About the Writer
About the Painter
Time Line
Constellation I
Constellation II
Constellation III
Constellation IV
By way of an Afterword
Appendix of Rima Staines’ Paintings
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Dedication
Copyright
SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT was born in San Francisco in 1989 and grew up reading and writing about old magics at the base of Mount Tamalpais. Her short story collection, The Gray Fox Epistles, won the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Literary Foundation in 2014. She has published two books about the wildlife and history of the San Francisco Bay Area and writes a regular column about land and myth for EarthLines magazine. Tatterdemalion is her first novel.
RIMA STAINES was born in London in 1979 to a family of artists. Her book illustration work includes The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes; Baba Yaga by Sibelan Forrester et al.; Catherynne M. Valente’s Ventriloquism; and Sometimes a Wild God by her partner, Tom Hirons. Her paintings have been exhibited in the UK, France and the USA. Rima and Tom live with their young son in Hedgespoken, a travelling storytelling theatre.
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Before — PRESENT TO 2025 CE
(Rose, The Holy Beggars)
The Fall — 2025–2043 CE
(Margaret)
The Camps — 2044–2198 CE
(Wheel, Martin)
The Fool’s Revolt — 2198 CE
(Wheel, Iris, Ffion, Martin)
The Wild Folk — 2198–2315 CE
(Anja, Bells, Perches & Boots, Molly, Poppy)
EVEN THE RAVENS STOPPED THE GLOSS OF THEIR CROAKING CALLS UP over the fir trees when the boy Poppy began to speak aloud. He read words from a book made of gray leather. The book was held in the hands of the wheeled creature called Lyoobov. On her great arched back, taller than any horse, sat a barn owl who listened with round yellow eyes.
Before, watching from the needled bows and last scraps of telephone wires, the ravens had known Poppy as the boy, quick and orange-haired, who could speak in their velvet tones, who looked like a person but had the blood of a wild thing nursed on fir sap, on brush rabbit livers and black walnuts. They had known him as that fiery streak of loneliness, cawing and whistling and hissing as he went, no human word in him, wanting to touch every last thing he saw, even their own black feathers, which they once, in a startle of pity, let him do. They had known him as the little person with the shiny battered coffeepot, always polished, that he had found half-buried in sand on the beach and kept with him always, for brewing up dirt and thimbleberries, yerba buena leaves, the poppies of his name, over small fires. He poured his concoctions into acorn caps or buckeye shells and fed them to passing creatures—harvest mice, foxes, snakes, warblers. Always, whatever he poured in turned into the thing most needed—grass seeds, blood, mosquito-hawk legs.
Now, he made his voice human as he read from the pages of that big book. The ravens gathered overhead as below the people from the hamlet called Nettleburn crowded close. They all kept the distance, still, that you would from a bonfire, as if Lyoobov or Poppy were coals. Even so, old men with braids in their white beards, with missing fingers and battered vests that still held a little of their original red, reached toward Lyoobov like she would warm them. Lyoobov was supposed to be only a story, dead for three hundred years. They were weeping.
Molly, the mother of Poppy, stood in her husband’s arms with tears all over her own cheeks that had joy and also grief in them. Joy because her Poppy had been gone three years and she had been sure he was dead. He’d left on a July afternoon during his fourteenth year with a bag full of rosemary cakes, the battered old coffeepot he took everywhere, and a little green marble in his hand, heading toward the creek where he always went to watch for newts. He hadn’t returned. Joy because she had never before heard him speak a word in any human tongue. Grief because he leaned into Lyoobov’s chest like he had found a home, because he spoke now, when he had never spoken at her urging. This, she knew, was his real mother, this strange and wheeled beast they all had thought belonged only to the myths of a distant Fall. Lyoobov was luminous as any planet, and Molly’s boy swooned, at home in that orbit.
Poppy’s voice as he read was strong and only a little accented, not with the lilt of another version of English or Spanish, no, but rather with the languages of streams moving, of ravens chortling and mountain lions purring to their kittens. Every so often a choke or a yip or hiss entered his speaking, and the people gathering, and gathering found that they could not look away. Nor did they want to look away from that boy and that big wheeling beast. His odd voice echoed outward as he leaned back into the glowing Lyoobov, who seemed to be lantern-lit from within.
