fireun | The way of sisters

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday, the one I lost.

A few months ago I wrote her a story, and I want to share it here.

Happy birthday, sister mine.

“She used to stand out there and caw at the crows, you know.” Nana sat with me at the kitchen table, casually tapping me on the knees whenever my gangly legs felt the need to kick against the table legs, setting the hanging leaf a clanging. “She would be out there in the morning, early as anything, waking her father up, hollering at them.”

Ma had been a skinny girl, sticks for limbs and straw for hair. I had seen pictures on Nana’s wall, sitting on display in various corners of the house. I loved to imagine her out back, shouting back at the crows as they gathered and gossiped along the branches of the old butternut tree- her posture assertive, just this side of aggressive as she defended her home turf much like one crow family to another

Visiting Nana and Grandpa in the mountains meant visiting with all the stories that seemed so unreal as soon as we were back in the city- stories of a tricky Coyote, wily Raven, and a host of animals (or were they people?) that left me awake long into the night wondering. They were nights riddled with cricket song and the huffling snore of my sister in the cot beside my bed. The days were full of crows. Somehow such a common bird was so much more visible up there where there were more trees than people and the houses were spread so far apart. As my sister and I tussled like a pair of puppies in the front lawn over our favorite blue ball I could always hear the crows laughing right along with us.

I always felt the crows were laughing at me as they sat up in that old tree, talking to each other about things I did not know, could not know, and mocking me for my lack of knowledge. I would stand out there, waiting as Grandpa gathered butternuts for us to shell on the front porch, listening to the chuckles of crows. Maybe they knew I was the daughter of the brazen girl who used to get up each morning to join in their conversation.

But I was never brave enough to glare up at them, puff out my chest, and let out a harsh ‘caw’ of my own. Always afraid of messing it up, oddly concerned I would insult where I meant to praise the gleam of morning light on particularly well-preened feathers. In my own way, I was as odd a child as my mother- paying so much attention to the crows.

If I was an odd child, my sister was unfathomable. From her first tumble from the lowest branches of the butternut tree as she tried to climb up after the crows to the time she showed me the battered old cigar box she had started to fill with feathers my sister was some sort of sprite that had wafted out of the forest, a changeling or demon, I didn’t rightly know. I teased and taunted her by stealing feathers to tangle in my hair, chasing her around pretending to be a fierce Indian. My sister would run from me only until her temper snapped and her hands pulled, fingers like talons, liberating just as much hair as feathers in her fury.

“Those are mine.” Face flushed, eyes bright and fierce, my sister was the brave one who should be out with the dawn challenging the crows.

“Fine. Keep them.” We would go our separate ways in a huff, our stiff legs and sharp eyes an amusing mockery of the crows stalking around the yard, but I don’t think we ever noticed the humor of the situation.

But as soon as Nana’s blueberry muffins came out of the oven we crept close, drawn by warmth and familiarity and family. Butter still on lips slightly purpled with blueberry juice we would curl up in our room and whisper our secrets to each other.

I don’t know exactly when Ma’s attitude toward the crows changed. In a city setting, far removed from the remodeled Adirondack farmhouse she grew up in, the crows were easier to ignore. I would catch them casually observing our comings and goings from atop power lines, the black walnut tree out front of our home.

I laughed at the gooseflesh that felt the need to march up and down my arms, at the way I felt a flush creep across my face. There was nothing malicious or malevolent about a bird.

They just were.

“Maybe they want to be us” my sister mused one morning as she lay on her belly in the living room, watching the crows out the cathedral window that let in enough light to have us sunning like cats, only half lucid in our laziness. “Maybe they want earrings and necklaces and fancy hats.” She rolled onto her back, stretching with a scowl. “But that’s stupid. I’d rather fly.”

I bared my teeth in a slow sneer, wrinkling my nose in the disdain of the older and wiser in the face of a silly suggestion, but she never saw it, her attention caught and held by the trio of crows holding court in the yard.

Three crows. I had been told at a young age, contrary to the popular rhyme, that a trio of crows was a darker omen. Whenever Ma would whisper of three crows sitting and watching her it was a portent of sorrow and death. She would be on the lookout for tragedy, and it was hard not to catch her crow-inspired anxiety.

