DILLON’S MOTHER had put the feeders up for the season, entombing them in the attic, yet the little Ruby-throats remained hopeful of their most premature resurrection.
Had they really grown so reliant? So much as to resist the pull of their southern migration? The temperatures at night had already begun dipping toward the freezing mark for well into a week now, and this species of hummingbird, he’d learned, wasn’t inclined to enter torpor, a sort of mini hibernation to conserve energy, as easily as some of its cousins.
Being a rapt student of biology, Dillon made sure to always canvass his studies.
He wondered if his feelings on the matter were a standard case of ‘transference,’ that unconscious ‘redirection of emotion’ he’d once heard his mother, the degreed behaviorist, drone on about. Made sense, he supposed—then nearly winced at his own averseness to that stark and pending truth.
“That’s cruel,” he’d said to her the fourth day, watching the hummers dip and dart in the periphery of the feeders’ absence.
“That’s life,” she’d said. “Time to move on .”
The acidic verve brought him fully around to embrace a sort of kinship to those tiny creatures, to recognize that both he and they had grown mistrustful of this season’s pale and abridged light, while at the same time learned a most valuable lesson about the risks of dependence, as he too felt a desperate urge to gorge in the shortening day. To yank back the receding edges of summer and tie them to anything that wasn’t also being slowly pulled toward shorter, colder days—dear old golden rule days—and that autumnal cadence thrumming in his ears like the heavy respirations of something untamed lurking around the corner.
His thin, darling mother had given a perceptible nod to the window, motioning to the less transparent world outside, implying that his long accustomed season of her apron strings was racing to its own conclusion, not so unlike another that was blazing along the distant rolling hills in ruddy and saffron iridescences. A remarkable fire, Dillon recognized, which burned with more strident confidence than the one smoldering within; awkward, insecure, But most unquenchable: the onset of his maturation. No matter how hard he tried staring beyond that adorned foliage outside, he still couldn’t see the colors of his own future, those hues remaining obedient to the prevailing uncertainty. The only guarantee would be the envy he held for those residing in more equatorial climes.
His mother’s insinuation that ‘life giveth, then taketh away’ was a sobering one, authenticated by the loss of her husband four years earlier. The passing of his father continued to slip wispily between his fingers, no matter how long or tightly he maintained a grip. As his mother had once become, Dillon was a prisoner to the memories of his father, just more subtly than she had ever been, the desperation manifested in his isolation, where he has relegated such reminiscences.
Where he clung to memories, she’d begun clinging to material things, promising to never again allow the seizure or repossession of anything that had first been hers. She was not honestly looking forward to him leaving the nest, despite her recently implied fingerprints all over his back. Her despairing moods, her admittedly fertile and increasing reveries over the true meaning of life—all were symptoms, he recognized, of profound loneliness and disillusionment.
“… to the dreary and seemingly pointless progression of days: you still have my full attention, if not my allegiance ,” she’d articulated to a bare wall one drunken afternoon (was toasting it with a full glass of wine, as a matter of fact), not knowing he was behind her, having returned from his own awful day at school. Hers was an especially vivid rant, one that left him feeling guilty, if not distinctly doomed. It was this very dilemma that he supposed was responsible for her growing preoccupation with material things; that to embrace something was to give it necessary meaning. He figured her ‘obsessed,’ a term she occasionally bandied about with utter detachment, and he often wondered if doctors were less equipped, or inclined, to diagnose themselves.
If he couldn’t stop the season’s progression, Dillon decided he could at least taunt its determination. While his mother addressed certain laundry duties downstairs, he prepared a pot of water (short of putting it on the fire), added probably too much sugar, and headed to the storage room where he would pull down the wooden stairway that accessed the attic. A place, Dillon sagely decided, that should be well known, too, for its reluctance to let go.
All three hummingbird feeders were glass-blown and highly prized by his mother, passed down by her mother, two years deceased, their purchase allegedly from a carnival long ago in the
Northern Province. A carnival, of all places—and a legendary one brought to that distinction by its ability to waver like a mirage between allegory and the horizon, as it always seemed that very little if any direct evidence existed to support its authenticity, at least in any certifiable sense (the feeders’ original boxes, for instance, bore no clue or specific indication as to their place of creation, only relying on Grandma-ma’s word). The occasional confessions heard from those alleging to have patronized that notorious locale were often filled with such absurdity as to make them seem outright fraudulent.
The carnival was one of those intriguing franchises perpetuated by enduring myth. Probably less of a disappointment, he supposed, if left to remain that way. Enchanted carnivals indeed! He considered himself fortunate to no longer be of an age that entertained such possibilities. It intrigued him to know that so many adults had reached their ‘moment of truth,’ as his mother had once put it, their ‘crossroads,’ at which time they began yearning for that lost aptitude to once again ‘circumvent reality without the guilt.’
As he climbed the stairs, he thought he recalled precisely how the feeders’ packaging appeared; their colorful logos of balloons conveniently contorted into a pageantry of letters that spelled out the creator’s name and credentials: “Dmitry, Artisan of Glass and Stone.” A glace and candied style of marketing that was heaped upon the inventor, he remembered, with just a dollop spared for the product. Certainly more optimistic than the feeders themselves. Each one was an exercise in Gothic nuance: ribbed vaulting at its rounded top, tendrils snaking downward along its gourd shape, rowed on one side by linear sequences of quills and other sharp protuberances, with a few strays poking here and there to complete a most organic effect, all having been pulled by the artisan to various lengths as the glass cooled. And it was from these spines where the hummers fed, the sweet nectar pulled to the ends not by gravity, but capillary action.
When he’d first seen the feeders two years earlier, Dillon thought their designs were coerced into resembling, if not downright mimicking, certain formidable marine crustacea.
