Four and Twenty Blackbirds Read Free

my head, aggravated because I couldn't make him understand. "I didn't hear it anywhere. I just know it. It's in my head."
    "But stories like that have to get into your head from somewhere. Where did you pick them up?"
    "Nowhere. I came that way. I was born with the story. It happened to me before I was born."
    He tapped the tips of his index fingers against each other, then reached for a pad of paper and a pen. "I've got an idea. Why don't you tell me the whole thing, then—from start to finish."
    "I don't know the whole thing," I sulked. He still didn't believe me.
    "Then tell me the parts you do know. I'd like to hear them."
    I closed my eyes and saw flashes, frames of action disconnected and surreal. A house like the one I'd sketched for Mrs. Patterson, surrounded by swirling green-black water. The slick jerking motion of an alligator sliding off a bank into a fetid pool of stagnant backwater.
    One.
    Two.
    Three women. Me in their arms, passed from one to another.
    "My mother and her two sisters," I said, eyes still shut.
    Mr. Schumann rifled through a folder before pausing to read something. I heard his asthmatic breath aimed down at the desk, blowing against his loose papers. He scratched his head with his pen. "Eden, it's my understanding that your mother died when she had you. I know you live with an aunt and uncle; is there another sister too?"
    "Yes, but that's not who I mean."
    "But you said—"
    I balled my hands into tight little fists, squeezing the story out like toothpaste from a tube. "Not my mother now . My mother then . When I was his prettiest one. It was a long time ago. Whole lives ago since he killed them."
    Mr. Schumann held still for a minute. He thumped his wrist down on the desk and used his scritchy little pen to jot notes across his pad of lined paper. "Who is this 'he' you mentioned?" he finally asked.
    I always saw the women so clearly, it seemed strange that I couldn't conjure his face. I felt his arms, broad and muscular when they picked me up to sit on his shoulders. I recalled the sweat and musk and tobacco smoke I smelled when I pressed my cheek against the crook of his neck. But these were only photographs.
    I needed a scene. I cracked my eyes open enough to peek over at Mr. Schumann's fidgeting hands. They fumbled, disassembling the pen into pieces and placing them in precise east-west alignment with a granite paperweight and a letter opener shaped like a sword. Such anxious hands. Not like my father's at all. Not like the long, dark fingers so lean and strong and always sure.
    My father's fingers held glass vials filled with funny liquids and powders, and he poured them one into another, another into a greater one, and another onto a small burner. One more bottle. Three drops of brown, smelly stuff on top of it all. When all was done simmering, he removed it from the heat with a padded glove and poured it into a Mason jar that might have otherwise held peach preserves.
    His sleek back stretched a damp undershirt to its breaking point. He was at a rough desk, reading something from a book beside the vials. He leaned his head backwards over the chair and gripped his hair with both hands. Tight black wool.
    He was frustrated, angry. Something was missing.
    "Papa?"
    "What are you doing in here? Get yourself away now."
    "But Papa, I wanted to know where—"
    "I said, get yourself away now."
    "Papa?"
    "Now!" He shouted it, rising out of the chair with enough force to throw it towards me. His elbow struck the book and knocked it fluttering to the floor. The pages flipped from beginning to end with a shuffling flap. Another flash: the shuffling of cards in my mother's hands before she laid them out in a cross-shaped pattern on a purple silk scarf. No. My father. His book.
    I was fascinated by the yellowed, dirty pages as they waved back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth until the thick cover clattered still. And before my father could whisk the book closed and throw it back