Small Forest Creatures

by L. J. Arensen

Sometimes Soren dreams of dying, of his soul rising out of his still body like a bird. A live bird, with hollow bones and a tiny beating heart and feathers at its throat. Not like the birds his brother Gabe kills with a slingshot. Not like those limp bundles with their skulls crushed, their breasts caved in, feathers soaked in dark blood. “A bird’s eyes take up a third of its skull,” Gabe told him once, slicing through a woodpecker’s scalp with his knife and peeling the skin away. A bizarre beaked creature with enormous dark eyes remained. Its sorrowing eyes stared naked and unprotected at Soren in a red mask of sinew and muscle like an exposed soul.

Bones & Flowers by Jim Janknegt

He loves his brother. He always has. He was mad with grief when Gabe first went away to school in Kenya. He would stand and wait at the end of the driveway every afternoon until his mother came outside and found him. “Come inside and play,” she would say. “I’ll show you the school holidays again on the calendar.” But the black boxes she checked off so carefully each morning meant nothing to him and he waited every day until finally his father’s car came winding up the side of the mountain with Gabe leaning out of the window. And then he was so happy he thought he might faint. He pleaded to be allowed to attend boarding school early until his parents acquiesced, just so he could be near him, just so he could hear him laugh. He was sure that Jesus looked just like Gabe, he was sure that Gabe looked just like Jesus. Even now, now that he knows Gabe is nothing like Jesus, he still loves him. Sometimes, when he is entering the dining hall, being jostled and prodded by the other boys, he will feel Gabe’s large hand on his shoulder and his heart will leap like a wild thing. “Hey, kid,” his brother always says, and every time Soren looks up slowly, savoring it, and says, “Hey, Gabe,” and then his brother leans over and scoops him right up, even though he is not a small boy anymore. Gabe lifts him out of the children’s line and into his own. “Stick with me, kid,” Gabe says. “Try and look old.” The boys around him, Gabe’s friends, always laugh. They laugh at everything Gabe says. The other younger boys fall silent and watch in envy when Soren is with Gabe, but he does not care. He does care about anything then; he is perfectly happy, standing with his brother in the dining hall line. Then they reach the food counters and the hall monitor notices him and sends Soren back to his own line, no matter how well Gabe pleads and smiles. Even so, it is enough for Soren, and when he is ordered away he always turns to Gabe and gives him a thumbs up and says, “Better luck next time.” And then they part. He still loves Gabe. But in the afternoons after school when Gabe sometimes comes looking for him, Soren does not want to be found at all. His brother kills things. His brother stalks and traps small animals. He enjoys this. Then he skins them and roasts their flesh over smoky fires with other wiry boys who act as if he is a god, although not a god like Jesus. One day at school Gabe and his friends had come and stolen him away into the forest. “Time to become a man, kid,” Gabe had said. “Are you ready for it?” Soren had thought he was. All that long way down the side of the Great Rift Valley, pushing through briars, leaping over gullies, watching the older boys fiddle with their slingshots and hurl stones into trees to flush the birds, he had thought that he was ready.

“We’re going to Hyrax Cliffs to check the traps,” Gabe said, and Soren had nodded eagerly. “You know what a hyrax is, right?” Soren did. When he still was a small boy, he had extended a lollipop towards a hyrax in a game park and it had bitten his thumb. He did not remember much about the creature itself, but he had a searing recollection of the fiery injections in his belly to protect him from rabies.