“I saw three crows.” Ma would whisper, her eyes downcast, skin pale.

She saw three crows, and I sat small and silent through my grandfather’s funeral with black wings and dark eyes filling my mind. My sister pressed tight against my side, her eyes not on the priest and his book, but out the window. It was only my imagination that lined the quiet trees outside the church with crows, but I took my sister’s hand and held it tight- for such is the way of sisters.

I no longer imagined having conversation with the crows. The image of my Ma, wind pulling at her straw-blonde hair as she shouted and laughed with the crows, was forever darkened into something far more forbidding. She was no longer a gangly, gawky child entertaining herself as best she could in the morning; she was no longer my beautiful and whimsical mother trying to win their friendship. She was a warrior warding the crows away from her family.

But I grew up and moved out, and the crows faded into nothing more than something to study in biology lectures, a bit of lore to examine in literature workshops. They were added to the mythology of my youth, sequestered somewhere between a belief about the wind blowing leaves in-side-out signaling thunder and that to squish a spider would bring rain.

My sister grew to be a fey and unfathomable woman- bright-eyed and dazzling in an array of jewelry and fabrics that caught every eye she passed before, a pair of wings tattooed on her shoulder blades. She was an artist of small, glittering things with her eyes always looking somewhere none of us could see, hearing voices too quiet for the rest of us to notice, her head cocked ever so slightly to the side as her lips curled into a smile.

We grew apart, as sisters do as they grow into young women, but I would watch with a fascinated sort of lack of comprehension as she made her way through life and life seemed to fumble along after her. She was as strange to me as the crows that called out to the morning, their voices heavy with secrets.

I remember distinctly the day Ma called to let me know there were hawks nesting in the woods behind the house. Ma loved the hawks, loved the way the crows seemed out of sorts with the predators living in such quarters.

I drove home to visit, and the crows were waiting for me. Only two this time, sitting on the stump of a lightning hit black walnut tree. Staring. I blinked, my whole body gone shivery and nauseous. For a moment it had not been two birds standing there but two tiny, bony women wearing feathers, with talons for feet, staring out from their masks made of bird skull and beak with something far too close to anticipation. Animal people belonged in the stories I wrote in class, in the books I read- they had no place on my front lawn. Suddenly insecure in my own skin I slunk from car to garage and let myself into the house as swiftly as possible.

“I think the hawk killed one of the crows.” Ma’s voice was hushed, almost as if she didn’t want the crows to hear her. The window was open, letting in a pleasant summer breeze, the chatter of neighbors and squirrels, and the occasional harsh laugh of a crow.

I have never felt so uncomfortable in my own house, in my own skin. I felt shadowed, stalked- I could feel the unfathomable eyes of the crows on me wherever I went. I closed the window, pulled down the shade. “I’m cold” I muttered as a weak excuse. I just didn’t want the crows to hear the furiously unsteady beating of my heart- the pulse of prey.

My sister seemed unaware of any pall over the house. She was a peal of laughter, a glitter of silver and whisper of bells as she wandered barefoot room from room. I found her out in the front yard after dinner, sitting in the lawn swing, bare toes wiggling through grass green with a mild summer.

“They’re beautiful.”

I assumed she was talking about Ma’s flowers, a mix of lilies, black eyed susans, and bachelors buttons, the butterflies and bumblebees making their way from blossom to blossom in a quiet bit of last minute industry as the day wound down. “I wish I had been here to see the lilac’s blooming.”

“Not the flowers. The crows.”

The words, the wistful bit of worship in her voice, startled me into taking a step back, dropping out of my comfortable camaraderie as I cast about for the dark spots I should have known would manage to mar the quiet evening.

Two tiny women, dragging feathers through thick grass as they hopped and laughed, heads cocked to the side, peering at us from one glittering eye, then the other. The sun gleamed on plumage that glistened in the same sickly mix of colors as oil- blues and greens with sickly shades of yellow and purple stretching between.

Words, I could almost hear words in their chattering chuckles, hissing and rasping exhalations. Their chests heaved with a passion that had no place in a pleasant summer evening, was too feral to be familiar. And my sister tilted her head in an unconscious mimic of the crows and smiled.