Poppy read only in the strictest sense of the word. It was as if, the old men whispered to the old women as they lit up pipes of cured tobacco and brought out candied hazelnuts saved for years for some outstanding occasion, it was as if he only had a voice when he put his eyes upon the book in Lyoobov’s hands. Otherwise his words would have been all towhee-speak. There on those pages the words formed and gathered. Those pages were his mind, his soul, they whispered, and Lyoobov his translator. And really they weren’t pages at all, but bark-bound sheaves of a body scratched with bird tracks and woodpecker holes.
I’VE A FOX-SWALLOWED HEART I DO. IT WAS MADE UNDERGROUND, you see, in the ribs of Lyoobov, who has known gunfire but has regrown like any wise plant will do from her waiting roots. The only difference is that this Lyoobov came back as a female, not a male, like plants that have both the ovum and the pollen. Red alder trees for example. She found that was easiest. She found it was necessary, this time, to be a she instead of a he. A mama-beast, not a papa-beast.
Of course you want to know that story of resurrection, but I’m not much of an alchemist. I know nothing of the metaphysical. I know only that I walked because I was looking for newts but I found no newts in the creek, so I walked further, and further, and I seemed to have some fire in my soles so I kept going. It was like following a red string or the path of a doe and all of her arrowed hoofprint. I walked and ate rosemary cakes from my mother. The stellar’s jays cackled, flaunting their black combs and spreading flashes of indigo with their wings in the oaks. I poured them perfect worms from my coffeepot and they quieted down. They even left me a handful of blue feathers, which I put in my hair.
My need to keep on walking was like what you’re filled with when you meet a pretty girl and something about her is a whole hillside of purple lupines in your blood and you can’t do anything except hold her in your mind’s hands and follow wherever she goes. I know you think because I never could speak to you your way that I was simple or dumb or made in the wrong body with longings only for coyote-girls or something, but you are all mistaken. I have loved quietly like any boy. Annabelle, yes, I see you there turning pink because you remember how I watched you through the window of your father’s place where he fixed up all our shoes with tree resin and old rubber from the beach, string from the guts of rats. It was like that, the feeling as I walked for days—that kind of longing, that need for wholeness. I barely ate besides the rosemary cakes and new huckleberries in the woods, tart ones that made my tongue dry.
At the end of my walking, Lyoobov and I just found each other, in the middle of a field made all of tar broken in fissures and veins by a thousand thick dandelions and milk thistles and clusters of fennel. It was like Lyoobov had been there all along, my whole life singing my small name, Poppy, Poppy, to the wind in thousands and thousands of small seeds.
We are parts of the same thing, she and I. I am hers and she is mine. Lyoobov is not the same as before, not quite, because her bones came apart and then reassembled and she had to grow ligaments, veins, skin, which the broad-footed moles helped with.
She told me that all the barn owls gathered blood from their prey in their beaks until there was enough to fill her whole body. Her heart grew from iris tubers, from a thousand million lacey pieces of mycelium knitting and knitting at all the last red thimbleberries and freshly dead fox hearts of that great meadow where she was buried as a he hundreds of years ago by the woman named Margaret who had watched him die. Before, Lyoobov was the map through the World as They Knew It and Out the Other Side, and he was a boy, like me. Now, Lyoobov, she is a Maker, that’s what she says, and so she is a girl.
Listen: I rode on the back of Lyoobov all the way east up the big mountains to where the snow starts and the sun rises and the clouds drop everything and the waters flow down.
Listen: I can tell you what happened to Anja, whose name you are always murmuring. Anja protect my child, Anja bless this bread, Anja heal this wound. I can tell you her story. We are carrying it, me in my little chest-country, Lyoobov in the great chamber of her abdomen which I have slept in through a small trapdoor beneath her.
But listen: all stories are hitched to a hundred others like spokes on wheels. We told stories, catching up, dreaming of bright lines through the sky that hitched us to each other, that splintered and shone through our identical bones. We are carrying voices from Before. All the threads that made Lyoobov, that made Anja, that made me.
