The Night Birds

       Evelyn tossed her wedding ring into the falls with only the eyes of three larks to watch her. It dangled in the air like a falling star, and with a final moonlit glint, lost itself into the rushing of the water. Evelyn’s face was still and bitter. Every one of her wrinkles was visible, by the flickering of an ancient bulb wired to the rail. She was staring at nothing, for awhile, standing alone on the bridge. Then her eyes, by instinct, followed the natural flutter and glow of the larks. They sat furrowed in the blank cone of her middle distance.

          Her gaze was silent, and indifferent, and thoughtless. She stood there without the faintest flicker of an appetite. But minute by minute, her pupils began dilating with a kind of rhythm. And the first thought that she had, when leaving her reverie, was wondering if the larks were staring at her in the same way she was staring at the larks.

          If they were crows, or ravens, it might never have occurred to her that she was being watched. It would have been so obvious. But that songbirds were watching her- it rubbed her, somehow. Her eyes were now focused completely on the beady faces of the birds. They were not sleeping. They were not hunting. Why were they so interested in a stranger?

          The waterfall was so loud, like a huge gurgling giant. She remembered the sounds she heard, that gurgling that apparated from the alleyway. Purple welts obscured Clark’s face as he lay beneath the fire escape. His blood oozed down her fingers and she started crying over him, a man she had never met. It must have been a kind of a destiny that they would end up together. That rube. Sometimes she wondered about what would have happened with her if she hadn’t shown him pity.

          Still, her finger was quickly feeling odd. Uncomfortable and exposed. She rubbed the pale mark that was left behind. There was the flicker of some unfortunate fester. She had been thinking on and on about the night she had. But now she thought about some of the times she saw him smiling. It gave her the flutterings of a panic. She had had a license to return before, to forget what happened.

         She felt a huge amount of turmoil waiting at the gates of her mind, eager to break out on the signal of her abandonment. She hadn’t thought about it before she acted, she had been trying not to be controlled, nor to be stepped on. And now there was something that was hers and she felt the pain of no longer having it and found out that the pain was stronger and more uncomfortable than that moment of disgust which compelled her.

          She shivered for some reason and looked down into the waterfall. It was a jumble of inscrutable noise. She felt small leering at it. She felt small needing something from it. But Evelyn still winced as her thoughts began to sift to parts of her brain less concerned with fighting back against her suffocation and more concerned with- to the shame of half of her- making sure that the delicate implements of her life remained in balance.

          With moonlight glistening off the edge of her bifocals, she realized that she would need to get her ring back.

-1- Home

          Out of all the common minerals in the river, gold, Evelyn, is the heaviest.

          She remembered an elementary school teacher saying that- second or third grade. 

          That’s why the prospectors shook their pans for gold- it always ends up at the bottom.

          Heading down into the falls wasn’t something that anybody in her village had ever felt like doing. Underneath the bridge she was standing on, bisected by the Farrow Memorial Waterfall, was a canyon, and living in the town for thirty years she had never heard of any path that led downward, into, or around it. She had never asked about it and she had never overheard anybody else who had asked about it. But now she needed to go into the river. She needed to go down there tonight. Because nothing in the world could be worse than if she went home and Clark asked her about her wedding ring.

          Evelyn left the bridge. She walked back into town. It was eleven-fifty on her watch. She did not regret throwing the ring. She was so mucky and claustrophobic before she threw it that she would never have gotten anywhere if she hadn’t done something dramatic. Now that she had thrown the ring, it was all clear- she needed to get the ring back. Everything else could wait until then.

          As she pittered under her first street lamp, her purse was hanging over her arm, and her mind was racing for solutions. She pictured the ring inching down the river, flipping on a rock and spinning through the water.

          None of the stores were open. There wasn’t anything like a plan yet. There was just a huge swath of ideas in her head that she was eliminating, and one or two more stubborn ones sinking in the water. Eventually, she was down to one idea. It was not her favorite idea. But it was her only idea.

          She needed to go back home. Just for a second. She could see that the lights were still on. Her husband was awake. From across a hill she could still see him sitting on the master balcony, staring at the moon and drinking seltzer water from a sea-colored glass. She had a sense that he was as sad as she was. She still could not forgive him.

          Evelyn had to walk through the kitchen as she weaved her way to the garage. The place was a little better. She now only saw flecks of glass dust from where the wineglass had been crushed inside her hand. The broken window was, of course, still broken. She could stare straight into the wilderness that she was no longer protected from. Her arm reached over and touched one of the shards of glass that still hung onto the window. It left a drop of blood that would soon be indistinguishable from the many half-scabbed cuts on her palm.

          In the darkness of the trees, she saw glittering eyes again. They were just birds. Who knew what their world looked like that they would hound her like this? She pulled down the blinds, but the hole went through them, too.

          The balcony was directly over the window. Evelyn looked up at it. Clark’s janky silhouette blotted out lines of blue lamplight. She felt as though there was something about her husband that she could see better through the cracks in their porch than when she was looking at him across the living room. She knew him better than that, though. She thought.

          Her eyes were hot again. She rifled through her garage, opened up boxes and old plastic lids, grabbed things she thought would be useful. She found a dusty pocketknife in an underused filing cabinet. When she was feeling her way across the floor, she almost tripped on a flashlight rolling across the concrete. She found the batteries for it after she searched through the camping supplies in a cardboard box.

          Evelyn still needed something. In fact, the very thing she was looking for in the first place. She did find sections of rope. They were frayed and rotten. As she was sifting through bag after bag of rotten rope, Evelyn’s hands shook more and more, thinking about how much time was passing. The ring flipped, got stuck on a rock, floated down the river. She opened up all the other boxes, all the other containers, and last of all, she opened up the Holidays box. Christmas lights. She pulled on them. Metal wires reinforced with rubber. She hesitated. She thought for a second. She coiled them around her shoulder.

          Evelyn had already walked halfway to the other hill when she saw Clark again, inside the garage. His soft brown hair that never quite looked tidy, even when combed. After the fight he changed into one of his white button-ups. She thought he thought she had come back.

          Evelyn felt bad about throwing the ring. The whole thing began to seem rather sad, marching to a bridge with Christmas lights and a flashlight wearing an old dress. But she had rappelled when she was much younger. Much younger. But it was real gold, good gold, and it was at the bottom of the river, and she knew that the river wasn’t wide. She did know it was long. She didn’t know how deep it was.

          Her eyes steadied on the Christmas lights again. A sort of manic energy as important as fuel began to dissipate. She didn’t want to tell him she threw away their wedding ring. She couldn’t lie to him about it. And it was because she could never lie to him. She couldn’t go home. And besides that, her anger never went away. It was like a still flame inside her stomach. She was so, so angry. But she couldn’t go home. She couldn’t talk to him about it. Not without her wedding ring.

          So before she knew it, she was watching Clark from behind an old tree and crying. He saw the boxes ransacked, looked around at the things she had left. She saw him whisper “Evelyn”. She couldn’t hear him. He didn’t understand anything. He went back inside.

          She had never felt more silly or stupid or cruel. If it wasn’t for that, maybe she would have just gone home.

        She was staring at the house, all mixed up in bits and pieces. There was a dull instinct she harbored and which she neglected to exercise. Her mind told her there was something odd, but not fast enough, and before she knew it, she could feel the sudden jostling of two hands jabbing her shoulders.

