National Archive of Midair Collisions

By Shana Ross

Today, my boss is being interviewed by NPR.  I hear the radio person asking Katherine the same question over and over, trying new angles, attempting to throw softballs.  Everything boils down to why.  She wants to know why we do what we do.  

“Since 1918,” I hear Katherine say, “for every reported incident, we know the species - of aircraft and of bird - and have, through science, determined the story of how they met.”  

“To what end?” the reporter tries.

I bark an unflattering laugh.  It’s probably very good interview technique to get people to personalize their comments, like, why is this job so meaningful to YOU, instead of asking them to defend their work intellectually, why is this job important, why should we care?  However, I know Katherine.  

I am apprenticed to a woman who has, for thirty-five years, spent every workday sorting through wads of tissue – meat, bone fragments, feathers – whatever is left, whatever can be found after a bird strikes a plane.  It happens often, when you take the entire continent into account, and our charge is to examine and log all the information we can glean from every incident.  We don’t work with sample sizes; we create a full and complete record.  And that’s what she thrives on – an absolutely perfect set of data.  She’s like a librarian whose sole job is cataloging.  The puzzling and unpuzzling and careful recording of information into a well-organized warehouse where everything is beautiful, and nothing is missing.  What other people do or don’t do, what conclusions ONE might draw, what ONE might learn from the data – that’s an entirely different question from her perspective.  She is unwavering in her purpose.  This reporter has no idea what she’s up against, trying to get that sound bite.

I’m glad that Katherine is the face of our office, still.  In a year, it’ll be me in charge of the lab, on call when someone comes to write about us.  And when someone asks why this office exists, this weird and gruesome little bureau, the first thing that pops into my head is: this is the most American endeavor America has ever America-ed.  That’s why.  One hundred years of performance art.  A century of using the most cutting-edge science of the day to fully understand an unending stream of small traumas, to record them for posterity in exquisite detail, then clock out and go home to sleep the peaceful slumber of someone who is certain they have fulfilled their duty.  I think Katherine truly believes she does her part every day to better this world.

Truth is, no one comes to look through our data.  No one is searching for patterns.  No one is testing theories on how to protect planes or birds – someone might be working on that, but they don’t care to come here to pour over our proof, to see whether they are moving the needle.  And so, it’s not proof at all.  It’s not even evidence.  It’s some sort of time capsule, silently tracking a history of this country, through one odd peephole.

Katherine isn’t holding a damn thing back – this is who she is through and through.  If she’s curious about a bigger picture, well, it just doesn’t matter for her.  Her legacy is a record with no holes.  She finds pride and joy in that.  She’s a good person, a good scientist, perfectly suited to this job.  When she dreams of flying, she’s an airplane.  In my dreams, I’m covered in feathers.  People often try to call us forensic scientists, and Katherine always shuts that down.  No crime has been committed, she always says, so what we do does not meet the criteria of “forensic.”  I have never argued with her.

The reporter notices me perched and watching.  She tries to hide the doubletake.  I get that a lot.

Where Katherine is birdlike in a dainty chickadee way, I’m birdlike if your frame of reference is a raptor.  I’m imposing, even where I’m not large.  Striking, people say, when they don’t want to be racist.  The chic close shave instead of hair, fierce as hell, doesn’t help people find words when they meet me.

“Oh, yes, what a great idea,” says Katherine.  “Let me introduce you to Ruth.”

Twenty minutes later, I have a shadow.

“This is even better than the time I went on a ride along with a homicide detective,” the reporter bubbles.  “It felt weird to hope for a great story when I was with him, but we’re guaranteed some action, here, right?”

I smile and offer her a lab coat.

“What drew you to this job?” she asks, warming me up while I prep my station.

I evade that question with some action.  I take the first box out of the cooler and open it with a flourish.  “Fresh snarg,” I say, hoping I’ve stirred the air enough that the scent reaches her quickly.

She doesn’t flinch, and leans in with wide eyes and her microphone.  “What’s snarg?” she asks for the audience.

“Bird goo,” I reply.  She makes a face, not at the specimen container I’m lifting out of the box, but at my insufficient description.  “When a bird encounters a plane, what’s left is what we call snarg.  It’s what gets scraped off of the wings, out of engines, picked up in lumps off the runway, hunted down when it’s a really big strike that hits the ground along the way.  Meat, shards of bone, liquids, feathers.  The feathers are key.”

The reporter makes another face, this time encouraging.  She’s good at her job.  I want to talk to her.  I’m as surprised as anyone.

“Feathers are the most reliable way to tell what kind of bird this was before it became…this.”  I hold my specimen tray at an angle so she can see it, but not tilted enough to drip.

“Wow,” she says.  “I’m glad I work in radio.  This job would make, like, the worst unboxing videos ever.”  She bites a lip while grinning, maybe to prevent me from seeing how much she entertains herself.  “But I’m sure there are people who would be into that.”

I stare, attempting cold and stony.

“So, what are some of your favorite cases?”

I search her face for clues on how to answer that.  I think she just wants something fun and light, good anecdotes for the audience.  This is the stuff I know I have to get good at spinning into yarns for when I take Katherine’s place at the big donor dinners, the scientist trotted out to make senators and billionaires feel good about the unseen corners of the Smithsonian.

“The one in front of me.  Always the one in front of me,” I say, with what I intend to be a winning smile.

I think that’s true, even.  She rolls her eyes.

So, I tell her about the time it was a moose, and we tried for a week to figure out some way a whole animal must have fallen off a cliff positioned just right to hit a plane that was on its descent. Turns out there was a hunter’s lodge near the airport where an eagle stole a chunk of moose mid-butchering and wound up in the wrong airspace.  