The forest gave way abruptly to a vast ledge of bare rock. The change between the shelter of the trees and the open space unsettled Soren. They were standing on the very top of a cliff. The stone was bleached and gray and stank of baboon dung. “Check the traps,” Gabe murmured, and the boys fanned out and scattered into the trees. They were all strangely silent. Soren sat down cross-legged on the rock face to wait for them. The stone was hot beneath his bare legs and he liked this. He sat for a long time, drowsy and warm, until the brush behind him rustled and Gabe emerged. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright, and he carried a dik-dik by the legs. He dropped it at Soren’s feet. Soren reached out his hand and touched its soft coat. The tiny antelope was dead. Its skull had been bashed in and blood from the wound pooled around Soren’s feet. The creature’s hooves were smaller than Soren’s thumb. “It was a fighter,” Gabe said cheerfully. “Half out of its mind and impossible to hold down.” He looked down at Soren. “All right, kid,” he said. “Your turn.” And he tugged Soren to his feet and led him to the edge of the great rock. For one stunned moment, Soren thought that Gabe was going to push him off the cliff. Instead, Gabe lifted him down onto a ledge that ran along the length of the cliff. The other boys had returned, some bearing trophies. They ran to the edge and fell upon their stomachs to watch. Gabe led Soren along the ledge to a cleft in the rock. “Hyraxes like rifts in the rock,” Gabe explained. “Best place in the world for a snare.” He stepped back and helped Soren step into the cleft.

At Soren’s feet stretched a long thin wire tied with a noose. A hyrax lay trapped in the noose. Soren had never seen an animal trapped in a snare. The hyrax’s tongue was swollen and gray. Its paws pushed feebly at the bloody noose around its neck where it had torn its flesh trying to wrench free. Its eyes were dull and unfocused, but it continued to twitch spasmodically, fighting for life. “Sometimes they get away,” one of the boys said from somewhere above his head. “But nothing gets out of Gabe’s snares.”

Gabe tapped his shoulder and pressed his knife into his hand. “Go on, kid. Kill it.” Soren did not refuse. He had never refused his brother anything. He reached out his hand and cut the throat of the tormented creature. It was not so very difficult. The hyrax was already near death. He just finished it. The creature shuddered then fell still; its blood spattered upon his hand. Something inside Soren’s chest wrenched and tore. He thought he might faint. Gabe spun Soren around to face him. “Good boy,” Gabe said, and reached out and lightly, o so lightly, touched Soren’s chest over his heart, over the torn place, almost as if he knew. Then, somehow, Soren was back out on the ledge and the boys were lifting him up, whooping. They snatched the limp bundle from Gabe’s hands and dipped their fingers in the blood and wiped it across Soren’s cheeks. “You’re a man,” they said. Gabe grinned. Something was hurting him. He thought it might be his heart. He looked down to find the knife still in his hand, his fingers wrapped tightly around it. He turned away from his brother and saw that he was standing on the very edge of the cliff. A dead tree jutted out of the side of the rock face below him. Its limbs beckoned like broken bones. He knew what he should do. He knew that he should fall. But he did not want to die. So he cut himself instead across the inner skin of his forearm, with the knife he had used to cut the hyrax’s throat. The flesh parted so easily, stinging. The blood welled up, an atonement. “I’m sorry,” Soren whispered.

He has cut himself ever since that time. It is not something one can do every day, lest an adult notice. On most days he simply searches for and collects the bones of small forest creatures: dik-diks, duikers, birds, hyraxes, voles and shrews. This began in guilt but now simply gives him pleasure. He keeps them on a shelf above his bed: lines of tiny ribcages, delicate skulls, jawbones and incisors, and all the indeterminate bones of leg and forearm. He finds and keeps their bones. But he also offers, carefully and methodically, his pain. He cuts for Gabe’s sake and not his own, for he has not hunted again. He knows it is not sufficient, but he gives his blood for all the creatures starving and choking in the snares of his sibling. He dreams about those creatures at night, dreams of their bright eyes, their glossy coats and delicate paws. They do not seem angry with him, only fearful. He reaches out and tries to offer them lollipops but they turn and run away into the shadows. He looks down and sees that there is still blood on his hands, even after all this time. He looks up and sees Gabe standing in front of him, grinning. “Hey, kid,” Gabe says. “Time to become a man.” And then he wakes in the silent dormitory and cries a little, quietly, so that none of the other boys will hear him.

Nights are Sarah’s downfall as well. As long as there is still light, she can endure anything. She studies the other girls. Under the harsh fluorescent light of the study cubicles the girls sit in their nightgowns at the desks, their bare feet twisting on the metal legs of the chairs above the cold linoleum. None of them ever remember to wear their slippers, no matter how often the dorm parents chide. They pass notes back and forth surreptitiously between their desks and practice their curly signatures.

