Chapter One of my novella, which is in the works

ONE

When he was seven, Andre found his mother in the attic. A mound of black and white feathers splayed on the floor. She was preening.

She knelt leaning forward, pinching feather by feather between her sharp, long fingernails. Right hand, left hand, right hand, left. She pulled the dirty things along the length of each quill, and flicked them out into the air, into the sunshine. She was an angel under the skylight.

And then, she was done. She sat back slowly on her feet, brought her shoulders out of a hunch. The dust settled. She picked up the whole thing by the collar and shook it, and it was so long that the ends dragged in the dust bunnies. With a strange look of purpose, she lifted the feathers, turned them, so that Andre could see the inside.

It was a cloak. A magic cloak of feathers. And his mother was drawing it closer to her shoulders; she was putting it on.

Andre sneezed from the wooden slat ladder and jerked his head below the open square of the trap door, but it was too late. He heard a gasp, and then her bare feet coming closer over the wooden floor.

“Andre,” she said, sounding relieved. “It’s only you.” She reached down with her hands and he lifted his arms so that she could pick him up. He was fished up through the door and towards the light, towards her. His feet knocked into each other when he wrapped them around her waist, but he wasn’t too big like his Dad always said. He burrowed his nose into her neck and grabbed at the back of her linen summer dress.

She stood up straight without holding him, letting him cling to her, but now she put her hands on his back, smoothing the bare skin with a warm hand. “You didn’t put on your clothes,” she murmured. “When did you wake up?”

Andre didn’t answer. Maybe if he stayed quiet, she wouldn’t ask anymore, and he could just hold on to her.

“Andre, you have to let me go,” she said, her hand slipping off abruptly. A slightly chilly summer morning draft made the hair on the back of his neck rise. “Come down.”

Reluctantly, he uncrossed his feet and let her put him down. But he grabbed a soft fold of her orange creamsicle-colored dress. The breeze pushed it up a little, like a balloon, like there was nothing inside but air.

She looked at him, as if to say, silly boy. She unbuttoned the dress down the front, twisting each one deftly like when she shelled peanuts for him. Down, down, down, until the waist, and then she shifted her shoulders, and the whole thing fell off into a limp heap at his feet. There was nothing inside but her warm, creamy skin.

He stared at her as she picked up the orange linen in her fingers and wrapped it around his shoulders. He stared at her as she walked toe first back towards the magic cloak. He stared until she turned, and met his eyes.

“I’ll be back for you,” she said in a whisper that he could barely hear. She bent down to the feathers, and in one swift movement, flung it up so that it swirled about her shoulders and came down to her red knees.

“No!” he yelled, but it was too late, and it was as if the orange linen held him to the spot. He couldn’t throw it off. Her arms lifted in the cloak, and she was changing, and he couldn’t stop her. The feathers sleeked to her arms and came up white under her belly; her toes curled and pushed up so that her body became long and thin starting from the stick-like legs, up through her stomach and chest to her arched neck and raised chin. And then her face—her face that no longer looked back at him—hardened long and sharp in a beak that pointed up to the skies.

She was an angel, still, in the halo of the sunshine. “Don’t go!” he said, finally able to say something, but from her mouth there came only a deafening, shrill cry that brought tears to his eyes. She picked her way towards him, awkward in her new, scaly black legs, and suddenly out of the sunshine she was frightening. There was no softness left in her wild beady eyes, in her small red-capped head. Backing up too quickly, he tripped on the dress and stared horrified. She would peck him with her hard beak. She would hurt him.

But she turned before him, and arching her tail-feathers, made a run towards the spot where she had sat preening, the spot right under the skylight. She ran an awkward, leggy run, working up a strong wind with her wings so that he smelled the muddy smell of a marsh, and suddenly, she was flying up—but there was nowhere for her to fly—but the skylight, oh the skylight had been cranked open, and as he watched she pushed it all the way with her hard, long beak. And at the same time she arched her back so that her entire body, new and feathered and sleek, just fit through the frame.

She was gone.

Andre shoved at the dress, and finally he was able to yank his arms and legs out. The breeze blowing by his cheek made its wetness go cold.

He scrambled to his knees, to his feet, as something in his nose began to hurt. Tears came out to release the hurt, but he couldn’t see anything but the blurry color of sunshine. He wiped his eyes too hard with his fingers. He had to find Dad.

Sometimes, she let him dial on the phone himself, and he knew Dad’s number by heart. Two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine. Andre lowered his shaky feet onto the slats of the wooden ladder one-by-one, and repeated the number with each step.

Two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine. Two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine.

The phone was on the little table next to their bed. He picked it up and dialed (two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine), but there was no sound. It wasn’t on. What button turned it on, so that it made noise?

He wiped his nose with his right hand. One of the buttons was blue, not like the other gray buttons, and when Andre looked harder, he could spell out the word “TALK” in white print. He punched it with his pointer finger. Sure enough, red light came on. The phone whined in his hand.