It’s all candle-lit and red inside of Lyoobov, and she has been keeping these Stories safe too beside the heating hearth of her heart, where my coffeepot rests, near to boiling, ready to pour. You’d never believe it, what my pot brews on the hearth of Lyoobov’s heart.
You are whispering loud, you are coming closer. Yes, I do mean Anja born of the buckeye whose mother was Wheel. Yes, like Bells, Perches and Boots have told it, kestrel-watched, cowbell-clanged, sole-trod. I don’t know how to tell a thing like they do. I only know how to say it all fox-swallowed and then spat up again with fur and bones on these pages which are and are not like new white milkmaid flowers perpetually blossoming and then dropping their petals all over our feet, growing with their roots right in Lyoobov’s ribcage, where I was, after all, born.
I will tell it all to you, the life of Anja. But I will have to tell you from the beginning, Before the Fall.
First, I will tell you how we came to know any of this at all.
It started out that we were just rolling along the broken highways of the Valley that stretches forever and ever, out to squares with overgrown orchards of fruit trees dry and dead. The Valley is scattered with empty canals, silt and crabgrass thrusting up everywhere. We picked fruit at first, until the orchards grew crippled, twisted, like they’d been poisoned.
Lyoobov crooned to me each morning that it was time to go East, toward the sunrise and the place where the snow all gathers up those granite peaks. That’s where it all Began, she said to me, in her way. That’s where she had first been dreamed into being four centuries ago, cold in the foothills in the snow, under the sky full of the smog that drifted and stayed from a City to the west.
Lyoobov trundled on, murmuring about ice up in the mountains, and I followed, teaching myself to juggle shriveled almonds and peaches from the trees at the western edge of the Valley, boiling them up later in my coffeepot and pouring out vials of some elixir for the two of us, nothing transformed—just the hot syrup of peach and ground up almond.
One morning, we found an orchard empty of leaves or fruits, and wandered between the endless trunks of the almond trees, horrified, wondering at this desolation. There, we met a woman.
That’s when it truly began.
From far away, coming through the trunks, she looked like a girl my age, tanned as a nut, tangled bun of hair, long moving skirts of tawny fabric stained and frayed but so ample it was hard to tell exactly where they ended. Close up, her face was lined a thousand ways like the little feet of songbirds. She greeted us with a hand raised. She smiled at me specifically, brilliantly, so that her whole face moved. To Lyoobov she nodded, a low nod almost like a bow, and she said:
“You’re up and lurching around already, that’s a good start.” She reached a hand to lift her skirt to her ankles and I saw a sea of sparrow, junco, finch, wrentit and kinglet feet around her own feet, pecking at a ground as vast as the whole Valley. She grabbed one, a yellow goldfinch, snapped its neck and split it open with a single long fingernail.
“Here is a map of the way up the mountains. You knew already, didn’t you Lyoobov, that somebody’s been calling, hard to say who, somebody’s been dreaming and time to go back, like a blue thread on a needle stitching a single blue stitch up there and leaving the line between so that the place the water comes from and the place it goes are one, not a clogged artery all laced up with sorrow.”
“Iris from the stories!” I said, and it came out a garble of these words from Lyoobov’s book and the speaking of songbirds. My head went light with the feeling of it, of human words coming from my tongue, all sharp and tender at the same time. I reached out my hands to cradle that little goldfinch, the color of poppy pollen and the dark shade of night, still warm, still with a cheep in his beak, a word of comfort, a word of satisfaction at a small worm. Inside his opened abdomen, ribs as fine as plant stalks, I saw the sharp granite and snow and blue riverbeds of the mountains called the Sierra Nevada, looming to the east. The ones we’d already been moving toward. I saw the whole mountain range in there and I also saw a fine tracery of paths, magnified. The amount of detail that yellow-feathered body contained made my head spin.
Iris grinned at me like a girl and it made her face complicated, an old woman’s rivuleted topography of skin.
“Mmm,” she said. “I have been called that.” A wink. “Follow the blue creeks. I think you’ll get to the right place eventually, between the two of you.” She pulled several dried up bird organs the size of fingernails from a pocket and ate them like berries. “And you,” she said, touching my red hair, “listen well.”
