Migratory Animals Read Free

them in their bunk beds with hands on their shoulders and the word, “Come.”
    They went through the kitchen and out the side door, then circled to the front of the house, rounding the porch on tiptoes. The birds ignored them. Her sons, Jake and Ian, crouched in front of her in matching blue-and-white-striped monogrammed pajamas, gifts from Harry’s parents; Ian cast an occasional glimpse at his older brother, Jake, to confirm his feeling of wonder. That what he was seeing was real.
    Living on this ranch was part of Alyce’s most recent arts fellowship, and for the boys, everything was new and wonderful. “The leader’s named Roger,” whispered Jake definitively, pointing to a bird settled on a branch of the only tree actually inside the fenced yard. Ian nodded in agreement.
    â€œSic semper tyrannis!” Alyce said. The boys ignored her.
    Jake was wiry and pale like Alyce, but Ian would be different. He was square and squat, even for a three-year-old, and would grow to have the body of a wrestler, she thought. Alyce hoped that whateverelse happened in the years ahead, they would remember this moment and think of her less harshly.
    Standing in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, shivering, a hand self-consciously placed on each of her sons’ shoulders, Alyce took a deep, full breath in the way her ex-therapist had taught her, but it caught in her throat on the way out as she watched Harry emerge from the other side of the house. He wore a brown canvas jacket, carved walking stick in one hand, tongues sticking out of his unlaced hiking boots. When Alyce looked at her husband, she couldn’t make herself feel anger or grief or tenderness or trust.
    â€œEarly birds,” Harry whispered, standing above his family on the ledge of the porch. She wondered why he said it that way. There was no “up early” or “up late” for Alyce, just a ceaseless groan of semiconsciousness.
    â€œYou, too,” she said, noticing the stink of her own underarms, the greasy sheen of her unwashed hair as she pulled a hand through its tangles.
    â€œI wanted to hike before the heat. And then I saw . . . this,” he said, gesturing at the robins. “Look at them.” She could see it in his face, the way the muscles tensed: her husband had been just as hoodwinked as her sons, perceiving something spectral about the robins’ movements en masse, about the ways they formed complex patterns, designs the birds themselves could not have understood on more than an intuitive level.
    Alyce came from a family of birders, but she had never been interested in checking off species from a list or watching them gorge at backyard feeders. Rather, flight itself was the reason she’d majored in mechanical engineering in college, specializing in aeronautics, an unsophisticated science compared to how birds migrated long distances based on the earth’s magnetic field, big gliders using the thermalupdrafts created during the day, as the heat from the sun rose, and small powered fliers, like robins, preferring to migrate at night when the atmospheric boundary layer was still. Back and forth, back and forth. Just one more way to devour endless days.
    Alyce looked at her boys—all three hunkered down, staring out at the field, connected by a web of dumb, guileless awe. Jake and Ian flocked around Harry and each other, forming their own instinctive patterns of flight.
    Harry leaned into their sons and said, “We’ll have enough robin soup to last the entire winter.” The boys’ expressions turned first to horror before scrunching up in the way they did to show their suspicion of grown-ups.
    Jake turned and explained patiently to his younger brother that the robins were messengers of a magical army. “I’m going to ride one.”
    â€œWhat about me?!” cried Ian. The robins started, jumping slightly to the top of a dance beat, before bolting east in a rush of chirps