“How did you know it was a moose?  DNA testing?  That must make your job so much easier, now that we have that technology.”

“Actually,” I say, “we almost never use DNA analysis.  It’s not nearly as accurate as you think it is, especially since we never know what we’re turning in as a sample.  Snarg has basically gone through a blender.  What was a bird surrounding a stomach filled with whatever it’s eaten, is now a slurry of all that stuff, so you’ve got DNA from all of that, which can send you on …a wild goose chase.”

She rolls her eyes again but is pleased at my dad joke.

“Feathers, like I said before.  If I have a full feather, I know I can solve the case, definitive ID, eventually.”

I tell her the story of the time that all we had to go on was a small chunk of pinfeathers, and it just wouldn’t match up with any known bird.  Close, but not quite, close but not quite, and finally we realized it was an unidentified species.  Katherine got to name it, this new bird, and she went with podiceps spero, because hope is the thing with feathers.  She got a real kick out of that.  I’m not sure that plays to a wide audience.  But if it’s going to make people chuckle, NPR is the best chance.  

I don’t tell her the rest.  She’s here for clean stories; bite-sized finger food.  This one is tangled for me; still hooked into my flesh somewhere deep and tender, which is why I don’t take it out often.  I was so thrilled to be there, to be present at the discovery of a brand-new species, this little grebe that no one had noticed before.  It’s the kind of thing scientists live for.  The big childhood dreams, unlocked as an achievement, instead of the realities of science that never occurred to you as a kid.  It’s exactly what all the boring, routine, fastidious tasks were supposed to add up to. Washing glasses and prepping slides in college.  Candling quail eggs and tracking embryo growth before grad school.  Fieldwork.  Wet work. All for eventual glory.

But I also developed recurring nightmares, which I blame on that little grebe.  It wasn’t new.  It was just hiding from us, and now what?  Was that the last one?  Will someone go out to find it in the wild?  Will I be party to its death sentence?  There’s a lot to be said for flying under the radar.

It was very early on in my tenure here, when I tried to talk to Katherine about it.  She took my hand and held my eyes for a long moment before she said, so soft and stern that I knew it was the last word on the matter, “That belongs to someone else.”  I don’t doubt it was a piece of good advice, and hardly her fault that I still don’t know what to do with it.

“So, what do we have in front of us?”

The reporter is chipper, and my hands have been keeping busy while I was far away in my thoughts, petting old worries like beloved sheep dogs.  I look down, and it’s my turn for the double take.

“Well, we’ve separated the different components to the best of our ability,” I say, and show her the prepared slides.  “Now we take a closer look.”

But there are too many distinct samples.  My rhythm is thrown.  I start popping them under the scope. 

“This is a good one,” I say, fascinated.  There’s something that looks like a scrap of avian epidermis, jet black like a silkie chicken.  Unusual.  Some indeterminate musculatures, pulped.  There’s something that looks like scales.  Scutes.  Reptilian, if I had to guess, but birds have them too. These are just odd.  And another piece of skin that has hair.  Mammalian.  I look again and again to see if it’s a strange, thin feather, but the follicles are all wrong.

I look back at my station to find one more piece of the puzzle, a feather fragment that has a strange glint as I pick it up in my forceps.  Thank goodness.  With a feather, I can figure out anything.

By the end of the day, the reporter has stopped recording.  She shifts her weight, not wanting to be overly rude, but I became useless to her hours ago, entirely absorbed in the curiosities in front of me, barely grunting in response to her questions.

“So, when do you usually wrap up?” she asks.

“In a minute,” I mutter, a split second before the rest of the lab goes dark, the last intern out the door.  I blink as the hum of fluorescent tubes clinks and settles into silence.  

“Actually,” I decide to confide in her, “this timing is pretty typical.  I stay late most nights.  I prefer being the first one in and last one out.”

“Are you going to be here for a while,” she says slowly, “or can I buy you a beer?”

I can’t tell what kind of overture this is, friendship or a mating dance, but I say yes, and we head to a place the reporter knows in Adams Morgan.  She springs for the Lyft.

###

“But enough about you, what about me?”

Kelly is definitely flirting now.   I let her confidence float me along in its current.

“How does one get into radio?”

“Great question.  I don’t know.  I’d say practice, but that’s Carnegie Hall.  I’d say grit, but that’s true of everything for everyone unless you come from major money.”

“Do you come from major money?”

“No.”  She’s grinning, as if the repartee is stoking some fires.  I’m tired.

“So how did YOU get into radio?”

“Ding ding ding!  Better question!”  She is pleased with me, or maybe herself.  Despite my annoyance, she seems so genuinely happy that I can’t help warming a little.  She launches into an origin story, charming but rehearsed.

Timing is everything.  It’s not this casually happy woman’s fault I’ve been in a funk for…months now? Is that possible?  Something about me has gone threadbare.  I want to be here in this warm bubble of people laughing and lives colliding like molecules, I do.  I want to be here when some go shooting off into the night, alone and in pairs, and I want to watch some stick to each other for a while and sink with hopeful weight into the booths.  I want to stare into Kelly’s eyes and see where that takes me after a couple of drinks.  But this mood makes me overly honest and impatient.

“Do you think your work matters?”  

She freezes mid-sentence at the interruption but does not blink as she decides how to answer.  For the first time, I think she’s actually curious about who I am, instead of steering the two of us into a good story to tell at future parties.

“Yes.”

She goes minimal, daring me to make the next move.  The line between mating dance and cockfight is thin.

“What…” I start, then sip my beer and swallow carefully.  “What does it mean to you?”

Kelly giggles.  My eyes smart instantly, and I feel a flush of embarrassment that I’m thankful will barely show.

