Chapter Text
He stared at her unblinkingly through the dark. Neither of them breathed. From the next room came a high, feeble wail, and a scrabbling at the wall. Her heart thundered in her ears and, for a moment, she could hear absolutely nothing else.
He crawled across the ground towards her, dragging his dead, twisted legs behind him. When he was close enough she could hear the frantic rapid of his breath, the stink of fear in his mouth. She held out her arms; he crawled back into them.
They sat and listened as the wailing devolved once more into the throb of weeping.
“Can we go to her?” he whispered against her sweating neck. “Please.”
She pressed her mouth to the top of his head. Did not kiss, did not speak – merely took into her memory the sensation of his down-soft hair, the smell of him somehow still not dredged from infancy.
“Okay,” she replied.
They crept through the sudden stillness, the flagstones cold underfoot. She carried him on her back; though she was small and weak, he was as light as a hollow-boned bird, and she cherished the way he clung to her, palms clasped sweaty around her neck.
They found Mama in the bedroom. She crouched in a corner sucking her hair between her teeth, and looked up when they entered again. Her eyes were white and listing in their blindness. When she saw them, she smiled. Her teeth were rotted through.
Evelyn set him down on the bed. She did not watch him raise himself; she still could not bear the sight of his viciously distorted body, not even after so many years of existing in such intimate witness to it. Instead she turned to Mama, who was shuddering upright, shaking herself out like an animal. Her hair hung wet and heavy down her back – she had been swimming again, evidently – pale as the moon that was absent, now, in the utter blackness of the night.
Max heaved himself across the bed. She did not see him do it, but she heard him; a grunt of effort that escaped him before he could bite it off, the distinct creak of camphor-wood, the shuffle of enduring cotton. Evelyn hazarded to look at him. He was sweating, the corners of his mouth glimmering with spit. He glanced at her, caught her looking, and grabbed her hand. The delicate fineness of his face, she had always thought, made it all even more appalling. He had pretty eyes and a pretty mouth and skin that was translucent enough that it seemed to adopt a strange, peripheral glow. He repelled darkness the same way Mama did. The same way Evelyn did.
“Little birds,” Mama whispered to them as she crawled onto the bed. It was a low sprawling thing with a mattress of goose-down and covers that had long ago been cast away. Papa would have doused her in silks, too, but they would be torn between her teeth or stained with her sweat or cut apart and made into a noose. For all his fancies, Papa’s greatest gift was this. His love was the enduring.
Mama stretched her body along the bed and Evelyn was once more reminded of just how tall she was. Her feet dangled over the end, their soles black with dirt. She curled her toes and let Max curl himself into her chest, bony and damp with sweat. A white hand raised and found Evelyn by memory alone, stroking down the familiar length of her arm. She gazed down at Mama and saw the bony waste of her body beneath her shift, threadbare and yellowing around the neck and arms. It was all she ever wore, these days, when she deigned to wear anything at all.
Evelyn swallowed. Sobbed. Submitted herself to Mama’s little nest of madness, back to the womb, arms tight around the body of her brother. Mama’s hideous face shed all darkness, raw and pink in grief. She touched Evelyn’s lips. Little birds, she said, over and over. At some point Max began tremble. This was the end – they all knew it. The obliterating blue of summer drove to a close, and the first hesitant winds blew from the south, and it would end. There came the sudden braying of dogs in the distance, the calling voices of men. Mama’s hand gripped her so tightly that Evelyn’s skin split beneath her nails. She did not whimper; did not weep.
Clutched tight, all three, birds in the dark.