          “Boo!”

          Evelyn jumped and dropped everything. Behind her, a little girl in a leather jacket was there to laugh at her.

-2- Sydney

          “What are you doing, Evelyn? Hold on, let me guess.”

          The little girl put her sneaker on the flashlight, rolled it forward and then back.

          “You have a flashlight. That’s easy, since it’s dark. Who wouldn’t want a flashlight? I should get a flashlight. There’s a pocketknife on the ground.”

          The little girl was Sydney, a kid she knew. Evelyn somehow never figured out whose. She was a peevish child, and Evelyn really didn’t want her involved with this, especially since her gravest secret could be found at a glance in her empty hand. So Evelyn reached for the pocketknife with her right hand instead of her left, but it was still Sydney who picked it up and opened all the implements, .

          “You’re not going to a dark place to unscrew something are you?”

          Sydney pushed the screwdriver back in.

          “Not the cutters, I think.”

          The scissors clicked closed.

          “A secret picnic would mean an affair- but that’s impossible with your crusty urges. We can rule out the corkscrew, the can opener.”

          They both clicked into place.

          “I don’t even know what this one is.”

          She put the little hook back into the pocketknife.

        “Gad, Evelyn, you make this hard. But if I had to guess, you took a knife because you wanted a knife. It’s such a shame you don’t have any pockets.”

          Sydney put it against Evelyn’s hip and let go. It clattered onto the cobblestone. Evelyn picked it up, again right-handed. Her nostrils were flaring. What would Sydney do if she found out that Evelyn was so reckless and foolish? Mock her? Tell the town?

          “The only thing that’s really trouble is the Christmas lights. Now it might just be your menopause is acting up, but don’t worry, I’ve got a pocket calendar right here, in my pocket.”

          Sydney took her pocket calendar out of her jeans.

          “Now it’s a little bit off, since it’s just past midnight-“

          She tore off a page.

          “No, well, it’s still May according to my calculations. So the Christmas lights, the Christmas lights- I give up, won’t you just tell me?”

          Evelyn was reaching her trembling hand toward the flashlight. As much as she tried to make the motions of her dominant hand too bland to notice, she could feel, almost beyond her control, the awkward, nervous form those fingers took; the critical, scathing eye of Sydney. As though she had found some crucial advantage against someone in a board game, Sydney clicked her tongue and said-

“I thought you were left handed.”

Evelyn threw her arm behind her as quick as she was able. But Sydney smirked like a tiny dirt-feeding gremlin.

          “I wouldn’t have said that out loud if I hadn’t already seen what was wrong. My my, looks like you’re down a wedding ring since I saw you last. Did you finally leave him, like you told me you would, like you told me year after year after year?”

          She squinted at Evelyn’s aversion and she frowned.

          “Call me crazy, but you know what, I have the slightest hunch you haven’t left him yet.”

          Evelyn picked up the rest of her supplies and started walking as fast as she could towards the bridge.

          “Ooh, I’m curious, so if you don’t mind, I might just tail you. You know how it is. Thirteen years old, no guys, so boring after midnight. Too boring to even sleep, I’ve just got too much energy.”

          Sydney jogged in place next to Evelyn even as Evelyn sauntered through the village.

          “Okay, so I’m not very deductive. I lack a certain faculty. Let’s say that I have three guesses. Three guesses, and if I get it right, then I win the game. My first guess- hm, no wedding ring, a pretty sharp knife, a flashlight- goodness Evelyn, you’ve finally done it. You’ve killed your husband.”

          After she was done laughing, Sydney said, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Don’t count that as one of the guesses, you can’t count that. No, you killed your husband and now you’re wrapping him in Christmas lights and shoving him off a bridge. I tease, I tease, you can’t take me seriously, it’s so late.”

          Evelyn had cleared the village. She was now walking towards the bridge, still hoping that something in her disinterest would make Sydney bored and she would leave.

          “Okay, fair’s fair, we can count it if you want. Two more questions. Ah- ah- aaaaaaah- okay, how about this. A real guess- sort of. You saw a couple orphaned little baby children right on the outskirts of town. They said ‘dear Evelyn, we are but three small nomads traveling from meal to meal, on a journey to make our tiny bellies full’. Poor Evelyn was smitten- never had any children of her own. So you give them the most valuable, least important possession that’s always on your person- you toss them your wedding ring! And then you get the Christmas lights, since nothing on earth makes orphans happier than a little Christmas. You’ve got the pocketknife because- gee, I don’t know, one of the kids really pissed you off? Tell me if I’m onto something but I’ve got a hunch this isn’t it.”

          Evelyn winced when Sydney talked about not having kids but was otherwise silent. She was at the center of the bridge, and so she stopped. She started tying the Christmas lights to herself.

          “Interesting, interesting. So it’s not what’s across the bridge, it’s what’s on the bridge.”

          Evelyn struggled using one hand to tie the knot around her wrist.

          “I got you, girl,” Sydney said.

          Sydney held the knot with her hand so Evelyn could tie it.

          “So, this is new. This I did not expect. Some sort of human Christmas ornament? No, not a guess, it’s just a joke. Oh, at least tie it right. Here’s how we did it in Girl Scouts.”

          Sydney undid Evelyn’s simple knot to tie a much more complex one.

          “Don’t do that again. Eugh! Nothing makes me cringe more than a bad knot. So you’re making some sort of support. I really want to say you’re bungee jumping, but I know that any sudden jolt would blow your fragile old person parts all across the county.”

          Sydney grabbed Evelyn’s other hand and tied the Christmas lights to it.

          “Is that good? Good. And if you’re going down there, Evelyn, you could really use a harness, instead of being strung by your wrists like a medieval torture victim. Ah, don’t fret, don’t fret, I’ll get to it, I know quite too much about harnesses. So, here’s my last guess, by the way- bear with me.”

          Sydney’s hands worked under Evelyn’s arms, around her hips, fastening wire piece by piece.

          “Ol’ Evie had too much to drink. What a surprise. Clark comes home super late. They talk. Talking becomes arguing. I’m not going to pretend I know what you two argue about. The prattling of adults is far beneath me. But it got big. It got bigger. It got intense.”

          Sydney tapped Evelyn’s ringless hand, still raw and bloody from the wineglass.

          “Is he hurting you again?”

          Evelyn shook her head.

          “Eh. So the fight, it got really dark, really intense, you stormed out, went to the bridge, pitter-pattered for a bit when pop!”

          Sydney stopped tying for a moment to make that noise with her cheek and index finger.

          “Off comes the ring, down it goes into the chasm. But you, Evelyn, your poor menopausal brain lacked the capacity for forethought or follow through, leaving you with the only thing you had left: the sagging prayers of an impulsive old woman who hoped that what could be done could also be undone.”

          Sydney tied the last of the knots and pulled them. They were secure.

          “Good enough for government work, eh? And when you get back- if you get back- be sure to tell me what you find down there. You know, apart from that ring.”

          Evelyn was wrapped in a safety vest made of Christmas lights and tied by a girl scout and was suddenly not very sure about the plan she had created.

          “I’ll take the rest of the lights and lower you down. Damn girl, you have enough of these things to light up the White House.”