“Ruth,” she says, leaning towards me, “Do you want to know why I like my job, or are you having your own existential crisis?”

“Who isn’t having an existential crisis right now?” I volley back, “Have you been following the news?”

“Babe, I am the news,” she quips.  “We’re in the middle of interesting times, though, huh?”

I think for a split second we might kiss, but instead I blurt, surprising myself too.  “Kelly  - I’ve got to go.”

“What?  Why?”

“I need to go back to the lab.”

“Should I come?”

That wasn’t the response I was expecting.  I was reasonably sure, after the hours she’d spent politely avoiding the literal meat of my work, that she would prefer not to go back, possibly ever.  Doubly unfortunate was the fact that I had no intention of doing anything productive.  I had not remembered a miracle experiment that would solve the day’s mysteries.  I wanted to stop by and center myself by standing in my lab, then go home to sleep.

“I’m not sure I can get you clearance to enter after hours,” I lie.  “Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Do you want to?” she asks, not giving me any clues.

“I think so,” I say, truthfully.  “I’m distracted tonight.”

“Ah,” she says.  She takes out a pen and reaches for my hand, smoothing my palm once like paper, then lightly skimming it like a fortune teller.  She cocks her head like a curious crow and puts my hand on the table.  She writes a number on a napkin.  “No excuses like ‘I washed my hands and couldn’t read the numbers,’ ok?”

“Do you just want to put the number in my phone?”  I shove it at her.  “What if I lose the paper?”

“Then what would you have to put in your scrapbook to remember tonight?”  She doesn’t meet my eyes again until her coat is on, and she is halfway out the door.  She winks, half encouragement, half goodbye.  I don’t know whether to believe me or not either, when I say I will definitely call.

I don’t go back to the lab.  I go straight home. 

I leave the shades up when I go to sleep, which I almost never do.  There’s a full moon, with cold silver light, which clashes in one corner with the orange streetlamp.  I feel unsettled, which I tell myself is my old fear of being derailed by the unexpected.  I try to feed it other people’s advice, to get it to stop gnawing at me.  Go with the flow.  Expect the best of others.  The gods laugh at your plans.  You can’t evade destiny.

I dream of feathers, falling from the sky like cherry blossoms and grenades. The streets are emptied but I walk through them, gathering feathers that I swallow as fast as I can pick them up, as if they are falling for me.  

###

In the morning, there is an email when I sit down at my work desk.  Kelly wants me to know that she was pissed at me last night, that she was the one going out on a limb and risking her credibility by being willing to see what this connection was, to see what this spark might lead to, even though it’s terribly unprofessional to do that with your interview subjects.  I almost stop reading, because I have done this dance before, the girls who can only feel their true feelings after you’ve left the room; I know many the tricks they use to feed an endless hunger for drama and attention.  I roll my eyes to protect myself from a scolding I haven’t earned.  I almost stop reading, so I almost miss the pivot, where her self-righteous rejection of my rejection turns into a plea.  

She had the most disturbing dreams last night, about huge hunting birds or maybe dangerous angels, and then when she woke up, there was a feather on the windowsill, just like the ones in her dream.  And another on the sidewalk in front of the bagel shop.

She wants to meet me for lunch.  

I feel the memory of her fingers, cool to the touch, resting on my warm hand.  I feel a hope rising that doesn’t know it’s dead yet.  Sadness flutters into a landing, perches next to a kneejerk defensive anger.   I try to let my feelings go numb so I can shrug them off like dead skin.   

But I want to see the feathers.

I decide to go out for a latte, to see if I can restart the day.  Lost in my head, I run into Katherine as soon as I stand.

She withstands the bump heartily, so robust and ever balanced, despite all appearances.  Both of us grunt with surprise, but then blink at each other.  With Katherine I don’ t need to shuffle through stacks of niceties.  She smiles.

“Oh, Ruth, there you are.  I was coming to find you.  I heard you had an interesting case yesterday.  Any progress?”

Some people are liquid liars.  The things they say, even their most elaborate inventions, the fictions just flow from their mouths, travelling easily into nooks and crannies and always downhill, around any obstacles in their path.  The plain truth flows that way from Katherine, someone who’s never in her life had to worry about adjusting herself for different audiences.  I am a dam with a well trained and tightly controlled spillway, cautious about ever opening too far, whether I am telling the truth or not. 

For the first time in my years of apprenticeship, Katherine looks nervous.  She isn’t flowing with either truth or lies, or even easy little truths carefully selected to function as lies without technical sin.  She’s beading, like sweat.  Whatever she’s thinking is locked down tight…but leaking through despite her best efforts.

I notice and promptly panic.  I keep that to myself, though, of course.   Especially in science, especially for a black girl – it doesn’t pay to let people see what you’re feeling.  One of my favorite compliments is when people look at me with awe and tell me I’m unflappable.  Katherine and I are more alike than we seem in that regard, though I wonder sometimes if it comes easier to her, being unflappable instead of just expert in seeming so.

“Lots of open questions.  It’s a doozy of a case.”

I’m trying not to let my stare be obvious, but my eyes don’t budge from hers.  Katherine forgets herself and her eyes crinkle up with excitement, for a moment, before something clouds it and they dart around the room, scanning for something or someone.

“This is my fault,” she whispers.  “I didn’t think.”

“What’s up, Katherine?” I ask, my nerves vibrating even faster.  Her eyes keep flickering.

“I was so excited to see the case come in.  It felt like destiny.   So of course, I assigned it to you.  But then like an idiot, I forgot and assigned you that reporter as a shadow.  On the worst possible day.”  Katherine gets a lot of mileage out of dithering, I think.  It doesn’t work on me – I can wait her out, and I know she’s not an idiot, but I’ve watched her do it to politicians and ambitious scientists and other sharks who occasionally circle in the dark waters of DC, wreathing herself in streams of conversational fluff until she seems nonthreatening.