After she left I wished I’d offered her a draught from my coffeepot; I wanted to know what would have poured out. What it was she needed most. Perhaps it was best I didn’t.
The dead almond trees and the patches of crabgrass turned to broken tar, the ghost-bones of suburban houses, and dust, as we went further East over that Valley. Dust and fallow fields with stumps of old life across them, little husks and withered root balls. Poisoned, I whispered to Lyoobov and she whispered to me, and below our feet we could feel the sorrows of buried rivers, long ago dammed and dug under in tunnels of cement. By the time we rolled into the dry juniper scrub foothills, me sitting up on Lyoobov’s broad back with the blossomed book of her bones in my hands, learning and learning its sounds, the sounds of my boy’s voice as a thing separate from a raven’s, a frog’s, a streambed’s.
Lyoobov always made the fire. It was an extraordinary thing to watch her gray leathery hands, her nimble wheeled bulk, her short trunk and her tail and her big dark eyes like cut out moons with tapered edges—all of her went into the making of a blaze. It was like she was giving birth to it, stick by gathered stick, tented into perfect forms that allowed the air and the flames to twine and crackle and sear. Afterward, she ate the embers, one by one, savoring.
Every night I held out that dissected goldfinch for us to peer inside of. It never seemed to decompose, only remained a just-dead yellow form, neck broken, changed from a body to a map. We followed the blue lines like veins in the mountain range of her ribcage, not because we had any idea what we would find, but because it felt like the only thing in the world to do. It felt like following sustenance; like this was the only way to be fed, though we ate haphazardly—quail and lizards, roots, almonds stored in Lyoobov’s carriage-sized middle. I slept there nightly, the embers she had eaten warming her body, part wagon, part beast she is, a place all made for dreaming in.
It may have been a year, a year and a half, it took us to get there. I cannot say. We rolled, we dreamed, through that wasteland of dust, up the mountain. We changed and we also stayed much as we always had been.
When the air got thin in my lungs and dry, and Lyoobov had to slow her wheeling between the cream and pollen colors of the granite, the tall straight pines redolent of some burnt sweetness, I smelled the fires of other people. It had been a long time since I had smelled the fires of other people. I saw places on the ground smudged with footprints made by wide thick soles. I saw the tracks of deer too, a black bear, all mixed in, a great shifting pattern, and I grew uneasy. So many animal tracks. We have creatures here, near Nettleburn, but they are very shy. They hide from us. Well, from you, not from me. They still do not trust you. Here, there were tracks everywhere, even ones like a mountain lion makes.
Up on the top of the next ridge, I saw a tall metal set of poles and bars, a black square with a little box on top with windows, and two sets of cables heading down toward us, then trailing off into the stones and grasses. The box on top was grown everywhere with a fringe of grass and columbine flowers, all scarlet and orange. I saw a face in the broken window, a young woman’s, hair in a coiled black mat on top of her head, skin like the darkness of the soil where my mother pulled me out. A bird flashed out the broken window, a jay, calling the way they do to warn of bobcats sneaking in the underbrush. The woman climbed fast as any red-furred squirrel, down a dark pole, and came toward us. I leaned into Lyoobov’s shoulder and she rustled her trunked nose against my hair, breathing out a warm breath that smelled of earth and firelight and comfort.
I held out the opened body of the goldfinch as the woman came to stand before us, weeping tears that moved blue against her dark cheeks, at the sight of Lyoobov.
“You’ve found us,” she said. “Nobody finds us but the ones we want. Which has been nobody, no, not anybody but you.” She said this to Lyoobov, touching her trunk. Her hair, close up, was a dense forest, felted like wool is felted, rope after rope and twined with green lace lichen, teeth of tiny bear cubs, a red plastic string from some far away kitchen. Such things hold their color almost forever.
“We don’t know what we’re here for,” said Lyoobov, said I, through the petaled pages of her book. The woman smiled. She took the goldfinch in her hands and tucked it deep into the folds of her hair.
“Come along,” she said.
