Lessons in Transmogrifications
“I think my brother came back as a crow,” I say to the young woman at the flea market stall. The pretty, quiet one with good skin who sits indifferently at a table full of bones and crystal balls. “He’s haunting me.”
She nods as if she has heard this one before. She probably has, this or some variation of it. After all, her booth, “Raven’s Requiem,” proclaims to be “Baltimore’s foremost purveyor of occult trinkets and treasures.” I trace the fraying edge of one of the tapestries that hang from the side of her table, wolves howling in vain at a yellowing moon.
“I’m not crazy,” I continue. “In fact, I’ve never been more lucid. Ever since his death, it’s like my senses are heightened. I notice things. I can hear things most people can’t. And see things too. It feels like I’m sitting up high, watching everyone else from above.”
“It started about the same time as the crow appeared. It’s always watching me. Every time I look up, I see it. It perches on the skylight of my bedroom. I wake up in the morning and it’s the first thing I see, looking down at me with its black, unreadable eyes. Staring at me, like it’s trying to send me a message. Or like he’s accusing me of something. And I keep thinking, if I could just get to him, you know, maybe I could figure out what he wants. We were close, once. And so I can’t shake this feeling that he’s come back. He came back for me.”
This is what happens with grief. You can’t stop talking about the dead, to practically anyone, anywhere you go. As if divulging such personal details will bring him back to life.
I try to will this woman into asking how he died. Most people do. Then I’ll say, matter of factly, that he swallowed poison. That he took a bottle from the factory where he worked, one of the many bottes of chemicals he used every day, and drove back to his apartment, stirred the crystalline powder into a tall glass of tap water, and drank it. Deliberately. I will say he killed himself. I will say all of this while looking her directly in the eye, as if without shame, although I am very much ashamed.
She does not ask.
“Sometimes he brings me things. Yesterday, I woke up to this terrible pounding sound. He was right there on my skylight, rapping at the glass with a watch in his beak. My brother used to collect antique watches. And guess what I found, later that afternoon, sitting in the grass in my front yard. The watch was badly cracked, but it was still ticking. He dropped it there. Intentionally. He wanted me to have it. That’s my brother for you.”
I shift my gaze to the neat little rows of Victorian apothecary bottles. Tinted glass. “My brother would’ve loved this stuff,” I tell the woman. And I know just what he would have said about them: “Built to stand the test of time.” He worked in plastics, but hated it. He manned the blow molder, the machine they use to make plastic bottles. He’d make thousands in one day. I can imagine him still, in his truck after work, muttering about all the waste. “Where does it all go?” he’d ask. Litter, it turns out. Straight into the Chesapeake.
I pick up an amber tincture vial. It’s so slight and beautiful. I wonder what it was used for in its day, what chemicals it has harbored. I view my distended reflection in the beveled glass. I see my brother staring back. He looks like he’s been crying.
I see my brother bring the glass to his lips. I watch him drink the misty white liquid inside. It is tasteless and empty. I watch him set the glass down gently and lay in his bed. He pulls the sheets up to his neck. It’s getting cold. The watch at his bedside keeps ticking. I look on as hours pass, as life leaves him and he dissolves into nothing.
I sift through a mass of coins housed in a faded cigar box beside the vials, pick out a few of the newer-looking ones. “Do you think I could lure him down somehow, maybe if I set out something shiny in my front lawn? Would that would work? I need to get to him. The noise he makes up there is awful. His talons on the glass at all hours. It wakes me up, and all I see are his insistent little eyes in the dark, watching me. Not telling me why.”
The woman takes the coins from me, gently placing them into a small brown paper bag. She folds down the edge, avoiding my gaze as she hands it over.
“Do you think it would work? If I could get him to come down, maybe it would be easier…If I could just get a little closer…”
***
I see my brother in a body bag. He is not quite human now. Still, this will forever be the point in time that I am closest to the old him, the living version of him. The medical examiner had wheeled the body out on a gurney, hoisted it into the back of a white, unmarked SUV. A final slam of the doors, and then all I could see was my own reflection in the tinted windows as they drove him away. As the next of kin, the police gave me the key to his apartment. It was the first time I had set foot in it, even though we lived in the same town. When I stepped inside, I saw the sign written in his methodical hand: “Caution: Body Upstairs. Do Not Resuscitate.” He had written this on a whiteboard and propped it on a chair at the base of the stairs. When I went up to the loft, I beheld the full extent of his plans. The typed-up note by the bedside table. A spilling box of anti-emetics, so he would not expel the poison he had ingested. The still-ticking watch. A tidy stack of unpaid utility bills. He did not leave hastily, he had planned his departure. For how many years? How many times did he look me in the eye and laugh and smile, full well knowing what he was going to do? How long had I been deceived? These were the thoughts that plagued me that afternoon, as I crawled into his bed. The sheets were rumpled but cold now. Laying my face on his pillow, I noticed a tinge of blood comingled with a smattering of downy black feathers. They were so fine, so foreign that the police must have missed them. That’s when I first suspected my brother was not who he seemed. He’d become something else.