In the warm lamplight of the dorm parents’ quarters upstairs, they play with each other’s hair. They take turns with the hairbrushes and the rubber bands, brushing and braiding and twisting while the dorm father reads from the Bible and the dorm mother stirs cocoa over the stove. If the dorm father were a sardonic man, he would read the biblical passages that speak of hair: Absalom hanging by his black curls in the thicket, Delilah sawing through Samson’s long mane, the sinful woman wiping Christ’s feet with her long repentant tresses. But he is not a man of much wit, so he reads the Epistles to them instead. A woman’s hair is her glory, the Apostle Paul proclaimed, and on this the girls would agree. Occasionally one of them will take a brush to Sarah’s hair. But she wears it short and she has grown accustomed to sitting outside of those intimate inner circles. In the dim glow of the bare bulb hanging above the shower room the girls double up in square porcelain tubs and scrub each other’s backs. Sometimes they steal a towel and make the hapless victim run back to her room naked and dripping. They say that they inform the boys of these towel thefts beforehand, that the boys are waiting outside in the dark night with their faces pressed against the windows, fogging up the glass. Sarah knows that the girls are not this organized. Sometimes one of them will climb into one of the dryers lined up against the wall and the others will spin her around until she begs for mercy. This makes them all hysterical, although they are careful to listen for the shuffling steps of the dorm mother.

In the bright sunlight of the recess hour, the girls do gymnastics on the edge of the field. The girls know that the boys watch them, although they seldom acknowledge this. They arrange themselves in circles and stand upon their hands with their feet pointed straight into the air towards heaven. They do star jumps and chains of somersaults that leave grass stains all down their shorts and some of them can even do round-offs and back walkovers. It is as if the red earth below the green grass is as yielding as a trampoline. Gravity seems to have no hold on them at all. They hang by their knees from the monkey bars and flip down to the ground below, their hair swishing through the air. For a season they practice pyramids, lithe towers of girls balancing upon each other’s shoulders and thighs and knees. They like to pretend that they are the Tower of Babel. On a prearranged signal they all tumble free to the earth below, each one shouting words in a different language. Sarah is not so different from these girls. But they possess something she lacks; they know some secret she does not know. Their cheerfulness does not seem feigned. Perhaps they are secretly miserable. Yet they are braver somehow. Unlike her, they are able to refrain from weeping when the darkness comes, and they resent her bitterly for this failing. During Sarah’s first few weeks at boarding school, the dorm mother would carry her away into her own quarters and rock her while she wept. But her sympathy ebbed as the weeks became months and now she issues hearty warnings instead as her plump hand hovers over the light switch. “Let’s not have any crying tonight, my girl,” she says. “Think of your roommates.” How could Sarah not think of her roommates, whose eyes are fixed upon her bed as soon as they adjust to the dark? Waiting anxiously, angrily, for her to fail. She tries. As the darkness fills the room, she lies with her arms folded across her chest. She pretends she is dead. The dead do not weep. The sheets are rough against her skin but she imagines that she is lying in a teakwood coffin, the wood smooth against her cold flesh. She holds her breath and listens to her heart slowly beating; she waits for it to stop. She imagines the red earth cut open like a box waiting for her coffin to be lowered into it like an offering. But then, inevitably, she spoils it. She sees her mother standing by her graveside, dressed all in black. Her mother tries to smile but instead she falls to her knees and cries out like she did the first time Sarah went away.