“Katherine,” I say, maybe sharper than I intended.

She shakes off whatever self-protective routine she’d gone into, and I see my straight-shooting boss staring into my eyes.  The intensity makes my heart race, but I tell myself I’m in good, honest hands, whatever comes next.

“Yesterday’s case,” Katherine says.  “How much did you figure out?”

“It’s a crazy mix-up of stuff,” I say.  “More slurry than snarg, only a small piece of plumage, and I haven’t sorted out WHAT we’re looking at, yet, so I haven’t started to construct narrative at all.

“That’s great,” Katherine chirps, clapping her hands.  “I was afraid you’d get farther. You’re usually quite gifted.”

I draw in a breath, ready to object, reflexively.

“Look, Ruth, let me cut to the chase.  It’s from a harpy. “

I snort.  She continues.

“Actually, I think they’re better described as furies, but the first one in our records was in 1930, and the director at the time was either a misogynist or had a poor classical education…or both.  They’re certainly not mutually exclusive.”

I am holding the breath I took, before the revelation.  I don’t quite understand what I’ve just been told, but I feel its weight, and an urge to be very still until something makes sense again.

“I have a special set of files to give you.  You’re going to need to sign some paperwork first, security clearance and so on.”

“What’s a harpy?” I can’t let her barrel on yet.

“Well, again, I think it’s more useful, more accurate to think of them as furies.  The Greeks called them Erinyes; the Romans called them Dirae.  Minor deities, somewhere between woman and bird, tasked with avenging the worst of human sins, lest we go unpunished.  Sometimes I think I should take it upon myself to amend the files.  I think I could.”

“Gods exist.  You have proof?” I am still goggled.

“No, that’s how they’ve been understood in the past.  What even is a god? The furies are not immortal.  You’ve got proof of that in your lab.  By appearance, they’re a largely humanoid hybrid of bird and woman…always female, which is interesting.  They’re sentient and able to communicate with us.  They just…haven’t in a long time.”  Katherine cocked her head at me, impatiently.  I felt embarrassed to not be a quicker study.

Katherine grabs at my upper arm, holds me, meets my eyes and holds them too.  “We don’t really know that much about them, but this office, for reasons of historic and bureaucratic legacy, is the sole authorized contact to their society.”  She caught herself.  “We don’t call them.  They call us.”  That’s Katherine in a nutshell.  She has a perfectly accurate assessment of her own importance.  No trace of false humility, but she’ll never inflate or pad things, either.  It didn’t soothe me in the way it usually does.

“We killed one?  That’s what’s in my lab right now?” There are a lot of things I could panic about right now, but they mostly seem like conceptual threats: world upended, assumptions shattered, and so on.  But having a dead vengeance god – goddess – in my lab is very concrete and very terrifying.   And maybe disrespectful.  “What do we do?”

Katherine’s smile is genuine.  “We catalog the strike.”  

“Is this a prank?” I ask.  “Is this some kind of last-minute hazing?”

Katherine’s hand slips from my arm and slides down to hold my hand.  She squeezes.  “I would never,” she says, earnestly, but she doesn’t let go.  The hairs on my neck rise, waiting.  

“But, Ruth, there’s protocol.”

I am a quick study; I remember with a flash of pride that feels quite tacky even as it warms me.  I know instantly she’s talking about Kelly.  Kelly spent a day with me trying to identify a piece of snarg that turns out to be a dead bird-woman who is a highly classified state secret.

I find myself caught in a strange wormhole, transported to childlike wonder, which for me was not an experience of innocent awe.  One of my early memories comes from when I was six or seven.  The TV was on, even though my mother was fixing dinner and so the the TV should have been off.  There should have been music, which she always danced to, just a bit, as she worked.  But today was different, and there was no sound in the house but the clicks and clangs of dishes and pots, and the news.  I stood and watched a stream of humanity trying to survive the aftermath of a disaster.  It was far away, but I couldn’t stop staring, trying to understand what I was seeing, trying to let the magnitude and horrors into me.  I started patting at my chest and stomach, which felt stirred up on the inside.  I remember the sound of the ice cream truck, chiming ever nearer, and when I started crying, that’s all I could blubber about, and so my mother thought all the wrong things about her high-strung child.  But I still remember how it felt then, the same dawning realization I’m having now: that the world is infinitely more vast and dangerous than I can understand.  

“So.  Let’s figure out how much damage we need to control.”  Katherine’s eyes are full of kindness that will not interfere with her work.

“I didn’t figure anything out.”  I am reluctant to say anything that will come back to haunt me.

“But did you get her hooked on a good story?  She seems like the kind of gal who might be persistent, once she gets a taste of something worth pursuing.”

I give Katherine the side-eye, in case there were extra entendres in that sentence.  But now I’m worried.  She’s probably right.  Plus she found the feather.

I confess.  The going out for drinks, the teasingly early night, the dreams – mine and Kelly’s – and the feather I’m supposed to pick up at lunch.  Feeling like a kid again has opened me up despite all my better judgments, destroying the walls where I’ve learned to control myself tightly over the years, my thoughts starting to fly out at full velocity, un-aimed, like a fire hydrant wrenched open in a crisis. Katherine takes it all in without saying much but the occasional “ah” and “I see” to keep me talking.  Then she smiles and stands up.

“I’m handing the place over to you soon enough.  I’d prefer to let you make your own decisions regarding protocol here.  The ramifications will belong to you, after all, either way.“   She turns and I can sense her smile vanish.  “Come.  You have some reading to get through before your lunch date.”