          Evelyn wasn’t moving much. She wasn’t breathing much.

          “Don’t get nerves now. It’s sturdy. Knots, wires, et al.”

          Sydney was staring at her. She’d never live it down. She had to do it.

          “Evelyn, I know you’re scared, but we both know it’s this, or the next place you see that ring is gonna be on the left fin of a pretty white trout. Now if you don’t do it, I’ll do it, but I probably won’t do a good job since I don’t actually care.”

          Evelyn’s feet throbbed. But still those feet approached the ledge. She saw how deep it was and nothing else. She saw a fog down there, and the foam and the crashing of water. She thought about Clark, how he looked in the garage when he was trying to find her. She thought about their fight, but even if they fought, she couldn’t stop thinking about how sad he looked. So even if she didn’t want to do this, she thought about how she wanted to do this.

          And she slipped over the edge.

          “Hold your breath when you get close to the water,” said Sydney with a grin.

          And then she couldn’t have heard Sydney anymore even if she wanted to.

-3- Three

          “Well,” said Dingo. “It looks like you may be right about this one.”

          “Don’t act so surprised,” said Feldman. ”I’m right more than half the time.”

          “I usually don’t trust it when your theories are outlandish.”

          “Well! Outlandish! Can you believe him, Malice?”

          But Malice never spoke just like he always did. The others looked at Malice and he stared back at them with his empty red sockets, unmoved.

-4- Deeper

          Evelyn was in the mist, the midplace of there and here. It was humid in a very cold way that still had her sweating through her dress. Evelyn would have been proud to emphasize that she had been inside a cloud before, mostly when driving. It had been just a sad opacity to her surroundings. She had tried hard to brace for the actual moment when she was engulfed by those milky continents, but she couldn’t trick her mind into believing it had happened. To her senses,  all she experienced was that the world became blurrier, and then became sharper. And then the cloud, titanic, majestic, was behind her and she could hardly believe that she was ever in it.

          But being lowered into this whiteness, it felt like she was in a cloud. She had never had it be so foggy that she literally couldn’t see the arm in front of her face- she thought it was just an expression. When she lost sight of her fingertips, she brought them closer, and then when they disappeared, closer again. It wasn’t long before there was no more than an arthritic centimeter of mist between her finger and her eye, and it was so thick and white that it obscured her hand entirely. When she blinked, even, the smallest parts of mist leaked up beneath her eyelid from crevices too small to notice. They danced between the cohesion of her lid and eyeball. Her blink was black-red… gray-red… gray-pink… gray… then white. So white that whether she was blinking or opening her eyes, she saw one continuous din of emptiness.

          The acid taste of wine still on her tongue numbed to nothing, the sensation of the harness clipping at her love handles began to fade- the sound of the waterfall became silence, and the heavy anxious scent of her own fatigue became soft oxygen.

          She was swaddled completely- and it felt as though she were inside a dream. So familiar, in fact, that she began to doubt it and struggle against it and try to wake up. But even though she had this sense that nothing around her was quite real, she couldn’t find the option to return to reality, in the same way that she could when she was sleeping. Her eyes were wide open, but she tried opening them wider, as though her eyes would split open to reveal fresh sight, that the white would split open to reveal her bedroom, to reveal her and Clark and an unbroken kitchen and a wedding ring still on her finger (she had had panicked dreams before of losing it, why not now?)

          It was harder, so much harder than it ever was before, just to make herself wake up. But she knew it was a dream- the same way she always knew when it was a dream- something deep inside her mind was telling her.

          She tried one more time, in a frenzy, to open the eyes beneath her eyes. And finally, the familiar ichthys-shaped hole began to appear in her vision- it was bright against mist, which even with its perfect white, had somehow no light. There was detail, and texture- familiar colors. And her body, it was no longer still. She was walking. And her legs were thinner, and she was wearing a skirt. She hadn’t worn a skirt in years! She almost dropped the bookbag she was holding and then just stared at it in her hands, wondering where it came from.

          She looked up at a red water tower, rusty and decrepit, covered in graffiti. She always had wondered whether there was even any water in it. She’d said she was exhausted at looking at it by the time they tore it down.

          Cars passed by. Old cars, with the old license plates. The posters on the bricks were printed different, a little bit more dull- less of them used colored ink. Her shoes were worse- less comfortable.

          The watch that she hadn’t been wearing told her that it was about 4:15, so she was heading home after racquetball club. She remembered one time when she was late from school, her mother was so upset that she bit her tongue and yelled at her as rivulets of blood were dripping down her cheeks. She didn’t want that to happen again- or to have ever happened at all.

          Evelyn sat down at Ashe Park. Her hands were not as wrinkled. Her mind felt hot and rash- she thought she had learned to control it better. She guessed she hadn’t. That weird excess of sweat thing that happened to her- until thirty it happened to her- it was back like it had never gone away. She shivered in the heat.

          She looked at her fingers. There was still no wedding ring.

-5- Three Two

          The three larks were there. Two eyes on their right hemispheres glittered. They turned their heads. The other two eyes glittered. There should have been three glitters but there were two. She wondered about that but was too far away to see why.

          The larks muttered to one another. A gold-eyed lark stepped forward. Evelyn rested her head on her young hands and listened.

-Ta tata ta dedah dedah-

-Ta tata ta dedah dedah-

-Tuk ata tak etudedirl-

-Gluck ten da malley truped turl-

-Look in the alley stupid girl-

          Evelyn stumbled off the bench. She knew exactly what the bird meant. She had to say, there was a part of her that was freaked out by the creepy birds and she desperately wanted to deal with that. But she knew she’d need to do that another time. In the heat of a sprint, she glanced at the fountain to confirm- It was true, there was the blue tank top with the thick purple line (she liked this shirt, she’d lost it in the whirlwind of the coming days) and there was the bandage on her head where Kenny had clawed at her (She’d have to visit Kenny when she could). She was in the interim period between when she received Matilda’s friendship bracelet and when she “lost” it. Yes, Evelyn knew exactly what she looked like today. Because later, she would look in the mirror, and realize that this ensemble was covered with another person’s blood.

          Evelyn ran so hard that she needed to buy bottled water from a sandwich shop, and then she ran even harder to make up for that. She ended up at Parson Alley just in time- well, strictly speaking, it was too late. But Evelyn was fascinated to see something that she had never seen before- the faces of the four men who had attacked Clark that day. Mythologized in her mind (and now, Evelyn realized, maybe a bit too ethnicized) were the grunting faces of her husbands’ assailants. She expected all of them to be ugly, but two of them were quite beautiful men. One of them had average qualities, a little too pale, maybe, and the fourth- he would have been passable if not for the acne, but she did think that he had excellent facial structure. His hair was a little long though, and it covered- but wait, shouldn’t she be doing something? Should she be doing something? She didn’t know. She stood there like a ghost wandering through a memory, squeamish about interfering, changing things that had already happened. She had actually seen some time travel movies just the other day, so being in the mix of it like this really hit her hard.

          She cleared her throat and finally one of the boys looked at her-  the ugly one (relatively speaking).

          “There’s someone here,” he mumbled, “ A girl, a girl.”

          “Damn,” said one of the handsome men. “We’ll scuttle off for today , but make no mistake we’re after you.”

