9781250816214

CAMEO
The moon melts in through the big bay windows of 1 Cedar Drive like
cold butter over hot bread. Nightingales and whip-poor-wills and
kingfishers tune up their throats as a gentle mist lifts from the street into the
summer night.
Sophia wakes. She fell asleep on the couch, too afraid to go up to that
massive bed where the shadows looked like long fingers reaching for her in
the moonlight. She looks down across the landscape of her drowsy body
and sees that a tiny grey field mouse has curled up in the arch of her naked
foot. Its round ears twitch with dreams of clover and owls.
Sophia stares. She does not leap away. It has the right to sleep in what
shelter it can find, poor thing.
“Go on,” she whispers, and moves her toes ever so little.
The field mouse opens its black eyes. It does not leap either. It watches
her. It leans warmly, possessively against her foot. It opens its mouth.
A shadow falls across Sophia’s belly in the shape of a curved knife. She
looks up unbreathing and she is not alone, not even so alone as a woman
with a mouse. A heron stands outside her window, a waterbird as tall as a
man, its fish-shredding beak pointed at her heart, the blue of its feathers
glowing like wet ink in the first drops of sunlight. It taps the glass with its
beak. Harder, harder, until it is not a tapping but a stabbing. A spiderweb of
broken glass pops open. The heron opens its mouth. A long hiss rises up
from its gullet.
Give it to me, rasps the heron. It is impossible, impossible, and yet the
eyes of the creature are the every-colored eyes of Mr. Semengelof. It speaks
with the voice of the music teacher. Pure song. Pure pity. Give it to me and I
will take it away forever.
Sophia’s muscles thicken with the rigor of horror. She cannot move. She
cannot get away. She cannot understand. She tries to obey, but she is so
afraid.
Give it to me and I will take it not only from your house but from your
mind. It will not trouble you again. You will not even remember that it
troubled you at all.
The field mouse blinks its beautiful eyes. It’s okay, it whispers. It’s best
this way. You don’t deserve it.