wizard-of-the-pigeons

napkin. He hurried from the yard before Red could notice the theft of the
tailfeathers. He’d have to hurry; it was going to rain soon. He crossed the
pasture, avoiding the moist brown cow flops, slipped through a barbed wire
fence, crossed a survey cut, and fled into the woods. He followed a rabbit trail
that wound beneath the trees until he came to a stand of spruce trees. Dropping
to his knees, he crawled under the low swoop of outer branches until he came to
a place in the center of the thicket. He could see the sky, and a tiny patch of
sunlight reached the ground.
This was his best place, his sitting and thinking place. He used a stick to
brush away a year’s layer of spruce needles. He dug down into the rich humus,
the ripe smell of summer earth rising past him. He dug until he could thrust his
entire hand and wrist into the hole. That was deep enough. He took the head
from his pocket and unwrapped it to look a last time into the golden-orange eyes.
But death had spoiled their color; he could not bring himself to try and close the
lids. Instead he rewrapped it carefully in the paper napkin and placed it in the
bottom of the hole. He buried it, squishing the earth down firmly with a clenched
fist. When the hole was packed full, he sprinkled a layer of spruce needles across
the scar. The tail feathers he stuck up in a small circle around the tiny grave.
They kept falling over, but he patiently stood them up again and again, until the
circle was complete. He never spoke as he did it; he made no sound at all. He
bowed his head gravely to the circle of feathers and backed out of the grove, the
trailing branches scratching his back and neck. He never went there again.
Red got in trouble. The school suspended him for three days after it became
known that he had wrapped a chicken head in tinfoil and slipped it into a girl’s
lunch bag. His father claimed the chicken feathers for tying flies, and his mother
bleached the blood stains out of his sneakers. His whole weekend at the farm,
flushed! He wished he lived on the farm and killed chickens every day. He
imagined setting their heads up on a little row of stakes by the driveway, or
giving foil-wrapped chicken heads to trick-or-treaters, or stringing heads and feet
on thread and trimming the Christmas tree with them. Some kids had all the
luck.
You were one of them. Mir insisted. Which one were you?
Wizard would not answer. He would not wonder if it were true. He made
himself as hard and solid as a macadamia nut.
He made his soul so dense that it could not be compressed any further. He
huddled within, knowing that it could not hold him prisoner forever. A pang