Читать книгу Double Jinx - Nancy Reddy - Страница 9

Divine and Mechanical Bodies

The year my sister turned into a crow

I ran the cinder track around the football field for hours. I stayed on

after practice ended, after coach packed up

his whistle and his stopwatch, after the other girls changed back

into sweats and carpooled home. At my house

my sister gathered all the shiny things. She plucked the buttons

from our parkas and strung them from the bedposts,

lined the closet doors with tinfoil and propped the silver-plated serving trays

along the dressers so that everywhere she looked

she’d see her own eyes looking back. She wouldn’t speak.

When our mother called us down to dinner

she answered with a raucous preening call, she piled mall kiosk pendants

around her feathered neck. She wouldn’t eat

the meals our mother cooked and instead slurped juice from cans, clawed

the soft and flaky centers from the caramels

in the cut-glass candy dish our mother kept for guests. She grew

bird-boned and slender, a brittle core inside each inky feather. That year,

though no one had died, not really,

my mother filled the basement freezer with casseroles,

each aluminum dish an archaeological dig of hash browns, beef tips

browned in butter, cream of something soup. In bio lab

we pinned and bisected earthworms, diagrammed their tiny hearts

on worksheets. Somewhere a teacher called out kingdom, phylum, family.

We smeared the cultured cells from petri dishes onto slides and marveled

at their manufactured one-cell lives. I ran the track each afternoon,

my mix tape turned up loud. The sun set

earlier and earlier each day behind the goal posts. At home

my mother diced and browned the onions. My sister

made herself a feather bed. The first snow fell around us as we slept,

flakes soft as down, clotting the trees whose leaves had not yet

turned and fallen, turning the lawn

bright as a spotlight.