The week before Sarah entered boarding school her mother packed her daughter’s belongings in steamer trunks. She folded two sets of towels and pillowcases and sheets as if Sarah were married and moving away. She assembled the clothing prescribed by the school’s dress code. Each item bore a small tag with Sarah’s name upon it. Her mother had sat next to a dim lamp every night for a month, lips pursed, sewing those name tags into every piece of clothing Sarah owned. Each sock, each pair of panties, each washcloth in the trunks bore the work of her mother’s needle. Sarah sewed in one tag herself, but the stitches were crooked and her mother tore it out and started over again. “I’ll do them all,” she said to Sarah. “I don’t mind doing them.” She told Sarah that she must be brave, that she must be good. She told Sarah that when the day came on which Sarah must go away that they must both be very brave, as if Sarah were a soldier going away to war. She will salute Sarah, she said, and kiss her on the forehead once and smile, and then turn and walk up the steps back into the house. A neighbor had offered to take Sarah to boarding school. Sarah had never met this woman. She stood with her mother on the close-cropped lawn and waited. Her mother was wearing black that day. Perhaps mothers wear black when their children go off to war. Sarah does not know. When the neighbor’s car pulled into the graveled driveway, her mother squeezed Sarah’s hand and gave a strange little smile and said, “Well, then.” She stepped forward to greet the neighbor woman and Sarah began to forget how to breathe. Her throat was tight and strange.

Her mother loaded the trunks in the neighbor’s car. Her mother saluted her and bent down to kiss her on the forehead. Sarah felt as if someone had both hands around her throat, squeezing it. She tried to speak but she could not say a word. “Well, then,” Sarah’s mother said, but then she forgot how to be brave. She began to sob. She fell to her knees on that perfectly manicured lawn and pushed Sarah roughly into the arms of the strange woman, her fingers pressing hard into Sarah’s thin arms. Later Sarah will guard those bruises as if they were kisses. When they begin to fade Sarah will panic, when they are gone she will die inside. “Take her,” her mother sobbed to the stranger. “Take her. I can’t let her go.” The woman gathered Sarah’s body, rigid with shock, into her arms and carried her to the passenger seat of the waiting car. Unknown children in the backseat watched Sarah’s mother double over on the manicured lawn. Their eyes protruded like fisheyes. Sarah stared silently as the car lurched into reverse and pulled away from her kneeling mother. Her mother’s hands clawed the brilliant green grass and the red earth. Her mother lay there weeping as if she was broken and let Sarah go. The other woman chattered to Sarah as if nothing were wrong. Her children shifted restlessly in their seats. How wonderful Sarah’s new dorm mother is, the woman said. What an adventure Sarah will soon be having. The other children love the boarding school. Her son loves it, doesn’t he? Her son looked disdainfully at Sarah. What a lovely large tuck box her mother has packed for her. She will be able to eat some of it every afternoon after school at three. She will be able to trade the treats packed by her mother with her little friends. She is a lucky girl. Sarah thinks of her mother crying like a broken winged crow. She thinks of her mother, who lets Sarah be taken away, who sends her away, again and again. Rage and desperate loneliness well up inside of her and a whimper escapes Sarah’s throat in the dark dormitory room. Each holiday she pleads with her mother, she prays to whichever god will listen, although none of them ever do. “Don’t make me go back,” she begs. “Let me stay with you.” And her mother shakes her head and wipes her wet eyes with angry hands and says, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry this time.” Sarah does not hate her. She knows what this is like. Every night Sarah lies on her mattress and shakes with her sobs. The other girls turn their backs to her, harsh words upon their lips. They jam their fists into their ears and burrow into their blankets, but to no avail. Her grief follows them. They cannot escape her and the hot tears rise in their own eyes. All the girls in the room lie weeping nightly for their absent mothers and they hate the girl who makes them weep, who makes them remember, who wakes their longing and their sorrow. “You are just a little crybaby,” one spits at her in the cold light of morning.

“You cry too,” Sarah says, helplessly. “Only if you start it, you baby,” the other girl cries, and spins on her heel and strides away. Sarah wonders if this is true. She wonders whether, if by some miracle she could stay dry-eyed, the other girls would fall asleep as peacefully as they braid each other’s hair during their nightly rituals. She wonders if she is truly to blame. It does not matter. There is nothing she can do. She can endure anything if it is light, but the boy’s razor helps. Nothing can make the ache around her heart fade, nothing except for the sight of her mother standing in the doorway of the dormitory to take her home for the school holidays. Nothing can make the pain go away, but she can replace that great pain with another one, a small sharp stinging one, for a while, and for this reason Sarah leaves the school grounds to stand with the boy on an old cistern in the woods and takes a razor to her skin.

