Willy is making tiny berry tarts. He wants to bring them out on the Common, where Sturbridge's reenactment freaks will be observing First Night.

I'm rinsing bowls before placing them in the dishwasher, tears streaming, at the outside limit of silent crying. One more degree of cry and I'll be sobbing.

Willy abandons the rolled-out crusts to rub my neck. It makes rinsing more difficult. When he's done, I say, "Thank you," in the same tone of voice one might use to say, "You’re stepping on my foot."

Willy wants to celebrate, but I am wrecked, still. It's been eleven months since my mother died, and I am the worst wet noodle, barely functioning, joyless. A whole new year — that just hurts my heart. I keep waiting for a moment of epiphany, a smashing of the solid mass of this consuming loss into something that can maybe be absorbed, like nutrients, into my blood.

But it doesn't come. And I keep thinking about pigeons.

Willy has to wake early to work tomorrow. As one of the newer costumed interpreters in the reenactment village, he'll have to help tourists make new fence posts. He hoped to work the Write With A Quill Pen Exhibit, but as a part-time goatherd, he was deemed better suited for fence-post work. I need a break from Sturbridge's fake-past. I want my own past.

Back in that past, my mother and I drove in her new used car, and she told me about pigeons. "Your grandfather used to tell me that when people started driving cars, there was a problem with birds," she said. "Pigeons kept dying, there were dead birds everywhere, because they kept flying right into the cars."

I sank back into the familiar rhythm of her uneven driving: heavy acceleration, pause, acceleration.

"I never figured out how the birds all learned to fly higher," she said, still wondering. I was stumped, too. My mother and I were quiet for a long time, gently lurching down the highway.

"Hey Willy," I say. "Let's drive." I'm willing to go out—he deserves a break — but I can't face all those butter churners and blacksmiths and millers tonight.

We head west in silence.

"Look." He points out his window. A full moon, whiter than its normal creamy self, hangs low in the sky, as though it's just rising in the black night. A second later, the whole of the moon dissolves into a burst of white-light raindrops pouring down, but the moon's circle hangs there still, the after-glow of a brief, brilliant display of fire in the sky.

"That was spectacular," Willy says. "Emily, didn't you think?"

I try to nod yes, but it's hard. Everything is hard.

I think of those pigeons. I see their lifeless bodies, beaks smashed to the side. Piles of them alongside the roads. But time went on.

And then, one day, no more dead birds.

Audrey Glassman Vernick has published fiction for adult and children in commercial and literary magazines. She also published a book on netiquette.

She is currently at work on a novel-in-stories for adults and several picture book projects. Her children's book, Bark and Tim: A True Story of Friendship, co-written with her sister, is forthcoming from Overmountain Press in fall 2003. Audrey has one of each of the following: husband, son, daughter, dog, cat. Together, they live in a house near the ocean.

Copyright 2002 by Audrey Vernick

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