          Evelyn stood against the wall as the men walked by her. The veil of their non-acknowledgment was fragile, but she was still successful at avoiding eye contact.

          And that left her alone with Clark for the first time since their fight.

-6- Deja

          He was a little more stout back then. God, there was so much blood. His eyes were so full of blood that they couldn’t open. The man had a concussion, contusions on his skull, a periorbital hematoma, three broken bones, a fractured jaw, and a perforated eardrum. In a week, he’d have trouble walking, and it would take six months to get better.  She may have been a little early, but she knew that sometime in between when she held him and when the ambulance came, he was going to have a mild seizure. Even knowing that it was going to be okay, it scared her.

          She took the first trusting step to repeat her actions on that day. And then she remembered that he hit her. After that, she remembered a lot of things. She remembered how trapped she felt, that she and Clark fell in love so, so fast, and they eloped before she even knew she wanted to. She remembered a decade right in the center of their relationship where try as she might, she couldn’t remember being happy for a single moment, not one moment. And things were fine before then and good after then, and in that decade she told herself, against her better judgment, that it would get better soon, and for once, it really did get better. But was it worth it, just because it got better?

          He had hit her three times, once for every ten years in her forty years of marriage- and going by the pattern, he was due to hit her again. Each time he hurt her, she had left him. Each time she gave him another chance. Each time it had gotten better. But then, the infrastructure of those conversations somehow wasn’t enough to stop him from hitting her again, after another era had passed them over. And now she never knew if it was gone or not. He’d gone to the new classes, he got the certificate, he did everything she could think to ask of him. But she just didn’t know.

          Those were three strikes against him- and if somehow, she could start from here, have all of the conversations they would have for decades about it, reteach him all the techniques that he had told her about from the classes- In the space of a few weeks, if she convinced him to become the kind of man she hoped he had become, a man who would actually, really, truly never hit her- she would still know that he hit her. That one scar she had, it might be all gone, but it would always feel like it was still there

          She looked again at the miserable man trembling on the ground. He needed help. He had nobody. She knew nobody else was going to come. She couldn’t imagine leaving him.

          She crouched, her bare knees reddened in the pool of blood. She held Clark again, and once again, she started crying. She knew how much it hurt him, the first time, to try to talk to her, so that’s one thing she did differently. She already knew everything about him, anyway. She had asked him before and remembered every word:

Q: Why were those guys hurting you?

A: No money.

Q: Why the hell are you dealing with loan sharks?

A: No money.

Q: What’s going to happen to you?

A: No money.

Q: Why couldn’t you get help from your friends? 

A: No money.

          He made the first move this time. Clark looked up at Evelyn and couldn’t quite open his eyes. “Who… you?”

          She almost said her name was Evelyn. Then she remembered that she was forty years younger. She called herself “Evie” instead.

          Clark slipped into his seizure. It was about at the seizure part that Evelyn had called the ambulance the first time. She decided that it would probably be best if she didn’t take longer than she had taken before- what led down the road of her potential missteps in this delicate moment, she did not want to know. She went to the phone booth and called the paramedics.

          Evelyn went back to holding Clark. His seizure was over, but he was now fully unconscious. She actually thought he was dead forty years ago. She went into the ambulance with him again. She watched as he was pulled into the ER. The rest of the day felt so long the first time, but here it was a blur. She left her home number with the EMTs, she went home, she argued with her mother about being late and four or five other stupid things that were really about the divorce.

          She found herself in her room again. Kenny was there. She missed Kenny. She kissed him all over his little orange face and then she started crying. She was freaking out. She was breathing fast and hot and heavy. She’d just re-enacted a formative moment in her life, and she didn’t know why- she didn’t know whether she’d wake up in her own bed again at sixty, if she’d have to live through her entire life again (an exhausting ordeal). She just started clutching a confused Kenny as she rolled on her bed and sobbed.

          And that’s when she saw them again- out the window were the larks, and they were watching her. She sat up so fast that Kenny got scared and scratched her arm on his way to the corner. Evelyn stared at the birds, her knees crusty with the dried blood of her future husband.

-7- Three Three

          “That’s an interesting choice that you made back there,” said the blue-eyed bird.

          She didn’t know that it was a choice. She would have appreciated the clarification.

          The larks chattered among themselves. The gold-eyed lark turned its head over its shoulder from their huddle.

          “You didn’t know?” it said. “You couldn’t tell at all?”

          She said something along the lines of, you are birds, why are you talking?

          “This is really important,” said the blue-eyed bird. “You didn’t even know you could have made a different choice?”

          Evelyn decided to entertain the wishes of the talking birds and seriously thought to herself about the subject. She tried to remember being in that situation for the second time. She had a sense that- perhaps- she could have done something different… but she was also afraid to risk it. She didn’t want to create some sort of paradox. Like in Back to the Future. She explained the plot of Back to the Future to the talking birds.

          The birds started squawking to each other. Or really, two of the birds were squawking. The third was quiet. Just nodding. Evelyn looked closer. It wasn’t the easiest thing to see them out the window, in the glow of her dim overhead light. But she was sure she noticed something. The quiet bird didn’t have any eyes.

          “Oh, that? That’s Malice,” said the blue-eyed bird. “It’s good of you to see him. Malice is the reason that you don’t have to worry about your paradoxes.”

          Evelyn told the bird she needed to hear that in a little more detail. A couple more twiddles were exchanged and all three birds turned to attention.

          “Not one of us knows how Malice works,” said the blue-eyed bird. “Maybe except for Malice.”

          “And that’s a big maybe,” said the gold-eyed bird.

          “Yes, it is. He’s blind and he doesn’t speak. But Malice is good at his job. He hangs back and sorts out problems before they even become problems. Accidentally bump into a plumber on the way downtown? Maybe if Malice weren’t here, the plumber would think about you when he didn’t the first time. Maybe he’d forget to turn a screw all the way, and the water would leak into the basement, and a rat would drown. And maybe a week from then, someone who would’ve seen that rat fighting in the alley now wouldn’t, and seeing that rat was the last inspiration he needed to work out the details of some huge treaty that he now can’t write. I could go on, but the point is, Malice takes care of those things. He stops anything from changing- anything except the things that have to do with you.”

          Evelyn was pretty curious about what the rest of them did.

          “I’m Dingo”, said the blue-eyed bird. “I’m the reason why you’re here. I can take you places that you’ve been. Feldman over there-“ he gestured to the gold-eyed bird- “Feldman told me you were coming down. Now pardon the abruptness, but we haven’t had people come down into the drink for- gosh, how long has it been? Decades, at least.”

          “I am called Feldman. Whenever you do something, or did something, I can see how it could have been done… Better.”

          “Differently, you know, not always better.”

          “Differently- usually better. And I can change it any time you like.”

          “And would do it all the time, if it weren’t for me.”

          “We had a conversation.”

          “People should change their own futures, we can’t make their choices for them.”

          “Yes.”

          “We agreed,” said Dingo.

          “We agree,” said Feldman.

          Evelyn stood there with a finger on her lips, thinking. So Dingo brought her there- hopefully he could bring her back. Feldman sees the different futures and can change them. Malice is the fixer, and he’s there so that the twisting of time doesn’t get in danger. 

          But, Evelyn had to ask, why? Why do any of this at all?