Soren does not always go to the forest. He likes to hide in a culvert that runs beneath the road beside the prayer chapel. He leans back against the curved walls and stares open-eyed into the darkness. Occasionally a car passes over the road above and the entire culvert trembles, dust sifting down upon his head as if he is in a miner’s tunnel. Its rough concrete sides are threaded with tiny cracks. Yet it holds. Soren has read that South African miners keep canaries in cages as early warning systems. If the canary topples from its perch, then the air has gone bad and all the dirt-streaked men scramble back up to the surface. Soren wonders what it must be like for the canaries who live deep beneath the earth. Do they mind it or have they forgotten what the sun looks like at all? Do they still sing? He likes to sing, softly, when he is lying in the culvert. His voice becomes more resonant; it drifts back at him off the walls. He is a canary singing gently under the earth.

He has hidden some things in this culvert, but he tries to keep it simple. He also keeps track of the seasons. When the rains come runoff from higher in the valley churns through his hiding place in a fast-flowing stream, red from the oxides in the earth and full of pine cones and grass. Once Soren came and found all of the belongings he had stored in the culvert scattered in the mud behind the prayer chapel, lying right up against the cabin walls for any passerby to see. His heart rose up in his throat until he had gathered everything up and stolen away. There are so few places to hide in a boarding school. Children crawl over the landscape like ants—scaling every tree, burrowing into every hole, swimming in each water tank. Finding a secret place is like finding a treasure in a field.

He is better than many of the children at finding hiding places. He has had more practice. When he and his sibling still lived at home, Gabe would go off on solitary hunting trips and Soren would play by himself on the grounds of their farm. He was more afraid of nature then, so he often played near or inside the house. He would find the most hidden of places and he would very carefully slip into them. It was very important to not disturb the outside of these places. He would try and erase his tracks as he crept into them. It was best of all if they were dark, because then he could light a candle on an upturned tin can. And then he would sit—underneath the leaning mattress in the attic, in the middle of the kai apple hedge, in the skeleton of scaffolding beneath the staircase— watching the candle burn and thinking to himself.

When Gabe came home, he would come and find him. He would stalk Soren. He would follow his tracks, brushing his fingers over broken twigs, crushed moss, telltale piles of dislodged dust, the scuffmarks of a small boy’s shoe. He would creep right up to where Soren was sitting and peel open his hiding place like a fruit. He would poke his head into the hedge, he would yank the leaning mattress away from the wall, he would jump up and catch Soren’s dangling foot. “Found you, kid!” he would crow. Soren was startled witless every time. And every time, for one brief moment, he felt a flash of resentment at being found. Caught. Invaded. Then his love of Gabe would roll over him like an ocean and he would drown.

One day on the way to the culvert, Soren stumbles upon four men standing in the science teacher’s yard. They are all gathered around something, something large and struggling, and Soren sees an enormous feathered arm flap between their knees. He tries to slip by unnoticed but the science teacher has seen him out of the corner of his eye. “Come here, boy, and lend a hand,” he calls.

Soren’s heart sinks but he shuffles over obediently. The men are standing around a vulture with a broken wing. Beside them on the grass lies a pile of bandages and some lightweight rods. The men are debating and dancing slightly to stay out of range of the bird’s fierce thrusts with beak and claw. Soren has never been so close to such an enormous wild creature. Its head and neck are featherless and an ugly shade of pink. Its feathers are storm-cloud gray. Its great hooked beak hisses angrily and its eyes are hot and feral. Soren can hardly breathe. It is a splendid and terrible bird. Gabe could never kill this creature. Its hoarse cry would knock Gabe spinning on his back like a beetle. Its burning eye would judge all Gabe’s sins in an instant and pronounce condemnation. Its beak would crush Gabe’s traps like twigs, swallow his knife whole, snap off each of his fingers at the root, tear great tufts of hair from Gabe’s blonde head.

