Believing Cedric Read Free Page A

as if it were the incriminating evidence itself.
    She became taciturn, looking around at the other women. She felt old, boring, especially watching two of the newer teachers who could have been teenagers for all Agnes could discern. They were girlish, stylish, confident, using words they must have learned from their newly purchased televisions or those radio shows that she now switched off. Gee whiz. Neato. Swell. “This salad is just ideal , Erla.” They raised their hands every now and then to pat their hair into place, beehives and bouffant flips, providing glances down the short sleeves of their blouses, confirming that they took to shaving their armpits, wore bullet bras. Agnes noticed that even the older women looked more fresh and vernal than she remembered them being, every one of them disciples of Chatelaine Magazine no doubt, embracing its tips and secrets with devotion, with faith. Lipstick, bubble bath, blow dryers, Clairol, Noxzema, all of it, ensuring they resembled Marilyn Monroe as close as was womanly possible.
    The following week, she turned down their invitation, as she did every week afterwards, until they stopped asking. No, she had decided, the only place she felt at ease anymore was in her house and when she was alone. And she was fine with that. She would resolve herself to a life of domestic solitude, to rituals that avoided people, to mornings spent sitting on windowsills before class, thinking.
    And really, it was surprising the wonders that one could find while alone. Only last week Agnes had had an experience that could only be described as extraordinary. She’d been on her way back from some grocery shopping, and had decided, for the first time, to take a shortcut that skirted a marsh on the border of her neighbourhood. Along the way, she’d noticed some cattails jutting out of the marsh’s edge, most of them having gone to seed, their brown velvet splitting along a seam that seemed to bleed out with a type of downy cotton. She decided she wanted to touch one of them, or maybe even pick it, but as soon as she put down her grocery bags and walked into the reeds she found herself stepping onto a ground that was veiled and unnaturally soft, which had her rethinking the idea. She stopped, looked around. A few remnants of fall colours were standing out against the browns and greys of early winter, a yellow leaf caught in the sepia culms, a brush-dab of maroon, a fist of rust. There were also birds, she realized, twittering and chirring in the rushes in front of her, hidden. On a whim, she clapped, just once, never for a moment imagining that it would have the effect that it did.
    The entire marsh seemed to erupt, and the sky darkened with hundreds, maybe thousands, of small black birds. They formed a bleary cloud that spread and thinned itself one moment, then condensed and folded in on itself the next; but it was always whorled and synchronous, always acting as one. There was a point when the flock passed low over her head, and she was sure she felt the wind of their countless wings, and flinched beneath its tremolo, ducking low into the sedges. Then the flock collected and spiralled above the marsh that was farthest away from her and, rather abruptly, sunk into the reeds again, leaving the autumn air empty but for their sounds, now remote and muted.
    When she stepped out of the rushes several minutes later, stooping to collect her grocery bags, she was struck with a strange sensation, a thought. It occurred to her that there might be someone else, maybe even somewhere out there in Canada, who’d experienced exactly what she just had, who had stood in some rushes mesmerized and half-frightened by a swirling flock of blackbirds. And for some reason—she couldn’t even begin to say why—it was important that this person existed, that they were out there. She continued on, thinking of who they might be, imagining a younger woman, an older man, crouched in another