          “Well, it’s our jobs,” said Dingo.

          “It’s our duties.” said Feldman.

          “We’re here because we’re supposed to make the world better.”

          “There was a very big city here in a different time.”

          “But not in this time.”

          “There’s just like thirty people. Malice won’t let me change it.”

          Malice stuck his tongue out at Feldman and Feldman growled.

          “Malice is right, in my opinion,” said Dingo. “We can’t change everything about the world until it’s just the way we want it. Then nothing would be real. It would all just be our dream.”

          “That’s bad, we’ve decided.”

          “While you’re down here, in this mist, you can be any version of yourself, any time, anywhere. People make mistakes. And fate is unkind to those people. People stray. People lose. And songbirds are supposed to make them happy.”

    “Three guesses why we’re at the bottom of a gulch.”

    “Don’t be morbid, Feldman. Some people do slip.”

          “You can’t prove that. One more thing: we can’t help you with the lottery numbers. I know, I know, it’s not my rule. It’s Malice.”

          Malice cocked his head. Evelyn was pretty disappointed to hear that since the very first thing that she thought about was getting the lottery numbers. But she could play ball. She asked Feldman to make it so she hadn’t thrown her ring into the waterfall.

          Malice squawked.

”Oh, it’s one of those,” said Dingo. “That’s always so embarrassing.”

“Malice won’t let me do that one because throwing the ring is exactly why you’re down here,” said Feldman. “He can work around some things, but if we interfered with the direct reason you were here, there would be a paradox.”

          If there was some sort of clever way around that, Evelyn couldn’t see it. She asked if she could go to the physical bottom of the waterfall and look for the ring.

          Dingo frowned, as much as any bird could frown.

          “I think we might be getting a little off track,” he said. “I asked you a question a little while ago. You were worried about paradoxes, we had a conversation- but after all that, I want you to decide if the way you just handled that whole situation- if that was okay. If you want to keep things as they are or you want to run through them again.”

          Evelyn had already stopped worrying about that. She felt like she couldn’t have left Clark there- it would have just meant letting him die. What she really wanted was her ring back.

          Feldman snarled.

          “I admit I don’t believe you really understand what kind of chance this is.”

Feldman’s gold eyes glowed, and Evelyn could see all the miseries of her life. She could see all the places where she could have decided for happiness. She felt what would have happened if she did one more round of bowling (the images of her perfect game came into and out of her mind) she saw what would have happened if she made that split decision when she was climbing those rocks (the stone she wanted to pull crumbled in her hand. A limp came, then went away). She saw the left turns and the right turns that she could have made.

          “And look at that poor cat,” muttered Feldman. “You had thirty-one cats to choose from.”

          And Evelyn saw them all. She saw Kenny clawing her wall on his side. But she also saw a black-spotted cat named Stanley who always ate the bugs off her ceiling, she saw Element, who flopped his ears back when she held her. She saw Queenie licking herself in the corner with grandiosity, and Preen hiding beneath her cupboards. All these cats which she did not know and also knew- she could have chosen any one of them.

          “And you chose poorly,” said Feldman. “You love Kenny, of course you love Kenny, you would have loved any cat. But I know he’s not the cat you would have loved the most. Queenie made you happier, you loved Flipper more, and Edmund or Daisy or Duke- they all lived twice as long as Kenny would.

          Evelyn didn’t like seeing this. She couldn’t imagine any life without her Kenny.

          “You would feel the same way about any other cat, that they were yours. All of these cats are yours Evelyn. Any of these cats, I can see for myself- you’d have been happier with them.”

          She felt how much she loved all these cats. She couldn’t choose. The memory in all of them was just so strong. Tears started pouring out of her confused face.

          “You should stop, Feldman,” said Dingo, in sharpness.

          “She has to get my point. She’s just paralyzed.”

          Evelyn didn’t even remember the cat she came in here with. She picked up one of the cats, and suddenly every cat was looking at her through the furry face she was holding.

          She asked for the cat she walked in there with, whichever cat it was.

          Feldman groaned. Evelyn was now holding just Kenny. She sat trembling on the bed, holding her boy, as her lifetimes of memory with all the other cats dissipated from her mind.

-8- Unmaking

          She went to sleep in her bed after that, before the birds could parse what it was she wanted.

She was young again, and had dreams just like she used to of beautiful men that whisked her away on flying ships and handed her the nectar of the stars. The young part of her was thrilled- the old part of her was watching these dreams at a distance, with careful doubt. When she woke up in her twin bed, with her cat next to her, she would have believed that her whole future was a dream. Except for the birds. Malice had his claws grasping the ceiling above her, noisier in sleep than he was awake. Dingo was standing on top of her globe, and Feldman was looking through her books- maybe never having gone to sleep at all.

          “You don’t have much in the way of educational material,” muttered Feldman.

          Evelyn blinked, and when she opened her eyes, Dingo and Malice were standing right next to him.

          “Feldman tried to talk to me about ‘efficiency’,” said Dingo. “But look at what happened. Too much all at once and you get plumb exhausted.”

          Evelyn got up, went to the bathroom to pop a zit, and then remembered about her acne scars.

          “We’ve got a lot of things to do today,” said Dingo. “Just tell us when you’re ready.”

          Kenny kept on pouncing the birds, but he passed right through them. Feldman was the only one who kept flinching.

          “God! We know you didn’t have the happiest life, Evelyn. Don’t fear ambition.”

          Malice preened his feathers. He pulled a rotting black one from his coat and shrugged.

          Evelyn changed her clothes in the bathroom today- the birds were now too humanized to her.

          “Where do you think you’re going?” said Feldman.

          After taking an eighties freezer meal for breakfast (so much worse back then), she grabbed her bookbag and left before her mom woke up.

          Fifteen minutes later she was at the hospital. Clark hadn’t yet woke up. She knew it was safe to stare at him. In her young body, flowing through her sharp fresh synapses, the love she once felt for this man was starting over again. Realer, and more senseless. She resisted the urge to brush aside the hair from his eyes, feel the handsome contours that could have helped her trace this unrecognizable, bloody face.

          She remembered being in this moment, even as she was here in it again. His eyes would be beautiful once they opened, with their startling blue. The good moments were sitting in her stomach like butterflies and the bad moments were surging in her throat like bile. She was never so conflicted the first time, when all she had was hope and hope was all she had. Touching the crook of his arm, she knew she loved him. She wondered if it was enough.

          She looked out the window. The larks were watching her. And she looked Feldman in the eyes and asked him if he could make it so her husband never hit her.

          Feldman grinned inasmuch as a bird could grin and his gold eyes flashed three times, for three events. Malice tilted his head to the left and the right, and nodded.

         “Hmm,” said Feldman. His eyes flashed four more times. Malice made two clicking sounds.

          Evelyn looked at the bird and immediately sensed something was wrong.

          Feldman flashed his eyes three more times. Malice looked at him with eyeless contempt but nonetheless clicked.

          Evelyn asked what was wrong. Feldman cawed at Dingo. Dingo tweeted sarcastically. Feldman’s eyes glowed two more times. Dingo glanced at Malice. Malice growled, opened his mouth to squawk, closed it, and then clicked. Then they stood still for a moment, Feldman intent for a moment, and then nodding.