I start to follow her into the director’s office, but she steps aside so I can catch up to her. Sturdy, practical Katherine reaches out to hold my elbow for stability, as if she’s aged twenty years during our conversation.  We walk together to find the files.

###

I walk into the diner, and Kelly is tucked into a booth with a notebook, scribbling something.  She doesn’t notice me, and I see she’s beautiful, now that I’m really looking instead of stealing glances.  I tell myself this is objectivity, since I’ve lost the thread of me and her and anything I might want from a tangle of our lifelines.  he looks up and waves, and I stride towards her.  I’m the girl who’s gone to the pound but already knows she’s not bringing any puppies home.

I slide into the seat across from Kelly and smile.  She smiles back, looking genuinely pleased to have me here, across from her, all to herself.  The flash of warmth for me, inspired by me, sinks into my stomach like a falling elevator.

It’s best if she does the talking, in case I am leaking – emotions, the static electricity of my stress, visible shapes of all the information I’ve swallowed whole but not yet digested.  There’s no telling what a perceptive story collector might pull out of me.  But she makes it easy for me.  

“Ruth,” she says, “my dreams were so crazy.”  She reaches across the table to grab both my hands in both of hers for emphasis, but the spark of her touch only lasts a moment.  She pushes off again, leans back in the booth.  “The fries are so-so here, but the tuna melt is amazing, if you like tuna.  Proprietary cheese blend.”

We order.  I get a burger.  It comes with fries.  Kelly shrugs and gets a cup of soup.  She seems oblivious to details I can’t stop thinking about: the gathering thunderclouds, the trickles of sweat dampening my bra.  The waitress leaves and Kelly goes for her jacket pocket.  She yelps and her hand jumps back. There’s a stripe across her palm and index finger that looks like a gigantic paper cut, and I notice her other hand has two bandaged fingers.  Spiderman Band-Aids. 

“Ow!”  Kelly seems amused by the injury, shaking her hand and diving back in.  She draws out a black feather with a strange sheen.  “You’d think I’d learn after the first prick,” she says, laying the feather between us on the table.  “So to speak.  Be careful.”

“Wow,” I say, my honest reaction popping out, subterfuge be damned.

“Right?”  Kelly is dabbing at her hand with a wad of napkins.  “So…what do you think?”

“Back up,” I say.  “Why come to me with this?”

“You’re a bird expert, aren’t you?”

“Your email.  It sounded like you never wanted to see me again.”

“I’m not used to people walking out on a first date.”

“Then don’t schedule them off the cuff after a long day at work.”

“You would have stayed if you were actually interested.”  Kelly’s eyes seem to grow until she looks like one of those awful knickknacks of sad children.  I breathe a sigh of relief.  There is beautiful purity to her selfishness.  

In this moment, I am the shiniest of toys, and she wants me.  Even knowing it wouldn’t last, I am tempted.  But I know what’s at stake.

“So now you want me to interpret your dreams?  That’s a new one for me.  Does it work on other girls?”

The flashes in her eyes are inscrutable.  She breaks away from our locked gaze and starts poking at the feather on the table.  “I’ve never had any dream that powerful,” Kelly says, so quiet I can barely hear her over the lunch crowd.  “I think I could taste it.  Like, I woke up with peppermint in my mouth, almost choking me.  Cold and sharp and minty, except it wasn’t really there, it was just in my dream.”

“Weird,” I say.

“That’s it?”  The sparks are definitely anger now, a self-indulgent variation on the theme.  “Weird? What about the feather?”

“Raven,” I say without looking at it.  “Common in the mid-Atlantic, although usually confused with crows.  This one has a genetic variation that causes pronounced ridges on the quills.  Probably due to environmental toxins.”

“This is not a raven feather,” Kelly insists, spitting.

“Nevermore,” I shrug.

I put my hand on my coat, considering leaving before the food arrives.  But she starts to deflate.  I stay.  We have an uneventful lunch.  The fries are actually pretty good.  

Back at the office, I pull the feather carefully out of my pocket and place it on Katherine’s desk.  “Raven,” I say, “obviously.”  

She laughs.  I feel the tension in my body starting to slip away.  Katherine grills me solemnly, but my confidence carries me.  Kelly isn’t hungry enough to follow all leads towards a big break, if she ever comes to realize what has brushed against her.  I am betting everything that she won’t look back.  She’s interested in the best story, not the truth.  What an unflattering – life-saving – privilege. 

“There is paperwork, obviously,” Katherine says gravely, fixing me with an eye before we move on.   

She hands me a key, the same one that unlocked the cabinet in her office this morning, the one I fell into.  I nod and take it from her.

“One more thing,” Katherine says.  She reaches into her own desk drawer and pulls out a box.  She upends it and feathers fall, all black, sharp, with a strange sheen.  My eyes try to estimate how many might be in that small hill taking shape on the desk as the last few drift into place.  “People are starting to turn these in.  From all over the city.  This,” she gestures, “is all from the past year.”

“Why?” I ask.  “Why now?”

She doesn’t look at me, just shrugs as she picks one up and strokes the flat of it, like a lover trying to reach through silk.  “The barb is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  And there’s an edge to it, molecules thick, that will slice through you as easily as air.  A full wing would shred you, at the right angle.”  She mumbles wistfully, and I am not sure if she means for me to hear.  I feel myself flush.  Tenderness is hard for me to witness.

“I thought they’d notice when I took over.  The first female director of the combined archive and laboratories.  But…”  Katherine looked up at me, tears in her eyes, welling, but she refused to let them fall.

Two women, friends, and eye to eye, we could barely see each other.