Lyoobov rolled, the crunching of granite dust, and I walked, leaning into her because I knew that she knew how to be brave among strangers. Her leathery skin smelled of honey and dust after rain. It soothed me. We followed the woman who introduced herself as Sare. I watched the dirt and found that when she walked she did not leave the footprints of a woman, but rather those of a small bear. The red plastic cord in her hair glinted like a line of blood. I still couldn’t tell you if the feeling in me, in my chest, under my ribs, was fear or joy.
Moving all dark as bearfur and smooth as honey from wild hives, Sare took us higher and over a ridge of granite. It was like a big torn-up spine, ancient and bare to the sharp blue sky. When we crossed it, I felt the way your ears do slipping into a lake: dark green and deep, newts showing you their orange bellies all around like moving candleflames. My head felt thick. The trees became twisted around us, wind-made, thin, wending between smooth granite once licked by the great tongues of glaciers. Shadows moved across the stone ground in whorls like birds were passing in front of the sun, but it was only those curved trees, silver-barked, resinous.
Suddenly there were small circular structures through the trees made of bone. A man wearing a marmot-fur hat hung strips of fish to smoke over a fire. I thought this was a village of Wild Folk, not people at all, living not just bear-women alone but all mixed. Even the trees—lodgepole, white pine, juniper—they seemed to look out from their bark. I watched for slender men to unfurl from their trunks but none did. I didn’t feel afraid because they are more like me than you are—the woodrat women out in the scrub who have every last fallen coin (pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters), the small robin men in woodlands who ask that you sing up the worms. I know them though you are afraid and run after you leave them the requisite eggs, buttons, scraps of dream.
Each hut, I saw, was made all of one kind of bone—entirely crow, entirely deer, entirely weasel. The structures were pale as snow.
When the people there saw us arrive, the day became all at once a flood of feasting, a flood of those people who kept murmuring the name Anja, and quieter, Lyoobov.
“No one here from down there across the Valley to the Bay, not since Anja, Anja and her man. Anja, Anja.”
It became a chant into the smoke of a dozen juniper-wood fires where a deer was roasted, and lily bulbs, and wild onions, and these people, they all gathered, dressed in soft wools and soft skins. They were only people, not Wild Folk, I saw: the way their eyes rested gently on me, on Lyoobov, taking us in the way people take in other people, which is very different than a raccoon or a woman with egret wings and egret legs, who read you for the layers of you under your skin.
They knew to feed Lyoobov hot embers, glowing as if they were apricots on fire; they knew that this was her favorite food, that she would smoke through her ears and the shape of those tendrils would rise up in the form of lost alphabets, which curved and moved like vines, hoofprint, the branches of trees. Those tendrils made me wonder if maybe all words, all languages, like the ones I know best from the teeth of the moles and the fir boughs, have been absorbed back into the dirt or the plum pits or the bellies of mountain lions, but are not all the way gone.
At one point in the evening, as someone passed around thimbleberry mead and the fires moved hotly with the shapes of wild mustangs and condors, Sare touched my shoulder and she said, “Your bird, your little goldfinch map, yellow as a lemon, she has the seed of Anja in her liver.” Between her thumb and forefinger she held up a small red bead. It matched the plastic red string in her hair.
“I don’t know much about Anja. I didn’t really listen to human stories, when I was small,” I said to her, but I said it the way black bears speak, which I learned from the beehives that remembered the cadence of those dark muzzles that once came romping down through the woods. She paused. A red flush moved through her cheeks the color of earth. She fidgeted her fingers on the bead, looked to see if anyone had heard—looked at the man who had been smoking fish when we arrived, her father.
“No, but you will, and more besides. You’ll get to know her very roots,” she replied in human words. Then added, bear-touched but soft as a whisper: “there’s an old Juniper, said she told her story to it like a person to another person. Under the bark. I’ll bet you can get the words out. I think she told it for someone of your kind to come and to hear.” She handed me the red bead, and then a tiny bear claw from her hair.