          Evelyn repeated what she said when she asked what was wrong.

          Dingo bobbed his head. Feldman turned to Evelyn.

          “Well, there were three times he hit you. I changed all of that. And then- he hit you four times.”

          Evelyn looked down at Clark in surprise and loathing.

          “Well, listen listen,” said Feldman. “After all, you know, he ought to never have hit you at all, but- well-“

          Feldman looked to Dingo. Dingo sighed and stepped forward.

          “Evelyn, it was his hitting you, and the consequences of him hurting you, that led to his not hurting you in the future,” said Dingo. “Without the same sort of responses to his actions, the problem of being violent with you was waiting beneath the surface to be triggered, at different times than before, and reacted to with different conversations.”

          “Some conversations had better outcomes than others,” Feldman continued. “Sometimes he hit you four times. Sometimes he hit you two. They were just- they were bumps in the road. I didn’t mean that, they weren’t bumps in the road, they were awful and unfair and malicious acts. But the point is, I’ve scrubbed them all away, and when you get back home, you’ll find a Clark that has never hit you, not even once.”

          Evelyn saw between the cracks of his words. A Clark that had incidentally never once hit her.

          “Well…” started Feldman, “Well,” finished Feldman.

          A Clark who never fell into the precise right winds of a situation where he would feel compelled to hit her. A Clark she had never once spoken to about his problem, because she would have been too naive to have ever expected it. Feldman had made a Clark that was like the Clark lying beneath her- a man who had never spent a moment of sweat or introspection realizing that he could be evil- just with forty extra years of lucky breaks.

          She asked Feldman if he would ever hit her after she came home again.

          “Now if I knew the future with any high degree of confidence, do you think that the three of us would ever have ended up in such a podunk town? The one thing I’ve learned from this post is that the future is impossible. Some timelines he hits you and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s very easy if I’m plotting out the life and death of some dumb hospital baby- but now that I have to factor in every potential attempt you might make to change your own timeline, and every attempt on top of that, the future becomes unreadable.”

          Evelyn was satisfied with the mechanisms that brought Feldman to his answer and much less satisfied with the answer itself.

          She also took the time to ask if, say, Feldman didn’t change the individual violent incidents of her and Clark’s marriage. What if Feldman went in and changed whatever events in Clark’s life that led to him ending up in the way that he was?

         “In order to do that,” Dingo said, “We’d need a fourth bird that was a behavior psychologist, a fifth that could change human nature, and a sixth to sign the paperwork.”

          Evelyn couldn’t help but feel like the situation she was in now was worse than the situation she had just come out of. She asked Feldman if he could change it back.

          Feldman’s eyes glowed once more, and faded to reveal his downcast, prideful expression.

          There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. Evelyn reached for Clark’s face and stroked it. She asked, what if we had only ever been friends?

-9- Rewriting

         Evelyn hadn’t taken much consideration for other suitors in her life. She only loved Clark or hated him, never dreamed of moving on when it was good and was just focused on her frustrations when it wasn’t. He had never been very jealous, and she had never cheated on him in any ways that he would care about, or even in any ways he wouldn’t. But Evelyn also knew that like a duck, or a goose, or a swan, or whatever kind of bird it was that mated for life, she was adrift without a mate. Her bible study group that she only went to for the good coffee was critical of her dependent disposition. Well all those girls could eat shit first of all because the Bible didn’t say anything about magical time-traveling birds so she was going to walk into there next time feeling a whole lot smarter about herself. Second, Carla was a closeted heroin addict and Rhonda brought a casserole every fourth meet-up just so that she could eat half of it herself, so those girls really didn’t need to tell her what it was she needed to get by in life.

There were many people who could have been happy without husbands, she acknowledged. But she was pretty sure, no matter what timeline came leaping out of Feldman’s eyes, she would never be satisfied without a husband.

        Evelyn looked down at Clark, thought about every flower he had thought to bring home, every gentle surprise and gift, all his great efforts and expenses. She kissed him on the lips. She glanced at Feldman. She told Feldman, through a rasp, through a veil of wrongness, that she would try to explore different options.

          Feldman didn’t seem as smug about it as he was about everything else. There was no flourish in it, just a quick ping from his eyes like he was a statue.

          “There,” said Feldman.

          “Come along,” said Dingo. “You’ll get to meet him.”

          Evelyn sat on the bed, clasping Clark’s hand. The world became a brighter and brighter white. And so did he, as his warm hands became cold and moist, like a decaying corpse, and then dissipated into water and mist. She knew she might never see Clark again and it dropped in her heart like a stone. She started sobbing, hurt and unmoored.

-10- New Flame

          The mist started disapparating. She felt a pressure in front of her hands, the mist becoming dense and physical. She rested her forearms on it. Evelyn was still sitting up from her position in the hospital bed, but now she felt the cotton of the bed be shaped and molded into a small and elevated pad. Long lines of density sprouted from it and eventually formed a backrest. There was a feeling of something in or around her hand- a chill like metal. It was still halfway misty, so she didn’t know exactly how to respond to it. Something kept falling through her hand, and she kept not catching it, like it was giving her chances to try it again. The lines and borders of the place were becoming visible, the colors started getting filled in, and that’s when she found herself struggling to grab the fork for the final time before it skittered across the floor.

          She heard laughter from across the table and saw a man as old as she was, but much more handsome.

          “That was breathtaking, Evie. You had me on the edge of my seat wondering who would win.”

          What?

          “You or that fork. Don’t be a sore loser, you gave it your best shot, but it had its claws in you. There, you see?”

          A waitress came by to pick up the fork, eyeing Evelyn with bewilderment.

          “They are no doubt taking that fork to drop it into the trophy it’s won for your wrestling match.”

          Evelyn wouldn’t normally find that funny, but some string of developed neurons in her body responded to that and made her laugh. Maybe she’d gotten used to jokes like that. She was flushed with a veil of joy and love and comfort. She ate her fancy herb-crusted salmon with a fresh fork. She could have a rapport with this man- and she felt like she could trust this man.

          She excused herself to the bathroom with an elegant silly flourish. She was riding high the whole way there. Like maybe this is what it felt like when you married the right person. She had a much healthier bowel movement than she was used to. And on her way back from the toilet, she saw the bathroom mirror. That is when she stopped.

          The image was familiar and unfamiliar. Her skin was much more smooth, her hair still with the trace of blonde, not yet all gray. She looked at her watch. It was the same year she had started. The same year she had thrown her wedding ring-

          And she was wearing a wedding ring. It was a darker shade of gold, some inlaid jewels. It felt familiar on this hand.

          Evelyn suddenly started feeling sick of this whole thing- she didn’t like being familiar and happy and comfortable and trusting and not knowing why. She didn’t even know the name of-

          Jeffrey, Jeffrey Kenning, and you are Evelyn Kenning, and have been for thirty-five years. You met this man in college and he proposed to you after winning the debate team championship. You live in a penthouse apartment and your husband is a coveted speechwriter for all manner of politic. The worst thing that ever happened to this marriage was at the Christmas party in 1998 when you saw him kissing another woman, but he brought it up to you before you had to ask about it, he explained it all so that you felt okay. You love this man, and your dog, and your two cats, and your boy William.

