writermag.com • The Writer | 37to peer into the casket. She wanted, needed, to see
him lying in that silk-lined box. But when she
went to stand, Mother clutched her arm and
jerked her back down. It was then that her feath-
ers had begun to sprout through her skin. Small
pinfeathers poked through her nylons and pulled
against the pores with each movement. They
itched and made her fidgety – it was all she could
do not to scratch them.
The feathers would come to her at Grandfa-
ther’s too.
At his house, while on his bed in the dim light,
his ashtray-breath smothered her and his thick,
probing fingers touched her. With every visit to his
darkened bedroom, her avian powers grew stron-
ger, and flight came to her more quickly.
In the cemetery, the newly formed feathers
covered the girl’s arms, and she felt their pointy
ends as they pushed against the inside of her coat.
She shivered as she raised her eyes and scanned
the crowd for Father. Solitary and distant as
always, she spotted him, standing two black-
cloaked bodies away.
A flicker of movement caught the girl’s eye. To
avoid Mother’s detection, she slowly turned her
head until she spotted Sister Crow perched on
the edge of a grey headstone. A smile pulled at
the corners of the girl’s mouth. The bird, black as
Goth, tilted its head and eyed her. In quick, short
motions, its sharp beak worked like a pencil
writing an invisible message in the air. And the
girl knew, for certain, the bird was waiting for
the eye – the ridge-less half marble clasped
tightly in her fist.
A shift in the crowd momentarily distracted
the girl, and then she heard the shovelfuls of dirt
thunder down onto the casket. Edging away from
Mother and moving toward Sister Crow, she
pulled the eye-shell from her pocket and gently
lobbed it toward the bird. Without a sound, it fell
to the grass just left of the headstone. The bird’s
shiny obsidian eyes followed it to the ground. Its
beak tipped up and down, and then it cawed a
thank you.
With a flap of wings, the bird descended to the
ground and picked up the object in its beak. Then
it swiftly took flight and disappeared into the
nearby woods. In vain, the girl searched the
naked branches for the bird while a heavy sadness
filled her. “No, wait,” she cried out, “take me too!”
An abrupt yank on the girl’s arm reminded her
she was to stay still and be quiet. “Why can’t you
behave?” Mother spat.
No one spoke in the car on the way home. No
one commented on her feathers. Father kept his
hands on the steering wheel while Mother stared
out the window, and the girl sat in the backseat,
running the tip of her finger over her soft, inky
down. Once home, Father abandoned them, going
straight out to his workshop; Mother headed
directly to the forbidden cupboard; the girl went
up to her room and climbed onto her bed, where
she curled up like a fledgling in a soft nest.
When the girl awoke, she was dismayed to dis-
cover she was still a girl. The feathers were gone,
but the inner ache remained. She rubbed her
palm against her pale skin.
One morning when she was supposed to be in
school, the girl instead rode her bike down to the
run-off pond. From the sloping bank, she watched
a swan float by. She pulled the secreted items from
her pockets and examined them. Two bottles: one
from her mother’s medicine cabinet, the other
from the forbidden cupboard. After a long minute,
she flopped onto her back, her grasp tight on the
bottles. Lying face-up with her blackened eyelids
softly closed, she could feel the feathers, black as
Goth, once more push through her scalp.Kara Donadt lives in beautiful British Columbia, where she
writes from her home studio overlooking Lake Okanagan. She
loves wakesurfing and golfing in the summer and hiking and
skiing in the winter. Her inspiration comes from other tal-
ented writers, nature, and the world around her.ÈWANT TO THROW YOUR HAT IN THE RING? Our 2020 Summer Flash Contest
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