The men reach a decision and step in. The science teacher catches the vulture at the nape of the neck as two other men secure those slashing legs. The vulture hisses in rage as the science teacher slips a noose around its beak and pulls it tight. The draft from its beating wings blows Soren’s hair back from his forehead. The last man secures the healthy wing. The teacher gestures to Soren. “I need you to hold its head for me so I can splint the wing.”

Soren’s hands are trembling, but he obeys. He steps in close to the enraged bird and puts his hands around the vulture’s head, just above the neck. The teacher releases his hold on the bird and quickly arranges the bandages and rods on the grass. The neck of the vulture is covered with leathery and pebbled skin, but it is as strong as the muscles in Gabe’s arms. The vulture writhes in Soren’s hands, and his body bucks as if he is riding a runaway horse. “Hold it steady, boy,” the men say to Soren. “Don’t let go.” The teacher kneels in front of the vulture as if he is going to embrace it and begins to splint the bird’s wing. The vulture hisses and fights. The splinting seems to take a very long time. Soren’s fingers ache from the effort of holding the neck upright, of keeping that hooked beak away from the science teacher’s bent head.

“I can’t hold it,” Soren thinks. “They shouldn’t have asked me. I can’t hold it.”

And then the science teacher speaks to that enormous ugly angry bird. He croons to it. He says, more gently than Soren believed was possible for a man to speak, “Hold still, baby.” The torn place in Soren’s heart suddenly throbs. He will not let go of the vulture; he will not fail. He will stand here for as long as he is needed. He closes his eyes and it is Gabe kneeling in front of the vulture, binding its wing. Gabe smiles up at him, his hands full of bandages. “Hold her still, kid,” he says. Soren will. He will hold onto the life thrashing beneath their hands for as long as he lives.

Large hands close over his and he opens his eyes, startled. The science teacher is looking down at him. “That was well done, young man,” he says. “I’ve got her now.” Soren nods, stunned, and staggers away. Behind him on the grass, the vulture snaps the twine around its beak and cries out in an indignant tongue to the cloudless sky. It is a wild thing finding itself in a dark mine it cannot understand, surrounded by men with dirt on their faces. It does not know that these are good men, but Soren does. He begins to run down the hill, faster and faster, beating the air with his arms as if he too has wings, as if he too can fly if he picks up enough speed. He flies down the valley to the dining hall to find the brother that he loves. He knows that somewhere in Gabe’s heart is a man who will kneel before a vulture and bind its wounds. He knows this because Gabe loves him, and he is not strong. He is like a bird, like a small forest creature. He is a canary singing under the earth and he believes that Gabe will throw down his pick-axe and fling open the door of the cage and hold him against his breast as they ride up the mineshaft towards the light. He flies down the hill to sing Gabe the song he knows how to sing.

If a boy her own size torments a girl, there are things she can do. She can scratch him or slap him or pinch him or even kick him. She can shame him before the other boys or accuse him of misbehavior during school hours when a teacher is present. She can even take a complaint to the dorm parents, who may act upon it. Boys are paddled far more often than girls. But paddling is not common even so. There are so many ways to punish a child. Carrying wood is favored, as is collecting trash on the school grounds. Tuck boxes can be locked away, chores can be doubled, extra homework can be assigned. In the world at the top of the valley, where the primary students live, the girls are treated gingerly by the boys. Sarah does not fear boys her own age.

Unfortunately, the dining hall is situated lower in the valley, on the grounds of the secondary school. It simplifies the logistics of the boarding school for all of the pupils to eat in one building. The primary and the secondary school students have separate dining rooms reached by a single hallway. A cursory barrier of welded pipe runs down the center of this hallway. The older students queue on the left side of the pipe until they reach the counters where the food is served. The primary school children enter the passageway on the right side of the pipe. At its very end lies the entrance to their dining room. Every evening at five o’clock in this hallway, things occur.