          Evelyn remembered a whole bunch of things. She could have remembered even more. Her body was ready to go with the flow, to continue staying as this version of herself- and she could, she could so effortlessly- but there was something in her mind. Something that was ticking her off. Even when she wasn’t wearing their wedding ring, she still felt married to Clark. She wanted to take off this new ring, maybe to toss it somewhere, but there was something in her hands and body that seemed gentler, seemed unused to such an act, and the psychology in her mind wasn’t there to trace a path to that action.

          This felt right and wrong and the more Evelyn was fighting against it, the worse it got.

          She told herself that it was alright, that she was happy, finally happy. If she was remembering all these things, though, she wondered what she’d forget?

    She was able to see Jeffrey at a distance. His round, curious face was inquiring some obscured detail of the restaurant. There was something in his eyes, a spark of youthful mischief. He smiled when there was nobody there to watch him. And then he was smiling at her.

    They spoke the rest of the evening. Evelyn never found him boring. He had a poor, cocky sense of humor, but it seemed like it somehow worked, just for this person. Just for Jeffrey Kenning, her husband. She mused that the Evelyn in this continuity must have had much better taste than she did.

It left a bad taste in her mouth.

They finished their creme brulee and Jeffrey escorted her down to the lobby- the staircase was shimmering, spiral golden-glass. She slipped a little on the smooth texture and he grabbed her by the waist. Their faces were two inches apart. Jeffrey had an instinct to kiss her then, but Evelyn moved back, in a move of unexamined instinct. It was so quick that Jeffrey did not even notice she had spurned his advance. They walked along to the car. Jeffrey leaned against the window, had a short conversation with the chauffeur, smacked the door, and went into the backseat. Evelyn followed.

She was sitting on purple leather, It sure didn’t feel cheap. What city did she live in? She couldn’t quite remember yet. Jeffrey leaned over and whispered something in her ear that she never knew that she was into. Her eyes became sharp, impenetrable pools. She clutched his thigh. He had an odd face that looked more serious than normal, and it seemed a little silly and, Evelyn thought, quite attractive.

The chauffeur drove into the tall garage of a very nice building. She thought about her own garage. But this was also her garage. There was a fondness for it still, sitting around inside her.

She walked with Jeffrey through the rock garden in between the garage and the house. A bit of an architectural flop, she mused: she didn’t get to be inside as soon as she got home.

Jeffrey knocked on a front door with a stained glass window. A man in white spats opened it. Jeffrey tapped him on the shoulder, opened an empty palm upward, closed it, and opened it again with twenty dollars. He tucked it in the man’s shirt pocket and pulled Evelyn upstairs. And it was then, as her feet were travelling higher and higher above the earth, that Evelyn began to place her stormy feelings. She decided that she wasn’t very fond that she kept remembering things that didn’t happen to her. She wasn’t very fond that her body was so different, healthier or not. And as Jeffrey opened the door to the bedroom, and reached over to hold her in his arms, she couldn’t be fond of that, either. Better or worse, memory or no memory, this wasn’t her husband. He couldn’t be. Clark was her husband.

She apologized, and she stole her arm away. Evelyn ran into the bathroom, fuming at all the good but unfamiliar things that surrounded her.

-11- Undecisive 

She did not want this anymore. She was in the skin of another woman. And when she said so, the birds did not appear to her. She said so again.

Jeffrey came knocking at the door, a polite, sad tone in his voice, asking what it was that was wrong. She said nothing, that she would only be a few more minutes. She hoped that she was.

She whispered their names. Dingo. Feldman. Malice. She thought Feldman would be the most useful. She said his name, a little louder this time. On the third time, Jeffrey said “Feldman? Who’s Feldman?” Hopefully if it didn’t all work, if she had been insane for some reason, then she wouldn’t be in trouble if she walked out of this bathroom.

“I don’t care what happened, sweetie. We can talk about it.”

The situation was becoming more unsettling like that, as she listened to the breaking heart of a man she half knew and half loved. She needed those birds to come. She just wanted to go back home. Whichever Evelyn this was, it was a nice place to visit. She didn’t want to live there. And she didn’t want to cheat on her husband. She called for Feldman again.

“All right, all right, settle down. I’m here.”

Evelyn glanced to Feldman, perching on the shower. Dingo was standing on the towel rack. He cocked his head and with a blue flash from his eyes, the world went quiet. It took a couple of context clues- the still shadows of the trees against the window, a fly suspended in the air. The cessation of Jeffrey’s nervous sounds. Time was still.

Evelyn was still concerned about the reason that was why she had called the birds, but she found her attention directed to the fly. She walked around it, stared at it more closely than she could have stared at any fly alive.

“You asked for us to come, Evelyn?”

Evelyn didn’t respond right away. Instead, she put her finger out and she touched the fly. As though dislodged from its position in the nothingness, it dropped towards the ground- then Malice squawked, and the fly kept flashing on its initial position until Evelyn moved her finger.

Evelyn apologized. She said that this was not her life.

“It could become your life,” said Feldman. “I can see it now, the satisfaction, the good health. With a little patience, it will become natural to you. In just a month, this will be the only life you will ever think of.”

Evelyn told him that this was the problem. All the other choices she could make, the people that she could have been, were not her.

“Would you like me to take you back? To do anything back from scratch again? You could live through your life, and never miss anything.”

Evelyn said that she wouldn’t. Living one life was exhausting enough. She wanted to go home. She missed being who she was. She missed her pride in the decisions she had chosen. She missed Clark. She missed every little thing about who she was. No matter where she ended up, or how she felt, or what bad decisions she had made, she felt too much disgust for her to wake up one day and for it all to be different, all of it to not be the elements of her life that she had spent a special effort in maintaining.

Dingo and Feldman looked pretty ambivalent about this. It was Malice who gave her, hidden in his birdfulness and eyelessness, a sweet, approving expression.

    “That’s just as well, Evelyn,” said Dingo, “We’re happy at the peace in your life.”

    “But you could change anything!” said Feldman. “Anything at all.”

    Evelyn asked if there was any way that she found a huge suitcase of money at the bottom of the ravine. Malice shook his head.

    Evelyn shrugged. She couldn’t think of anything else. Outside of never having enough money, there was nothing big enough to want that was small enough that her entire life would stay the same.

    She told the birds that she appreciated them very much. But she wanted to go home. She wanted to go back to a world with fewer metaphysical surprises.

    “Is that your final decision?” asked Dingo.

    Evelyn said that it was. Feldman and Dingo looked at each other and nodded. Both their eyes flashed at once.

-12- Cold

    Evelyn opened her eyes at the bottom of the canyon. The main thing she felt was wet. She was elbows deep in cold water. She pulled her arms back and pushed herself up, still grappling with the cohesion of the water.

    She was shivering cold, wringed out her hair, looked around. There was a glow, from the water or the fog. It was late at night but she could still see it. The stream was odd and placid. Less like a flowing river than a long, still pool. She tried to spot her ring a moment, but the ground was just water, the walls just rocks. She looked upward. She didn’t see the Christmas lights stringing into the fog. But they were still tied around her in her harness. She pulled the string, hand over hand, until she found the frayed copper at the end.

    There was no real way to enter the gorge and no real way to leave it. She assumed the bridge was just above her, but she couldn’t see it with her eyes. She thought that she probably shouldn’t head too far, in case of rescue.