I went alone. Nobody noticed me going. I had just my silver coffeepot hitched on a string over my back, like always. Lyoobov stayed, eating the embers one by one, letting smoke spell poems into the night from her coiled trunk, her ears. She let the women come and rub her gray skin with the oils of pine nuts and wildflower essences. The shadows from the fire leapt onto the wind-shaped pines. I held that red seed and I walked through the dark, feeling ahead with my feet.
It wasn’t hard to find the tree Sare meant because it was ancient and its trunk silver as all the stars, as time. The hard blue-dusted berries were thick, everywhere, a thousand blue earths. I picked up handfuls and stuck them through the top of my coffeepot. The whole tree in my ears thundered like a fast heart. It creaked in the wind. It wanted me near, under the rounded spires of branch, up to the trunk, my body a warmth to keep company through the night. I set the red bead into a crease of the trunk. I smelled the bark. I found that to the left of my feet, in the shadows, was a darker shadow, like a hole. I crawled to see and it was just as wide as my shoulders, gaping, darker than any night can be dark. I went in because Sare told me that I would be able to hear the stories and bring them back.
I’ve wanted, I’ve always wanted, to do one single thing you all approved of.
The bear tooth Sare gave me glowed. I saw the inside of that Juniper. Time had carved waterways of lines, the color soft as firelight or amber. The patterns of stars seemed to be glinting wherever I looked in that hollow of bark, which went deep down below in root tunnels, and up further than that glowing tooth could shed light. That’s when the voice started. It unpeeled from the layers of bark and echoed. It was, and was not, human. It was juniper berry blue in my mind where I held it as it spoke, in my hands where I felt it, dusty, weathered. Steeped and smoked with the centuries of Juniper growing, Juniper seeking water, Juniper breathing and releasing the thin air. It was her, the tree, whispering.
“Little child,” came that voice, and a smell of soft smoke. “Little child. You are only a little child.” All along the inner bark, stars gleamed, in familiar and unfamiliar constellations, from the old stories which I had never before understood—the one in the shape of a wheel which we call Wheel, after the long ago Fool; the one like an owl, for Margaret, with a bell in its claws; the one like a fiddle, for Rose; the tiny cluster, for the Holy Beggars. And more, gleaming and shifting all around me, ones I couldn’t name. I felt I might have clambered into the beginning of a world.
“I’m Poppy,” I said, deep inside the tree now, in a ruckled chamber whorled with bark. “I am little, it’s true.”
“You have come to learn the true story of Anja.” This time, the voice was nearer, and I turned. In the shadows, on the walls of her trunk, was a woman. She was all hunched up, rounded like the blue berries I’d stuffed into my silver coffeepot. Then she seemed to peel right off the wall, a dark shade. She came and she sat opposite me. In the glow of the juniper bark around us, I saw an ancient little lady with a dozen spindly arms lined as juniper branches, with a spiking mass of hair like spired juniper needles. White hairs grew on her chin. Her eyes were all patched with cataracts, but she had a good set of teeth. I noticed this, I don’t know why, maybe because they flashed.
“Yes,” I stammered.
“But do you even know your own?”
“Well enough,” I replied, staring into my coffeepot because her eyes were too strange, and milky. “My mother found me in the earth, only really I am part of Lyoobov, and Lyoobov is part of me—”
“But who is Lyoobov, and how, and why?”
“Lyoobov was born out of the dream of Rose, a long time ago, Before the Fall. But what have I got to do with Anja?”
“You were there at the beginning, because Lyoobov was there. You are here now, at the end. But what about the middle, little child, little Poppy, little heart? How can you ask for Anja, without everything that came before? How can you know a whole world, without every tattered thread?”
The silvery bark of the juniper’s inner trunk was shifting, the stars scattered there wheeling, like they might across a whole night, not a single moment. I had no words at all.
“Did you know that some stars are only memories of light, already dead? Like the voices of people, echoing long after they are gone?”
There were figures coalescing against the bark, the way the Juniper-woman’s had, ghosts that one by one peeled away, edged in stars. Rose. The Holy Beggars. St. Margaret, with owl wings. Wheel. Martin. Ffion.
“When you hear a story, little child, it has been folded and unfolded a hundred times in the mouths of its tellers. But the truest stories come right from the source.”
The starry ghosts gathered, and waited, glinting.