***
I pick up a stick of incense from one of the tables, dozens of glassy eyes watching me. A placard advertises, “Tarot Readings: $5.00.” The young woman catches me looking. “Do you want to know your future?” I shake my head. I’m not crazy. I know what the future has in store for me. Not much.
“Or your past?” Something about the way she says “past” stops me cold, the hard slap of the t as it catches in her teeth. “I can see you have unanswered questions.”
As she takes my money, the light hits her face, and I am struck by her youthful complexion, the smooth features of her skin. When I see young people now, I am always judging them against my brother, who was still young when he died. And who will now be forever young, immortalized at thirty-five, having decisively ended his own timeline. Meanwhile, I’m left here to go on, grow older, watch the world crumble around me.
The woman pushes some bones aside and lays down three cards on the table. All swords. Now it’s her turn to look to me for an answer, to explain this sudden onslaught of violence. I refuse to.
The last time I saw my brother, in his embodied, human form, he had been dead for four days. In a small side room, off the main hall of the funeral parlor, they had laid him out. The mortician greeted me. She said, “I don’t know what they told you about the manner of his death. I did the best I could with the makeup.” I hated the way she said that, as if I’d be oblivious to the manner of my own brother’s death. I am a smart woman; I am not blind to the pain of others. We were close, once. I gritted my teeth and said nothing.
They had set him out on a raised table, with a blanket tucked tightly up to his waist, hands folded neatly across his chest. I noticed his fingernails were blotched black and blue. His eyes were glued closed, but he did not look at peace. The skin had a stretched-out appearance, like a thin veil had been draped over his bones. When I touched his arm, it was cold and rigid. He had been stuffed with something. It did not feel human. On his forearms, tiny black slivers poked out through his skin. I touched them. Inky little feathers. The white powder of the mortuary makeup came off on my fingers.
***
Of course, thinking back, I see now: he’d been turning into what he would become for many years before he died. His demeanor changed first. He would blame it on work, the constant ringing in his ears from the factory machines, or the new medications the doctors prescribed. I had no reason to doubt him back then. Still, when he withdrew, I did not bother to follow. Even though I knew that life was breaking his heart, I thought it was a temporary despair. I presumed he would learn to bear it as I had. So I brushed it off when he would say, as he often did towards the end, “If we only had lived in a different time!” He viewed our present world as a bomb waiting to detonate. The poles heating up. Mutating fish in factory-polluted rivers. Microplastics invading our very bodies. As a boy, he would pretend to build time machines. He wanted to live a hundred years ago. The past was safer because you knew what would happen next.
Not for me. The past is a dangerous assembly line of regret, one after another. Here a betrayal, there a stab in the back. Each a colossal failure to see what was coming. Now, all I see are dozens of alternate timelines: If I had answered that call. If I had arrived earlier. If I had said something before it was too late, said that I understood. If I had begged him to stay.
But instead I am stuck here, in this god-forsaken timeline, where my brother is dead, and I am alone, and the world is still the same ticking time bomb. Where I am forever haunted by his eyes, inscrutable in the dark.
***
The woman puts the cards away. A heavy gust of wind pulls at the wall of tapestries. Whatever she had foretold, I’d missed it.
“What’s the secret?” I ask her. “To keeping them so alive-looking?”
I point to the animals arranged on the edges of the tables. The real reason for my visit to this booth. A taxidermied squirrel with a cowboy hat, a checkered bandana, and a holster. A red fox perched delicately on a stump. A great horned owl, midflight, wings outstretched.
She looks at me from the dark wells of her eyes, a reproaching tilt of the head. Baiting me. What are you up to? But I will say nothing more. I will not reveal what I have planned. I understand now what my brother was trying to tell me. I must be careful. Life is a fragile, flying thing.
When I see that crow again, I will trap him. And once I have him, I will hold on to him, hold him still enough to cut a thin long line down the length of his breast. Then I will peel back the skin and scrape out the organs, the eyes, the leftover meat. Inject the talons with a chemical solution: 50% glycerin and 50% formaldehyde. Once he has dried out, I will stuff his insides with cotton balls and wire, sew him back up. With a mortician’s care, I’ll fold his wings neatly in repose. I will kill him to keep him with me. He will not get away again.
Brittany Micka-Foos is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have been published in the Ninth Letter, Hobart, Witness Magazine, Typehouse, Briar Cliff Review, and elsewhere.