The girls do not run races on the playing fields merely for pleasure. They are also interested in becoming fast. A well-timed sprint may carry a girl all the way down the long length of the hallway into the inner dining room where a monitor stands to observe misbehavior. If no one is watching for her, if no one is waiting, the older boys may be reduced to tall blurs shouting in her wake. “Hey, girlie!” they shout. Or, “Come back and talk to us, honey!” These secondary school boys are enormous. Their arms go on forever. If they hold a girl against the concrete wall at arm’s length, there is no way of reaching him with nails or flying feet. All a girl has is her voice. This is what pleases these boys most: waiting to hear what a captive girl will say. Will she curse them? Will she plead for mercy? Will she speak in tongues? If she cries, they will release her more quickly. Some girls cry. Most of them do not. They hate these boys. They will not give their tormentors the satisfaction of seeing them weep. The running technique has its drawbacks. If too many girls are getting by them, the boys will trip one. Sometimes they stand back and watch the girl fall, but this is risky. Injury brings attention. More often, one boy will do the tripping and another will stoop down below the dividing pipe and catch the falling girl. She will fall directly into his arms like an eager young lover while the other boys erupt into clamorous applause. “I saved you, girlie,” the boy will say to the girl trapped in his arms. “What do you say?” If she thanks him, he will grin and let her go. Some of the girls trade stories amongst themselves of being touched or kissed, but usually they do not discuss these episodes. They would rather not speak of them at all. If a girl at this boarding school stumbled upon a magic lamp and was offered three wishes by a genie, she would make those older boys vanish completely, as if they had never existed at all. Or she would wish for them to diminish in size, to end up as small as rabbits or cats, and then she would carry them up the valley and keep them in cages and never feed them enough. Or she would shorten their arms, leaving them just long enough to raise a fork to their lips and clap their hands lightly with the tips of their fingers. She might also, if she had a wish left, remove their voice boxes, so that they could never say girlie again. There are endless variations on these wishes. The fields have been scoured but unfortunately no lamps have been found. Some nights in their study cubicles they draw treasure maps of the mission station and speculate on possible locations, but they know it is just a child’s game. And in the stories it is always Arabic boys who find such lamps. Nevertheless, they tape the maps in the backs of their closets behind their Sunday dresses, as if they are talismans or good luck charms. So far they have proved largely ineffectual. Some nights there are sporting events and the older boys are not present when the younger children enter for supper. Some nights there are older girls standing between the boys in the line, and the boys flirt with them instead. Some nights it is better to be late and some nights it is safer to be early. Not knowing which kind of a night it is can drive a girl mad.

Sarah is always late for dinner. She intends, sometimes, to try the early run, but her steps slow as she descends the hill. Often she begins with a crowd of girls and then lags behind. She lets things distract her: stones, pinecones, cicadas shrilling on the trunks of trees. For a while she stopped going to dinner at all, a brilliant tactic that was foiled by the instigation of an attendance list of the primary school students. Children must be fed three square meals a day, including two glasses of milk.

Sarah is always late and usually alone when she enters the dining hall. Her legs become heavier and heavier as she nears the entranceway. It is like a dream, like those terrible dreams where her legs are asleep and she cannot wake them, or she discovers she is paralyzed from the waist down or that her legs are encased in quicklime. She cannot move, or she can hardly move, and there is always something running hard on her heels. Something coming closer. Usually, after the futile struggle, she wakes in terror just as the thing lunges for her. She wakes before she is devoured. This does not work in the dining hall. But she must eat dinner every night and so she enters the dining hall, slowly. Sarah does not run past the boys. There is no point in it. Nothing does any good at all, not if he is there, the tall boy with the blonde hair and the enormous hands. If he is not there, they do not bother with her. If he is not there she walks by with her head down and they let her pass as if she is invisible. After all, she is such a small girl, just a small plain uninteresting girl. She tried so hard to be unworthy of their notice. Yet one day she failed and most evenings now she pays for this failure. She does not know what she did to attract his attention the first time, but she knows what keeps it. It is her fear and her hatred. These things excite him. When he sees her he swings himself under the bar and kneels in front of her, blocking her way. “Speak to me,” he pleads. She will not. He clutches his heart and throws back his head. “She’s cold, she’s cold, she’s breaking my heart!” The other boys, for there are always other boys, love this. They laugh and shout encouragement. “Just one word,” he begs. “Just one kiss.” She will not look at him, so he reaches out and catches her chin and forces it up until she meets his eyes. His hands are very strong. If he were ever truly angry with her, she knows he could break her bones. “Not even one word?” he whispers. His eyes gleam. She will not speak to him. It is the only resistance she dares offer. She will not speak but she trembles. She cannot help this trembling. Because of it, he calls her Rabbit. He loves her, he says. He cannot live without her.