    She just started sifting through the water, reaching into it, grabbing nothing but mud. After two or three scoops it became demoralizing. She didn’t want to sit down again because the water was cold, but there nowhere else to sit, there was just water and wall.

    So she sat down, felt her body tremble with uncomfortable shivers. She worried about hypothermia. Evelyn screamed for help until she didn’t feel like screaming. And after that, she waited. She waited and wished she was back in her home, ring or no ring. She rehearsed in her head her apology to Clark, for flying off the handle, for breaking the window, for throwing her ring off the bridge. She had tried to get it back. She couldn’t think of anything else that she could try to do.

    She heard a flutter in the air. She turned around to look at it but couldn’t quite catch it. She heard it again, and felt it fly over her arm. When she turned her head to look, the whatever-it-was landed on her opposite shoulder. She saw on it, a very tiny dark-feathered lark. She recognized the lack of an eye’s glimmer. It was Malice.

    She thanked him again, never wanting to make an enemy of magical beings. She didn’t quite know what to say. The other two were bigger conversationalists.

    Malice flew up into the air and turned around at her, looking at her with his sockets. Evelyn felt his desire for her to follow him. And so she did. She plodded after him, sinking her feet into and outside of the water. And it never felt like hours since she started following him. But eventually, it felt like many minutes.

    Then, in the distance, only just visible in the water’s subterranean glow, was a floating piece of flotsam. It was a nest, made from twigs and clovers and bits of string. And inside of it was a glimmering hoard of small objects. A golden necklace and an old bottlecap, fake jewels alongside real ones, many rings, many rings, many many many rings…

    And there it was in the pile. Grateful tears began to pour down Evelyn’s face. She was tortured with relief. She pointed to which one was hers. Malice rubbed his face against her finger and felt where she was directing him. He picked it up between his beak and held it out. When she grabbed it, he growled like a dog that was playing in the park. And then he released it. Evelyn pushed the ring back onto her finger, and she suddenly felt much better than she had felt for her whole night.

    Evelyn felt the other two birds landing on her shoulders.

    “How long have you lived here, Evelyn?” said Dingo.

    Evelyn said about thirty years.

    “Well,” said Feldman, “How would you feel if, twenty-nine years ago, someone built some stairs here?”

-13- Warm

    It was still a long flight of stairs. And Malice had had some conditions. Nobody in the town was to know about the stairs until Evelyn found them so as not to influence future events. The production of the stairs needed to be minimally intrusive to the lives of others. Evelyn happened to be physically close enough to a passing millionaire for Feldman to give him the impulse to build some stairs down as an underutilized vacation spot. Even then, Malice needed to solder the lives of the millionaire, the workers, and of the few people that they had had unavoidable conversations with to avoid any wanton timeline divergence. All in all, Evelyn had to spend twenty more minutes in wet clothes as she waited for the birds to work through the metaphysical red tape and get her out of there.

    But as soon as she stepped out of the water, she was very pleased to no longer be in it. She kissed all the birds again- and then they flew away, to a different roost, to their posts. Evelyn marched up the stairs and trudged through the woods. Once again, not hours, but many minutes. And then her shivering, wet old body saw the bridge again. There were two figures on it, staring downward; Evelyn got close enough that she could recognize both Sydney and Clark. They were looking down into the fog, had unfurled some fresh rope, were muttering grim things about Evelyn’s fate. Clark said something through clenched teeth. Sydney shook her head.

    Evelyn got closer, and closer. She tried to disguise the distinctive watery squish of her footsteps. It wasn’t perfect, but the both of them were so absorbed in waiting for the rope that Evelyn could get right behind them, hold her hands out, and-

    Evelyn yelled “Boo!”, shaking their shoulders. Both of them fumbled over themselves and screamed.

    “Evelyn?!” Sydney was slumped on the ground. “I almost fell over!”

    “God, Evelyn!” breathed out Clark. “She said you- I thought you were-”

    “Oh, she was!” said Sydney. “We had to- the harness! She’s still wearing it! See?”

    “You went down into the canyon, then? Did you?”

    Evelyn answered in the affirmative. Clark grabbed his head and squeezed his hair. 

    “Oh, Evelyn! You just- you can’t do things like that! I know that I can’t tell you what to do, I know that I- but it worries me! You can’t do things like that!”

    Evelyn looked at Sydney. Sydney, still bewildered, pointed at herself and closed an imaginary zipper on her mouth. Evelyn nodded.

    “Why would you do that, Evie? Why would you, in the middle of the night?”

    And Evelyn told him that she tossed her wedding ring into the water. He wasn’t okay. His pangs of worry led right into grief. He looked at her like he didn’t know her. He saw that she got it back, she showed it to him. But still his face was cloudy, fragile.

    “She was off her head about it, Clark.” said Sydney. “And I don’t know how, but she did get it back. Couldn’t you just forgive her so we can chalk tonight up to a win?”

    Clark sent Sydney a glance to shut up, and she sneered at him. He sent his gray eyebrows back towards Evelyn. It was not a promising expression. She saw that throwing the ring meant more than the valiant effort to save it.

So Evelyn opened her mouth and she tried to think about how she felt when she was down there, when she needed him more than anyone. She realized that after he hit her, she stopped apologizing. And so she started with that. She said sorry, for being so careless with something so important for them, for being prone to outbursts, for breaking things. She knew he was getting better- she knew that she needed to get better. And she could take some classes, if he wanted her to. Anger management and the like, or couples therapy, or anything to make the time she had with him worthwhile. She apologized for every time that she told him that she wished they’d never been together, or never met, or never gotten married. She realized today that it wasn’t ever true. She realized that whether or not they could make it work, whether or not they had a future together, she didn’t regret the life they lived. She wouldn’t have lived it over. She wouldn’t have changed anything.

    “Not anything?” he said, eyes still shameful and shaken from past mistakes.

    Evelyn thought carefully about the time where he broke her nose. She said, there were some things that she did regret. Not individual things that led her to this point, but events that when they did happen, were problems larger than themselves. It was very wrong. It was a reason not to be in this relationship. But Evelyn knew that she was choosing this relationship anyway, and she promised to stop pretending that she wasn’t. She would never forget that he hit her, but it’s better that it was in their past, than a problem that was waiting for them in the future.

    Clark looked at her.    “I meant what I said last time,” he said.

    Evelyn told him that she believed him.

    Clark nodded to her. He turned around and started walking home.

    “Let’s go home, you can change into some dry clothes. I put up a tarp for the window, I’ll pay to get it fixed.”

    Evelyn held his arm and started walking through the town.

    “Hold on!” said Sydney, rushing to walk next to them. “When the lights broke, I didn’t know how deep you were. How did you get back up?”

    Evelyn looked back at her and stone-cold told her that she took the stairs.

    “Seriously?” Sydney stopped walking, befuddled. After being stunned, she cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey! What did you find down there?”

    And Evelyn told her that there was nothing down there but a floating bird’s nest and three of the odd birds who tended it. An answer that no teenager would be enthralled by. But as she grew older, Evelyn hoped, the prospect of a strange animal’s den would grow and grow inside her as she thought about its simple beauty. So that when Sydney was old enough to search a river for a bird’s nest, she would perhaps be old enough to harbor some regrets.