###

Late night after a long day, and I am sleepless.  I move through my proudly spotless galley kitchen like a worm after a rainstorm, aimless, hoping to survive.  I make tea.  All I have in the house is peppermint, and for a moment I worry I might cast an inadvertent summons.

I take my mug and sit in my reading chair: the one my freshman roommate brought to college and left with me when she moved out, an heirloom faithfully passed down until it skips to a new lineage entirely.  It’s been lovingly moved to every apartment since.  It is the one thing in my carefully sleek apartment that does not fit my image, as if I am incapable of seeing it for what it is - a threadbare, once beautiful, exquisitely crafted piece of Victorian nonsense.  There was nothing like it in my childhood, no explanation for why I imprinted so deeply strange and stolen nest, but tonight it does not soothe me.  I can feel its bones through the upholstery.

The chair is where I perch to look out the window.  I stare into the night.  The moon and sky, the sidewalk, the buildings, the occasional person, the cars, the storefront with blinking beer signs.  It is either a meditation on the complete overlap of the mundane and the miraculous, or final proof that I am unable to tell the difference, like a colorblind bat who navigates with something else entirely.  I cannot tell if those are feathers in the shadow at the corner, or weeds rooted in the cracked pavement.  My suspicion, without proof, is that something is amassing unseen.  I am ambivalent about the prospect.  

I suspect Katherine knows something has changed, something is coming, but I already know what she will say if I arrive at work tomorrow worried about warnings and obligations and contingencies.

It is not ours.

Ours.  She includes me fully in that: her heir, her peer.  We are our own breed.  She truly believes this job of ours, a calling as sacred and consuming as any, erases the difference in how we have had to get through this world to arrive here intact, the difference in the generations beneath us, holding us up.  And our job is to autopsy what is left.

Without closing my eyes, I stop seeing what’s in front of me, my tea gone cold.  When vengeance comes on night dark wings, will it be a murmuration or a murder?

My first year with Katherine, there was a man who showed up unannounced.  He brought a very large box, and explained that he was a pilot, a hobbyist, and he looked like the kind with money instead of a greasy garage, such soft skin.  In the box was a Canadian goose.

“It’s dead?” he asked.  “I’m pretty sure.  But not a hundred percent sure.”

I assured him.  It was definitively dead.

“I think I killed it,” he whispered.

“With your airplane?” I asked, to make sure.

“Yes.” 

I was entirely inexperienced with the discomfort of elderly and distinguished white gentlemen.  So I did not know what to say next.

“I can’t see any wounds,” he said.  “The ground crew said to bring it here.  I was hoping…”

“I’m not a vet,” I said, “But this is a dead animal.  There’s nothing to be done.  For her.”  I kept talking, opening door after door just a crack, hoping to figure out what he was really after.  “You’ve done the right thing coming to us; we track all bird strikes.”

“Will you be able to tell me for certain that I did it?”

I promised him I’d send along the report, and he left.  When I dissected the bird, it was clear there had been a collision, but the way the bones had cracked instead of shattered, this bird had collided with the side of his plane, two high speed objects who somehow did not notice their trajectories would intersect.  I did not look up the specs on the plane he certified in the report, to see if it was true that the strike would not have been seen from the cockpit, as he was landing.  I went ahead and absolved him, telling him he could not have avoided the bird – no, I said he could not have been expected to do anything that would have avoided this outcome.  I thought that was the same thing, at the time.

He sent me flowers, the next week.  Katherine let me keep them.  Strictly, it toed a line, since we are federal employees.

The other reason I remember that case is that the goose, still so fresh when I got her body, was full of eggs.  One had shattered in her body.  Three looked perfect, and against all reason, I borrowed an incubator to warm them.  I wanted to see if I could.  

I hear Kelly freshly in my head, probing the sentences I think are enough.  “Could what?”

I wanted to see if I could make things right.  I wanted to see if I could snatch some life back from death.  I wanted to see if tragedy could become a meet cute, the origin story of a woman and her pet geese.  I wanted to see if I could save something for once instead of detailing its ending.  They did not hatch. 

I feel my eyes closing, the chair and tea finally working its magic on me.  This will hurt in the morning, sleeping here instead of my bed, but I don’t want to tear myself away from the window.

###

“It’s. Not. Possible.” My voice is raised, and I know it is sharper than I want to be.  Katherine has been so good to me.  I love her.  If I am unyielding, she is the one to pay the price, not any of the nameless bureaucrats past and present who deserve to be put on defense.

“I’ve given you everything,” she says, arms stretched to their full length, opening her body so I will believe her words are as unguarded.  “Everything that I have ever had.  There’s no way to contact them.  We have no channels to open.  What can you possibly think I’m hiding?”

I think she’s less upset with me than she is with my implied accusation: that she has ignored a huge hole in our records.  It can’t be true that we have no way of contacting the furies.  The US government might have an official policy and protocol that they keep from the public, but there must be a dozen agencies with their own, even more secretive, agendas and files.  Are they threats? Allies? Monitored or actively engaged in some odd partnered dance over the decades?  Back and forth and intense, never certain that the steps and postures mean the same thing to both parties.  Someone knows where they are, how to find them. 

I don’t think Katherine is guilty of hiding anything but her own head in the sand.  She didn’t have to accept it at face value when she was told we couldn’t do anything but wait and hope they might be in touch.  But she did.  And I don’t.

I spend the morning researching protocol.  What would have happened if I’d made the other decision about Kelly.  Tracing where each of the triplicate copies would go.  Tracing where those offices would have filed their reports, confirmed their completed assignments.  Tracing abstract loops on my desk with a single feather, carefully and steadily held so it will not mark me.  Re-tracing the new grooves with a finger.

