—
T
here's a boy here.A rabbit with a tail like a trembling cotton ball stumbles out from the blackberry bush I've found, bumps into my leg, and plops onto its haunches to level its black, droopy eyes at my mask.
“... You should run away," I tell it, not very kindly. It merely blinks. Stupid rabbit. Reproachfully I consider scaring it off, but then it wiggles its velvety pink nose at me and I sigh, my head tilting in defeat.
“Is that what you do? Wiggle your nose at the fox until he puts his teeth away and plops right next to you in the meadow?"
But I know how the story ends. You still get eaten, and then the fox cries.
Ignoring me, Bird?
My nose nudges against a ripe blackberry, close to bursting; it smells decadently sweet, like one of Ma's tarts. Gingerly I pluck it with my teeth and drop it to the forest floor. (Already I am regretting doing so. My stomach howls like a neglected child.) The blackberry's fall is cushioned by pine needles. Slowly, it rolls to a stop just shy of the rabbit's wiggling nose.
He's a pretty one. Gold all over his wings. Should I catch him for you?
“Don't," I growl, and the little rabbit stills, before darting for the berry, stuffing it into its mouth, and fleeing cowardly into a shrub of nettles. This is what you get for being kind, Bird! I think, and I stamp my hoof down angrily.
There is a boy in the forest, and worse, Rook has seen him.
Do I need to remind you, Rook? You set a hive on me, not many hours ago. Touch him and I'll drop scorpions on you in your sleep.
I still haven't seen this boy and already he is causing me so much trouble. My braids thump like a heartbeat against my neck as I stalk out of the blackberry bush into a clearing where the ancient evergreens thin out to reedy saplings, their spring green leaves spiderwebbed with a dusting of frost.
Rook is silent. Perhaps I've made him feel guilty. Sometimes, the emotion catches him off-guard and he gets so angry about it that he slips away into the dark until dawn breaks like an egg over the horizon, and his cloven hooves crackle on a skin of new ice.
When he returns, there are always strands of berries in his mouth that he leaves quietly by my head as I doze.
I see the boy first as a flash of gold antlers and then, all at once: a ghost clothed in earthen browns besides me. He's a pretty one. Gold all over his wings. I think I feel the butterfly wings in my hair tremble against my skin.
But that can't be, because they are dead. And, I tell myself, their souls had been emptied out when I ripped away their wings. (Ma said never to worry about it, because butterflies didn't really have souls but the illusion of one. Ma hugged me to her chest when I turned to the struggling monarch, peeled off a golden wing, and handed it over to her.)
There's a blue feather in the boy's mouth. Warily, I look from the feather to his face—golden eyes, golden antlers, golden fairytale prince—but with the mask on I know I seem, to him, like I'm not really moving at all.
Beneath my mask my eyes are wide, as wide as the Goddess' sky.
“You dropped a feather.”
When I see that it is my feather, one that I'd shed like a cat's dead prize, I startle back to life. I feel his breath on my neck as he whispers, like he is talking to something sacred. Or scared. I've always thought them the same: only two letters out of place.
“I didn't kill the kingfisher," I say, slowly, even though he hasn't accused me of anything. “It was already dead." I'd even buried it, because Rook had stared at it for a long time and I'd worried that if I didn't bury it, he would accuse me of something.
Of being just like Ma.
“You also shouldn't stand so close to a girl you just met." My words reverberate strangely through the beak of my mask. It comes out like a starling's warble—like something small, trying hard to make itself heard. My brows knit together when he touches a loop of my hair. It falls river-sleek through his grasp, though I say nothing more except:
“You might give her a fright."
And there's a praying mantis
Prancing on your bathtub
And you swear it's a priest
From a past life out to getcha