The crows took to flight with pleased shouts, pulling their feather cloaks tight and jumping, flapping. My sister bent to pick up a feather that had fallen, preened it absently with her fingers.

There was something musty mucking up the mulch and mowed grass smell of the evening- an old smell, dry, not altogether unpleasant. It overpowered the flowery perfume of the garden, of my sister.

My sister.

How does one explain that slow ambling descent into something just this side of madness? It was in the tilt to my sister’s head, the way she was slower to click back to the here and now, lingering in her own thoughts, caressing a silky black feather. Not madness, not really. More of an untethering from everything solid and simple. Holding her hand, it felt like trying to hold onto early morning fog- Beautiful, visible, but ultimately intangible but for a ghost of sensation across the palms. A moistness, a coolness, a slight hint of other.

She was still there, my sister, but not looking at me, never looking at us. Her eyes were on the crow-women and their glittering eyes.

We snarled and spat, for such is the way of sisters. I grumbled at her lack of concern with the way the word goes. She hackled at my lack of understanding, but always in the end our fingers curled together and for a moment there, everything was alright and understandable until time deigned notice us once more and life carried us back into our individual concerns.

Perhaps it was me who went mad, my eyes and accusations fixated on the crows. It was an accident, they say. But all I can think is murder. The cunning crow-women with their knowing eyes and impossible forms. They had to be responsible.

A murder of crows.

There were three crow-women this morning, gossiping amidst the bittersweet fruit in the pine trees. The third had feathers that gleamed in the sunlight, hanging loose to catch and billow in the breeze, beak cracked open in a morbid sort of smile. There was something similar in the way she posed and postured as she spoke with her sisters, an animated turn of the head, lift of a shoulder.

A hawk had taken one of their sisters, so the crows had stolen mine.

I came out of my car in a flurry of shouts, chest puffed forward aggressively, glaring up at the crow-women. Awkward, crude, earthbound and powerless as they hopped along the branches, chattering all too pleasantly, I hollered and screamed arms waving in a grotesque parody of a bird’s grace.

And my sister, my beautiful sister, cocked her head to the side and smiled beneath her half-mask of bone and beak. My sister smiled and called out to me, the crow’s caw softened into something more suited to Eartha Kitt than a corvid with what felt like affection.

It pulled the fury from my steps, stopped the howls in my throat and twisted them into a choked off sob. My sister swung her legs, flexing talons as she sat side saddle on a pine branch, avidly engaged in conversation with her new companions as they hopped around her. Defeat tasted like bile, toothpaste mixed with orange juice.

I never did take a minute to acknowledge her life decisions, to accept the fey and the feral that drifted through her every motion. My lips would curl into disparaging sneers, utter dismissive remarks- for such is the way of sisters. It is a slow realization, molasses dripping through every other forcefully sustained emotion until only resignation is left. Resignation and a bit of apology.

Such is the way of sisters, a hesitance before apology, resistance before acknowledgement. But I bent my head low, mouth open with the panting of a miserable hound. My body heaved and shuddered through a lifetime of emotion before swallowing its pride and its pain and settling on acceptance. A smile twined through tears as I looked up at her, and then I went inside.

And now I wait here on the porch, in the Adirondack chair my children lovingly set in the sun, and set me upon. I can watch the bird feeder from here, see the chickadees and finches hop merrily from perch to perch, grabbing seeds and flitting off with their bounty. A cardinal calls every now and then, but enjoyable as the sound is, that is not the music I am listening for.

My chapped lips pull up into a smile as a crow gains a precarious foothold on a feeder perch built for much smaller song birds and helps herself to some of the seed.

One for sorrow.

A second settles on the ground beneath the feeder, sending squirrels and a cloud of finches in all directions.

Two for joy.

An old counting rhyme, but they have the words all wrong. A third crow settles on the arm of my chair, feathers brushing soft against my skin as she smiles up at me from beneath her mask of bone and beak. If the expression on my sister’s face is any indication, the way the sparkle has not left her eyes in all these years she has spent nesting behind the house that used to be my parents, and will soon belong to my children for as long as they care to keep it.

Three is the magic number- all of the stories will tell you so.

Across the yard, a stray cat is stalking the crow-woman scrounging for snacks on the ground.

Three is the magic number, and my sister has come to take me home.

For such is the way of sisters.