Katherine keeps her distance.  I notice the silence; she feeds it like a fire between us.  I don’t dignify it by showing her how much it gnaws at my confidence and resolve.

So many dead ends, so many threads that thin out and vanish before you can find the patterns in the fabric.  Urgency is bubbling up and through me.  I have been trained in patience.  In thorough and methodical technique.  But I cannot stand the idea of business as usual.  I tilt.

There are people who know more than what’s in the files I’ve just inherited, and if I can’t find the shadows who must be standing between me and the furies, well, I can make them find me.  I make some searches, laying it on thick.  “How to find an investigative reporter as an anonymous source.” “How to gather evidence before going public as a whistleblower.” “How to bring confidential intelligence to the media.”  I skim names at the Washington Post.  Settle on one and read her past articles for an hour before sending her a message.  From my work account.

Then I leave the office.  Katherine calls out but I am walking too fast to hear what comes after “Ruth, Ruth!”  I can’t tell what’s louder, the slamming of the door behind me or my pulse in my ears.  On the street I walk faster than most of the tourists, not to mention the locals who are in no rush to get back to whatever desk released them for lunch.  I don’t slow down for them, for anyone, for anything.  I haven’t run into – or over – anyone yet.  I just keep going straight.  I’ll turn when I feel like it.  I’m anxious to get to my appointment, wherever that winds up being.  They’ll find me.  If I have a protocol, so do “They.”

After an hour, my blood starts to run out of adrenaline.  My body can’t keep this up.  The driving bass is now a snare tuned too tight, more of a rat-a-tat that weakens my knees, but I keep walking.  I’ve managed to circle back to where I started, almost, so I take the next right to keep myself from walking past the office.  This is taking longer than I imagined it would.  Time enough to regret being so hasty.

I can’t rein in my attention.  It makes sense to scan the faces around me, but I’m flitting from face to face, searching for something or someone out of place.  Someone whose eyes meet mine the second I turn to them, so that I know who belongs to the gaze I feel burning into me.  They must be watching.  I can’t find them.  One man, lowering his camera, flinches when he sees me.  That’s when I notice the strains in my face, my eyes too open, my jaw clenched for too long, something wrenched in my neck.

I am too deep in the city, even this one with its stunted buildings, to see the sun slip below a horizon, but the colors flash everywhere, and the night starts to smell sweeter.  The chill starts to collect floating aerosols into perfume.  Science knows why this is, can explain this phenomenon, the intensified scent of twilight, but what have we done with that knowledge?  Science cedes too much.  My feet fall slower.  I search the ground for feathers.

I panic when I can’t place the scuffing I hear, something dragging across the concrete.  I stop and try to root out the sound, but the scraping runs out to be me, my feet moving on their own, no longer going along what my brain has requested.  I decide to sit for a moment.  I lean back on the bench and search the rooftops for something that moves in the darkness, hoping I will at least see motion where I can’t make out any shapes.

I cannot be bothered to look at my phone to see the time when I let myself back into the lab.  It is late, not late enough to be more properly described as early.  I have found two feathers, not near each other.  I don’t know what I will say to Katherine tomorrow, so I will leave them on her desk, with the coordinates where they were found.  A peace offering.  An invitation.  

At my desk, finding words is hard.  I grip the pen too tight and can’t think of what to say.  Can’t think of how to say it.  I carefully, carefully stroke one of the feathers.  A sudden prickle comes over me in a wave, the raising of all my hairs, up and down my back.  There’s nothing I can detect to set me off, no sound, no scent, no disturbance of air as someone comes or goes.  It must be in my head.  Of course I’m sensing things in the shadows.  

Katherine made a small comment yesterday, as I sat cross-legged in her office, in a pile of fragile papers from the 40s.  “I guess we’ve finally crossed the line,” she said, and I’m sure I must have murmured something agreeable.  

Now?  What is so damned special about this moment that we’ve caught the attention of the demigods?  Are we that self-centered, to think that something is different, now? What atrocities right now are somehow worse than every moment in our history where vengeance did not descend from the skies, shrieking? Or do we think, somehow, we are more worthy of our gods, something about us calls to them?  Are we noble, pure, virtuous…WHAT?  

I am angry in a spiral that feeds into itself.  All written history littered with bodies – did they not suffer quite enough? Or did they not suffer beautifully enough to be redeemed? I am full of rage, at the goddesses who would pass that judgment.  I am full of rage at the wings that have not come to rescue us.  And full of rage at the long lists of unavenged violations weighing me down for centuries.  It is a single straw, just like all the others, that breaks the camel’s back.

Suddenly I am screaming.  It is rage, passing through my body as if I have come to a boil, but my throat doesn’t know the distinction and when the night guard comes running, he thinks I have scared myself.  He scans the room, then the perimeter of the lab, and, finding no one about to murder me, makes it clear that this little joke will be ours, meaning his, to remind me of my place in the pecking order when I come into my lab at night.  Remember that time you were scared of your own shadow, and I came to offer safety? My title and salary put into perspective next to height and muscles and testosterone and a gun. 

“OK, Ms. Davis,” he says, so smug I envision his face ripped off and scrunched in my fist. “I’m gonna leave you here, but if you get spooked again, you just holler.  And I know you know how to holler.”

“Doctor,” I say.

“What?”  He makes like he didn’t hear or maybe didn’t understand.

“DOCTOR Davis,” I repeat, and the temperature of the room shifts, unless it’s me who is suddenly very warm.

“Well, DOCTOR Davis,” he says, “Good night, then.”

