Page 72 of A Better World

The crowd was so thick that Linda didn’t see the bird lose its head. She only heard the cheers. “And as the last of us shall be first, we take and we receive, and we are grateful,” the town, all of Plymouth Valley, replied, in unison.

Quickly, the crowd dispersed, venturing to their assigned tables. She moved slowly, feeling out of time, as a group of elementary school kids sang harvest songs about bounty, John Parson’s great town, and the culling and hoarding of crops.

At last, she found her table. Daniella, ActHollow, and their spouses had taken a far end, and it was packed. Along the length of the table were Heinrich and Russell’s work people. She bent down beside Russell. “Hi,” she said, feeling meek and, for reasons she could not explain, ashamed.

“Oh, hi!” he said, pleased to find her. “How’d it go? Oh! No! What happened to your knees!”

She shook it off. If she explained, she might start crying. “There’s no chair for me,” she said, voice quivering.

“There’s not?” he asked. “I’d have saved you one, but I assumed you were eating with your crew.”

“But it’s Thanksgiving.”

He shrugged, sheepish. “There?” He pointed. At the opposite end of the table were four empty seats. “Do you want me to get up?” Hewas in midconversation, enjoying himself. Yes, of course she wanted him to get up. But not if she had to insist on it.

She headed to the empty seats, claimed one. Caladrius was served. It looked a lot like wild goose, the meat mostly brown and fatty. Her portion was a very long thigh and a thick breast, along with yams and spinach. She didn’t lift her fork. She’d eaten caladrius a few times since arriving in this town and though the taste was fine, like goose, she’d never enjoyed the experience. You don’t eat what you hate.

She sat by herself for a good twenty minutes, until Hip and Cathy joined her. The fourth seat was probably meant for Josie, who texted to say that she’d be setting up chairs at different parks all day and most of the evening, too.

Linda couldn’t put her finger on the exact problem. There were so many inconsistencies. So many strange behaviors. But shecouldname the feeling: loneliness.

She spent the entirety of the meal trying not to cry. At the opposite end of the table were the members of ActHollow, who’d waved once, cheerful and pleasant, and then resumed their separate conversation. As she sat quiet in the din, she remembered Gal watching them that first night. A woman on the outside, looking in.

John Parson’s Journey!

John Parson built a tunnel.

John Parson built a manse.

John Parson came to live with us

on this Labyrinth prance!

*Sung to the tune of “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down”

The Itch

When your mindisn’t protecting you enough, your body takes over and shuts down. There’d been too much adrenaline. Too many stifled emotions, half-realized epiphanies, that had quietly lacerated her from inside. Too much ahead, she suspected, that would be much worse.

At home that Thanksgiving night Linda felt an overpowering heaviness. She did not undress, but collapsed into bed. In the calm, floating drift before sleep, it came to her that all of this was a game. The price of living here meant playing. She was expected to drop the subject of Gal Parker and move on with her life. She was expected to make the clinic look good and to raise her kids and to canoodle her husband. She was expected to continue being a member of ActHollow by doing exactly as told. She was expected to be the woman in the mirror—pretty, appropriate, and yielding.

For the sake of her family, for the sake of peace in her life, she wanted to be the kind of person who went along. But there was a monster underneath all this. An ugly thing that breathed and watched. A hungry thing.

Morning came in a blink. No dreams. No thoughts at all.

She left the house before anyone was awake. Despite the holiday, the clinic was open. She forgot to make small talk with Sally, to ask her what was new. Like a robot, Sally continued with the script despite the omission. She checked Linda’s car like always, and told her, “Looks good, good-lookin’!”

Seven patients were scheduled. Linda gave up swallowing herunease, or logic-ing it away. Between her first and second patients, she called the PV Hospital and asked after Gal Parker. It turned out Gal had been released a few days earlier. “She’s got lots more treatments left,” the nurse said. “We’d have kept her here until she finished, but everybody was tired of looking at her. All she does is complain that she couldn’t see her kids. But she had it coming.”

So, Gal really was back home, in the very house she’d set on fire.

Linda left the clinic late that night, her assistant and the X-ray technician having gone home to spend the remainder of the holiday with their families. As she headed for her car, she noticed that the back wooden wall of the caladrius shelter had been smashed. The two-by-fours were broken inward, as if a vandal had struck them with a blunt object. She pulled the slats free, leaving a craggy hole so that the shelter was exposed on two sides. The wood had been cleanly broken. This hadn’t been done with a foot or a fist. So… an axe?

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, a shipment of caladrius feathers and leather arrived on their doorstep. The leather was rough and still wet from salt curing. Bird skin, it was thin and fine.

Though it was announced that 60 percent of the caladrius population had been culled, mostly for dry food storage, Sunny had survived. According to one of the pamphlets, residents were supposed to clean caladrius shelters every year after Thanksgiving. The job could not be outsourced to dayworkers. Wearing soccer goalie gloves, Linda went into Sunny’s shelter for the first time. She found a mound of tiny bones. Sunny’d licked these clean, practically polished, and divided them from the fur, which she’d used to insulate her shelter. Upon realizing Linda’d gone in there, she followed, hissing:SSSSSSSSSSS!

It was dumb. Linda was hunched inside the small shelter, trapped by a flightless bird that must have gained at least three pounds since June. “I don’t want your pile of garbage, garbage lady,” she said. Sunny opened her sharp-toothed mouth as if to bite.

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