Andre found the numbers and pressed their buttons (two-oh-five-seven-three-nine- nine) one-by-one, then put the phone to his ear. Holding the phone with both hands, and waited:

“Hello, Rhys Cameron at the Herald.” His father’s voice sounded flat and unfriendly over the line.

“Daddy!” He started to cry.

“Andre? What’s wrong?”

Andre wanted to tell him, but he couldn’t say anything. So he cried louder. “Daddy.”

“Andre, what’s going on, where’s your mother?”

“She’s gone,” he managed to say.

“She’s gone? What do you mean she’s gone?” His father’s voice sounded mad. What did he do wrong? Andre stopped crying so loud, but couldn’t stop himself from drawing in a loud, shuddery breath. There was a long silence over the phone. “Are you alone?”

“Uh huh.” Andre couldn’t see clearly in front of him, couldn’t see the room. “Don’t move. It’s going to be alright, I’ll be right home.” And as he hung up, Andre could hear his father’s angry mutter. He slammed the phone back on its set.

By the time his father unlocked the front door and opened it with a crash, Andre was hiding under his bed. Every once in a while he would sneeze. His mother had told him never to hide under the bed, because the dirty things down there would make him sick, but he didn’t care anymore. When would she come back for him?

He sniffed and rubbed his nose with his arm so that he’d stop sneezing, so that his father wouldn’t find him. Heavy sounds of shoes were coming down the hallway, closer and closer to his room. Andre held his breath. He saw the leather-shoed feet enter and pause by his bed. Don’t come down here, don’t come down here, he chanted silently, and squeezed his eyes shut.

He heard his father’s breath close to his ear and opened his eyes. His father was squatting down, looking at him with red eyes. “Hey, there,” he said. “You want to come out?”

Andre shook his head.

His father sighed and stood up. Andre closed his eyes again, because maybe his father would go away. “Shit, ” he heard him say. Suddenly, he felt something tugging hard on his feet, and he was brought abruptly back out into the sunshine of his room. “Ow!” he cried out loud. His back was scratched painfully hot by the rough carpet.

His father sat him up and put a big hand on his back. “Did I hurt you?” Something sounded vague, unfocused in his father’s voice, like he didn’t know what he was saying. Pushing Andre forward like a little doll, his father took a peek at his back. “Sorry.” And then he rubbed the back so that it hurt even more.

Andre kicked at his father’s knees and scuffled backwards on the seat of his underwear. “It hurts!” he said.

His father sat down, letting his big right leg fall on the carpet. His left arm, buttoned into the business shirt, rested heavily on his knee, and the hand flopped down. “So she left,” he said. He put his other hand over his eyes. He was breathing deep and hard.

Andre nodded.

“Where did she go?”

“She…changed.”

“What?”

“She put on her feathers and changed.”

His father looked up, and his face was suddenly frightening.

“I couldn’t stop her!” said Andre. “I tried!” And he put his forehead between his two dirty, red knees. The skin on his back hurt. His nose hurt. He was going to cry.

“She left…she left from the attic, didn’t she.” Andre peeked out at his father through his watery eyes. “I didn’t think she’d actually do it. It’s not your fault.” His father pulled him roughly by the arms into a hug. Andre’s legs were trapped under him uncomfortably. He rubbed his face against the stripes of the business shirt.

“Why’d she leave?”

“I don’t know, Andre.” Andre heard the words rumble through his father’s chest. He was holding him too hard. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” Andre allowed himself to be stood up, and held his father’s hand all the way to the bathroom.

His father let go of his hand to turn on the hot water. Andre had never been washed by his father before. Probably his father knew how. Andre ventured a smile, and took off his underpants to get ready for the bath.

But his father was sitting on the toilet, holding his head in his hands and shaking. A strange sound was coming from the low part in his throat. Was his father changing, too?

“Daddy…don’t cry.”

“Not now, Andre.” His voice was ragged, ugly. “Just give Daddy a moment, ok?”

Andre shifted around a little bit. He needed to use the toilet. “Mommy’s coming back, right?”

“No!” The word tore out of his father’s throat, and his head emerged from his hands, the eyes red and raw. “She’s never coming back, don’t you understand?”

“She said she’s coming back for me,” yelled Andre. “That’s what she said!”

“You fucking don’t understand, kid. She’s not your mother any more. She’s a crane. She’s a crane for good and she’s not coming back this time.”

Tears were coming fast down Andre’s cheeks. “She’s not a crane.” It sounded like a dirty word to him. “She’s mine.”

“Fuck.”

There was nothing else to say. The water was running hot, steaming up the room around them. The mirror was completely misted up, so that Andre couldn’t see his own face. But after a while, he must have stopped crying. Because he woke up when his father picked him up by the armpits and splashed him into the bathtub before he had time to kick his way out of it. The water was warm. His father had rolled the sleeves of the business shirt up around his elbows, and was wetting a sponge. He squeezed it slowly over Andre’s head, so that the water ran down in dribbles, and the tight, dried feeling of tears on his face was washed away in stripes. His father wiped his face swab by swab with the sponge, cleaning away the dirty things. The dirty words.

His father was good at giving baths, after all.