Sarah looks down at her feet and trudges into the dining hall. For two days now, the boy has not been present. For two days now, she has walked all the way down the hallway to the children’s line unnoticed. Unmolested. Unharmed. She does not expect her luck to hold. He has hidden himself between the other boys. She does not see him. But she hears him. She hears his voice. “Rabbit,” he whispers. “Raaaabit.” She stops, dazed. She does not know whether she has passed by him. She does not whether he is ahead of her or already behind her. She does not know if this disembodied voice is all he has in mind for the evening. And then his hand grips her shoulder and he spins her around to face him.

He is kneeling, which is normal. He has one hand behind his back, which is not. “Did you think I’d forgotten you, Rabbit?” he asks. There is something different about him tonight, something terrible, and so she shakes her head in response. No, she did not think he had forgotten her. He cradles the back of her skull with his free hand the way her mother does. But she must not think of her mother now. She must not think of her at all. Sarah begins to tremble. He pulls her closer to him. “Tonight’s a big night for me, Rabbit. Don’t you want to hear about it?” She nods.

He sighs. “You know, Rabbit, sometimes I think you don’t care at all. Sometimes I think you’d be perfectly happy to never see me again.” He pulls right up against him until his forehead is touching hers and she can feel his breath upon her face. “I have a surprise for you, Rabbit,” he whispers.

She will not cry. She will not. She pretends she is dead. The dead do not weep. She imagines that her flesh is cold but his breath is hot on her face, his fingers are warm on her head.

“Be very brave, Rabbit,” he tells her and then he draws his hand out from behind his back and in it is a dead thing. In his hand is a black crow with broken wings and a crushed skull. She had imagined that she would die and her mother sob beside her body but no, she has gotten it wrong, all wrong, her mother is the one who is dead, her arms broken, her skull crushed in, and Sarah is the one on her knees by the graveside, screaming and screaming.

Soren runs into the hallway and sees Gabe on his knees shaking the girl who comes to the forest with him. The girl is screaming and Gabe is shouting and shaking her and on the floor between them lies one of Gabe’s birds and Soren runs right up to him and pushes him with all of his might. “Stop it, Gabe! Stop it, stop it!” He is screaming too. He is screaming and hitting Gabe with both hands, small feeble blows, but Gabe releases the girl. She stumbles away from him and runs out of the dining hall. Gabe stares after her, then looks at Soren.

“She your girlfriend?” he asks.

He cannot stop screaming. “Don’t you ever touch her again! Don’t you ever!”

“Whoa, kid–” Gabe reaches out his hand but Soren runs from him. He finds her crouched by the cistern in the woods. She has already found the razorblade. There are bloody streaks all up and down the length of her legs and arms. She is striped with blood, she is awash in it. Soren kneels down before her.

The girl’s teeth chatter and she rubs her hands up and down her arms, wetting them with the blood. “I’m dead,” she says. “I’m already dead. I want to be dead.”

Soren wants to talk to her. He wants to tell her about the vulture, about how the man knelt before it and bound its wing, he wants to teach her how to hide, how to find secret places, he wants to tell her that his brother will never hurt her again. He does not know how to do this. Her eyes are hooded and blank. Her trembling skin is cool and clammy to his touch. She is the canary in the cage. She has toppled over because the air has gone bad. They are far below the surface of the known world, and all is dark and strange. The Tower of Babel has fallen and they do not speak the same language.

He pries the razorblade out of her hand and searches for a tongue she will understand. “Don’t ever use it like that again,” he says and then he rises to gather moss from the cedar trees. He will need a great deal to bind up her wounds.