When he is gone, I stay another hour out of spite.   I never write to Katherine. When I finally get home, I think I am going to cry in the shower, but I don’t.  I don’t feel like it.  I am so numb that I am unable to smell my soap as it lathers.

The next morning, she hands me a small envelope of feathers and sends a link to a small news story about a dead journalist, the one I pinned to my desktop. Sleep apnea.  Very sudden.  I see her staring as I read, her javelin eyes well suited to skewering things from a distance.

“Backlog from yesterday,” is all she says out loud.  “Let’s get to it.”

Getting back to work seems impossible, but your heart doesn’t have to be in it.  The daily grind rarely needs your full self, your best self.  I want to scream again, now that the lab is full of people who might hear me, I want to be heard.  But I am pinned again under the crushing weight of expectations.  I’ve worked my whole life to get to this job, one small footstep from the top.  What would happen if I made a scene? A medical leave while I recuperate from “exhaustion” if I’m lucky, a quick and choreographed exit to pursue other interests? A sudden bout of sleep apnea?

I’m not giving up.  But I go through the motions, and who but me would be able to tell the difference?  I am ashamed of how much comfort I suck out of the status quo.  It goes down to my bones.  My muscles glide in this office; they like knowing what to do next.  Prep slides. Write notes. File reports. Clean up as you go.  I wanted, so much, to be surprised by my own fearlessness.

I turn in my incident log at the end of the day.  Katherine asks me to stay a little longer.  I stay in my office until everyone else clears out and she comes for me.  Her face is funny.  Pleased, pissed, some strange combination that makes things twitch out of turn.

“OK,” Katherine says at last.  She beckons to the door and someone enters. “They’ve asked for you.”

The cloaked woman who walks in rustles.  Feathers are not meant to be draped in fabric.  She keeps the top part of her body unnervingly still.

“This is Alec,” says Katherine.

“The Alekto,” corrects the woman. “You seemed to wish an audience.  We are not here to reward your behavior.  But we have considered and are willing to discuss.” Her voice goes dry. “We made an appointment.”

“Discuss what?” I am breathless, but the words manage to come out.

“Your regrets,” the Alekto croaks.  She clears her throat and sits down without invitation.  Now we are three in the room, but barely.  Katherine fades, irrelevant.

No one speaks.  I hear my own voice, speaking thoughts I recognize, but I don’t remember asking my body to let the words out.

“I regret that you have not torn this place apart five times in the last century.  When do you plan to do something?”

My anger falls, leaden, no echo to my voice.  The air is flat in here.

“So how does it work? How do we call on you? Invoke you.”  I stare into the shadow of her hood, hoping to meet her eyes.  I already regret the sass in my voice.  Katherine’s jaw sets. “There wasn’t protocol for that.”

“You are rethinking your mercies,” the Alekto says.

“What?” Katherine and I are surprised in different ways, but our squeak comes out in unison.

“Obligation to others in your society is the most sacred of bonds.  Unrenounceable.  But broken with frequence and flagrance.”  Her sibilance is animal warning, and the idea of her humanity flees from me so suddenly I feel my heart stop.  “With creativity,” she finishes, and I hear the smile, uncomforting.

“We have already asked, and you chose that they should live - the careless ones, the selfish ones, the oath breakers.  They have your mercy, and so they have ours.”

“I don’t understand,” Katherine says.  “We were never asked anything.  I’ve never met you before today.”

“We respect you,” says the Alekto.  “We do not take vengeance you would not personally enact if you had our…gifts.”  

I am staring with my mouth open, not wide, my chin jutting as if my body is preparing for an argument even if I am still trying to make sense of the words.  I notice movement in her lap; a slender hand with curving talons has emerged from one sleeve to fidget with the fabric of her cloak.  Such a human gesture.

“Ruth, ruthless Ruth,” she says with a fond softening.  “You would have me exact vengeance for the horrors around us.  You would have me plunge into men’s soft bellies and rip lengths from their bodies, drape their hand torn flesh over their piles of wealth, snap and open the necks of complicit women, drop brainwashed children on the pavement from the filthy air over your cities, until the screams of a nation fade into sounds of sweet rain, patter of meat and spatter of blood and clatter of teeth falling, falling, falling…”

She pauses and I can hear Katherine weeping.  Is she crying over the image or how it will not come to pass?

“They have broken their bonds to humanity and are deserving of our terrors. But Ruth, Ruth, you would not condemn even one girl, a near stranger, to a sudden and painless death.  Our vengeance is not what you seek.  Not while you still cling to justice.”

I am out of my chair in a flash, my soft hands punctured in odd patterns as I grab her thin fingers and press them to my chest.  “I changed my mind.  Let me change my mind.  You could reshape this world.  I proved myself.  The journalist…”

“Was not our kill.  You set others in motion.  No, Ruth,” she says, and slides one claw down my face from cheek to chin, careful to not open any new holes in me as she takes her hand from mine.  “Vengeance is a glory, not a sacrifice.  Perhaps you will be ready, in time, but we do not yet feel venerated.  In the future, if you need to reach us…”

She leans in and I smell peppermint and warm down, lanolin and a hint of creosote.  She whispers in my ear, rises, and lets herself out of the room.  I can sleep easy, unhook myself from where I’ve been hanging on spikes of anticipation.  They will wait.  I will have to pick my successor carefully, carefully, carefully. In case I cannot reshape myself quickly enough.

“It’s like I don’t even exist,” wails Katherine. “Alec! Alec! Wait!”

I decide not to tell her the promises made just to me, murmured so only I would hear.  I’ve never felt more understood: the petty appetites I have suppressed for so long, the angers that stoke those bloody hungers – angers that are deep and worthy, angers I need to learn to wield for myself, first, before I can call on the flock.

END