One by one, they told their tales, just pieces of them, the way people do. You don’t remember your whole life all at once. If someone asks you to tell a story, it turns around a central point, a moment or a day or a loss. I sat, and listened, and into my coffeepot, beside the juniper berries, fell the voices of stars, which were also ghosts, and long ago, people.
THEY ALWAYS SAID THE GIRL WAS AS MAD AS BIRDS WHEN SHE CAME into town for a cup of coffee, a sack of licorice chews. They said you could hear her talking under her breath, and when you stood close, it wasn’t a human sound at all, but a broken, high chirping. No one knew where she lived, if it was up the hill and past the place where the asphalt streets and the houses stopped, into the scrub and the forest: lupine, madrone, oak. Now and then a woman slipping her shoes on at the front porch saw the girl come down from the mountain fire-road at dawn, oak leaves in her hair. At school, the children whispered that she lived underground, in the roots of trees, or maybe under their parents’ cars, in the dark small places that couldn’t be seen. The boutique owners busily swept their doorsteps when she passed by in the same linen dress, the same long-sleeved undershirt, day after day. Her dress always dragged its wide hem and collected dirt. The owner of the kitchen-supply store complained that she left a highway of birdshit on the sidewalk in her wake, because all the downtown pigeons, all the little blackbirds, they liked to fly after her and land on her shoulders or in her hair. There was only one man at the coffeeshop who would let her in and serve her a cup. He worked on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so that’s when she came, making sing-song cheeps under her breath. His family had come from another place, and his skin was not the same color as everyone else’s, so he knew, he whispered to her over the cash register, handing her change, what it was like to not be allowed to belong.
I was the only one who knew her secret, because I was the only one who smiled and watched her without feeling afraid, without feeling tight in my stomach and stiff in my neck. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to see more clearly, to see the things that have been there all along. Often, this is the province of children, before they’ve learned to believe that people have souls and birds do not.
I knew that she had birds under her long skirt. The kind that feed on the ground: towhees, dark-headed juncos, chickadees, sparrows. The humble birds, all simple feathered browns and blacks, the kinds everyone forgets. They bustled along with her everywhere, held in the dark shadow of her dress, chittering and feeding on street crumbs and the bits of rosehip or blackberry she now and then dropped from her fingers. That’s who she talked to in high chirrups. The edges of her dress moved with their small, feathered forms, so many of them around her that I imagined an impossibly ample space in the dark shadow of her skirt: scrub and nest and forest, all there in the darkness of her legs.
They weren’t pretty birds. Maybe that’s why no one noticed them: no one looked long enough to see them. They were battered—a towhee with a nick in her wing, a junco with a crooked beak, a white crowned sparrow with a missing foot. They were shabby, like her—tousled and threadbare and worn in. That’s why I followed her home one Thursday afternoon. I snuck right out of the schoolyard at recess. I wasn’t afraid. It was a gentle shabbiness, and she didn’t look that much older than me, even though she was threadbare. That day, I was eleven. I still liked to build mud-dams across the creek, with sticks for towers and ivy leaves for flags. The other girls sat in the corner together and laughed about bras.
I followed her up the path with brick steps that led out of downtown. It wound between houses, straight up hill, one of the old lanes built when a train came through, and people who lived high up the mountain needed a quick path to dash down in the morning and not be late. Ahead of me, I could see dozens of tiny bird feet next to her bare ones. A hum of chips and cheeps came from her skirt, a relaxed sound, as they fed on small seeds and bugs in the dirt. She kept walking, up and up, taking the narrow roads—Rose, Edgemont, Tenderfoot—until we reached the dusty mountain fire-trail called Old Railroad Grade. She walked at an even pace and sipped from her paper coffee cup. She never looked back at me, but the birds under her skirt did, so she must have known I was there the whole time, not just at the end, when she stood at a junction, and I crept behind a sawed-down Douglas fir log, and she said,
“You know they are very sensitive. The whole world passes through them each time they sing.” Her voice sounded like my grandmother’s, as cracked and soft as sturdy shoes. “Inside a towhee’s body is the whole town, the whole mountain, tiny and veined. Would you like to see?”