking. Star Preacher mimicked the odd angle of the girl’s neck to better understand exactly what had occurred. Then she shook loose her tresses until the birds covered the body, gobbling up the burying beetles relentless at their work.
The birds chanted.
The birds broke words in sacrifice for bones, “med red mur dred dred me me dum re.”
Winged monks holding words in their beaks like needle and thread, “bind earth, open sky, praise magenta and sorrow leaving . . . mud rum dre me.” The birds chanted, stitched and mended the girl’s skin until the soul was prepared to speak.
Only one agreement existed between Star Preacher and the heavens, a body must tell its story to move forward. A body should want to move forward. But a dead girl, so badly used, left to curdle among Styrofoam cups and used condoms, took some convincing.
At first – and this was normal – the girl did not remember her name. The vocabulary of her death was too difficult to pronounce. Star Preacher translated. She wrapped herself round the girl, tight as a bed sheet tucked under your chin, and began telling the story of her own body, stories of dead girls past. A shattered tibia named Suzanne, a sliced artery in fond memory of Alicia, the broken pelvis of Christina. Every bone named and renamed for a girl just like the one she cradled in her arms.
The girl tried to talk, but could only conjugate destruction, broken teeth ground against lips and ochre spittle ran down her chin. Star Preacher pressed her palms to the fractured jawbone reshaping cheek and gum until the girl formed vowel sounds and sanity out of the wound that was her mouth.
The girl gnashed words into being. Verbs cut the deepest and she bit down on her cheeks rather than say them. But in the end, she gained fluency. They all did. A crow landed on her knee and arched its wings. The wings framed a tablet, black and infinite as a dead girl’s story. Her name was Melanie, but Star Preacher christened her Precious Black-Wing, a name the heavens could not ignore, and cocooned the teenager against her chest.
“Mother,” said Melanie, not knowing she had been renamed by the darkness.
“Yes,” replied Star Preacher, her gaze soft as the afternoon sun.
“Do you work for God?” Melanie asked.
The birds fluffed their wings at the inquiry. Much cawing and preening of feathers ensued between the question and the darkness. A few took to the skies and rang tiny bells stolen from wind chimes. Crows were notorious thieves. Others lamented, “Flesh and vagary.” One jackdaw cried out, “Sacramenti . . . Deus . . . Humiliate.”
Star Preacher cracked her backbone and the birds fell silent.
“You are my work,” she said.
“Do my parents know?” Melanie asked, pulling leaves from her matted hair.
“Not yet,” said Star Preacher, “but soon.”
“Oh.” The girl fretted over the news. “Will that be terrible, like it was for me?”
“In its own way, yes,” Star Preacher replied and passed her hand over a crusted knee. The birds busied themselves again with clumps of hair and needlework. One snatched a candy wrapper caught in the stiffness of Melanie’s fingers and flew away.
“See, we will have you feeling better in no time.”
“Will I get to see my parents again?” Melanie asked, on the verge of tears.
“Possibly, but not as you understand it,” said Star Preacher. “Once you are ready, you can shine through.”
“Like a ghost?” Melanie asked, brushing away the maggots whitening her eyelashes like snowflakes.
“Sort of. But never too much or too often, otherwise such light becomes garish and haunting. Bad manners.”
“Oh.” Melanie fretted the news again. “Will once or twice make them feel better, though?”
Star Preacher paused from sweeping her hands over the girl’s clothes, the birds hesitated their songs and stitching.
“If they want it to, it will,” Star Preacher said. Then, pulling a pink sock from underneath a corn stalk, “Finally, a match,” and slipped it over the girl’s violet foot.
“Mother,” Melanie asked, “how do I get from this place to where I am going?”
Two blackbirds landed on her lap and picked at the scabs on the back of her hands. The gentle pecking comforted the girl.
“To get there, you simply need to tell the stars how you got here. And with your story, the path is made ready, my sweet,” answered Star Preacher, shooing the birds away.
“Alright,” the girl agreed. “Alright.”
And while all stories change in the telling, the stars recorded the tale of Precious Black-Wing as follows:
i left the store like any night. rolled my windows down. summer and darkness rushing in thick as water, and i was invincible. turned the radio up full blast. felt i could drive right up into the sky. home is only 15 miles, and I was already half way when there they were. two boys. two boys leaning against an old car. in t-shirts and blue jeans. hood of the car was up. i was already slowing down when a brick hit my windshield. scared me, and i stopped. never occurred to me not to stop. i so love the smell of black highway, of clover and summer green. the smell of heat, and thick air, moist and resistant. glorious like the sky was a hole I could fall up into. i felt a bit drunk over it all. nothing in the world had power but me. i was tempted to fly. then I stopped, and there were five boys, but only two came to the car. i knew when i saw so many that something was wrong. i just want . . . i just want to tell my mother that I’m sorry. mother. and then I thought why? how will I explain about my underwear? i knew one of the boys. he was two grades ahead of me. he used to smoke outside the biology lab. the boy with the flat eyes. the boy with a scar under his left eye. i thought it was a joke. then I knew it wasn’t. the flat-eyed boy had a knife. one joked with the other about breaking my window, nice aim, he said. i got scared then. i tried to run, kept thinking get out of here. those awful boys. the weight of them nearly suffocated me. then they disappeared and i saw stars, the knife, and the brick. and nothing would stop. no matter what i said. nothing would stop. i couldn’t breathe. then you were here, and that was it.
Star Preacher sat for a long time with Precious Black-Wing cuddled in her lap. She absorbed the bloat from the girl’s belly, and cleared her skin of blowflies and mottle. The birds circled and chanted. Suns rose and set. Star Preacher pointed the way, connecting one burning sun to the next with her index finger, and the girl memorized all that she was told. Then Star Preacher stood her up, brushed the corn chaff from the girl’s bottom and sent her on her way.
The crows breathed a sigh of relief. This one would rather heal than fight.
Crows will tell you that some girls will not heal.
Some girls will not take part in their own healing. Some girls said God could keep his forgiveness and His promises of heaven. What happened then was the work of the mother of all darkness and mystery.
Those girls became birds. The night birds Star Preacher wore as a crown.
Ebony-winged tormentors built for one flight. A migration to the bedroom where a murderer slept.
In their beaks, the night birds carried tiny mussel shells lit with oil. The birds kept vigil on the murderer’s window sill. They waited for an opening – for the weakness of sleep. Just a sliver, the slightest fissure of an opening was all they needed. And they dove as shadow through glass. They dove through parted lips or a flared nostril. Any opening was passageway enough to sink deep into the dreamer and sing.
The night birds sang rapture songs.
The night birds sang busted lip and piss songs. Unspeakable songs tuned with longing and terror.
The oil from the shells burned a murderer’s dreams to ash and he woke in darkness, starless and terrible as truth. The murderer struggled to breathe. His lungs were stuffed full and bursting. But the birds continued to feed him mouth after mouthful of feathers, and the murderer continued to swallow.
Crows are notorious thieves. Even breath was not beyond their taking.
And the birds do not stop. The birds will never stop.
Amy Sayre-Roberts’s short stories have appeared in Sou’wester, Chicago Noir, LUSO-American Voices, and Ninth Letter.