Inside the attic, the gloom was cleaved by sunlight eking in from the only window, a multifoil of leaded glass situated forever to filter the end of the day. Hundreds of boxes were stacked neatly, each inventoried by black marker in his mother’s florid hand. Keepsakes less contained huddled in the gloom, and all about this repository of ephemera, there hung in the dimness something Dillon had never noticed before: a subtle tenacity woven throughout the customary redolence, an otherworldly determination fuming to break from its state of intangibility into something … corporeal. Its present incarnation was not so unlike the one currently suspending the dust motes in the last waning rays of sunlight—only heavier .
The attic reminded him of an apothecary, reeking curatively of dried orange rinds, rosemary, and cedar. ‘Nostalgia,’ his mother had called it upon their most recent visit together. Something, she promised, that he wouldn’t be able to smell for many years yet.
“I smell it just fine,” he’d said, indignant. He knew what nostalgia meant.
“And what does it rekindle?” she’d asked. “Just how far back does it take you, hmm? To our last month’s adventure up here in search of canning lids and paraffin?”
He’d shrugged, letting her nose dwell on whatever it wanted.
A-framed, the space was as tidy as the main structure below, and just as long, and was high and narrow enough that Dillon could stand in the middle, hold out both arms, and barely touch the rafters slanting on either side (a feat he wasn’t able to accomplish a year earlier). His mother insisted on keeping the center aisle clear, as everything she’d exiled to these dusky regions was neatly tucked away, situated efficiently between the trusses. Anything that could be stored in a box went to one side, everything in varying degrees of cumbersomeness in the other: a treadle sewing machine, an assortment of wicker baskets atop a large steamer trunk (the key to which he has never located despite years of searching, although his mother maintained it being empty), a standing lamp with a miner’s helmet hanging in place of a shade now long missing.
He stared reverently at the locked trunk.
His father’s things were in there, he knew.
But it was the other side of the aisle where the feeders would be found. He crouched and sidled along the row of trusses, searching for three tall and flamboyant packages. He found them blooming amongst a patch of nondescript boxes labeled ‘highlights,’ followed by dates that clustered within a specific era, one that would have found him as less than a twinkle in anybody’s eye. From the broken seam of one peeked the rim of a hat, and a wisp of dusty pink feathers. His mother’s stuff. He leaned down, and sniffed.
Nothing; no nostalgia here.
This reminded him of that strangely pronounced ether he’d first detected upon entering, prompting another slow and cautious survey of these close environs. Suddenly, he focused on the rocking horse behind him: its mouth hard and forever upon the bit, its dark liquid eyes ceaselessly beckoning, its black, ratty mane hanging like Spanish moss from its thick and arching crest. A product of his father’s skills—some parts fashioned by his pragmatic side, others lavishly sequined by a flamboyant one—it was as close to a carousel piece as any equine rocker could get. It reminded Dillon of a more thriving time, not only serving an example of prosperity’s rewards, but also his father’s extravagant creativity.
Something on its shank had stolen his attention. He initially thought the eruption was sap bubbling out of one of the many cracks upon its chestnut body, borne of the attic’s aridness, but when he was nearly upon it, he had to stop. It looked like insect larvae. An egg mass, specifically, of about thirty. They had reached their advanced stage. Hatching was evident with most of the casings, the hollow majority showing pronounced ruptures.
Spider? Insect?
He ran a hand down the saddle’s dangling (and more practically fashioned) apparatus: dee ring, fender, latigo, girth—they were all present, chrome and leather twinkling and glinting respectively in the growing eventide. Even at the young age of four, every time he mounted the wooden steed in his father’s presence he was made to first point and shout off each part by name—from horn to stirrup—until he had fully memorized them.
The sensation of something delicate fluttered in his chest; a moth, a fragile damselfly, and he thought nostalgia flitted on similar wings. But did it inspire the fumes of lantern oil? Did it bring back the mornings when his father, preparing for the day’s work in the mines, would fill his lamp and carelessly (and, as it later turned out, prophetically) talk about the dangers of false floors and firedamp to a young boy?
Why had he suddenly thought of such specific things? By rousing one memory, it seemed he had loosed another from those fringes; one long forgotten. Had it been sufficiently long enough? That ephemeral ‘yearning’ one should feel when experiencing nostalgia—the distance between those feelings and their associative moments made the accompanying sentiment feel, in a way, compulsory, and therefore most undeserving of someone his age. Or, to use one of his father’s witticisms, he didn’t have enough rope down the well to pull up that bucket of water.
Regardless, he paid particular notice to that melancholic inkling, made even more poignant by its transitory nature.
Focusing once again on the horse’s shank, Dillon concluded that the egg mass had been deposited by an insect, a common species of blowfly, most likely. But blowflies had a particular penchant for laying their eggs upon rotting meat, not wood. This was curious. Curiouser still was that strange mawkish matter he’d initially regarded as sap, the stuff holding the mass together. Too hard to be wax, he reluctantly concluded that it was the rocker’s thick coat of shellac that appeared to have somehow melted in that small area, specifically into the crack, and had then re-hardened, thereby encapsulating, either partially or wholly, the already existing casings. To see it was to be particularly reminded of insect parts fossilized in amber.
Matters became even more bewildering when he spotted the marionette across the aisle. It dangled by one arm from the open end of a tall box, its strings loosely trailing back and disappearing into the container. A puppet eerily renascent, as if it had attempted to escape its prison by going over the wall, only to lose its nerve upon discovering the precipitous drop to the ground. This initial impression was further encouraged by the startled look on the puppet’s face; specifically, the high arch of its black, painted eyebrows, and the fear captured in its tiny brown eyes.
Dillon had forgotten all about this toy. The marionette’s name was Alton. No, Anton! Expertly carved from a block of pine, then capably jointed with brass pins in all the prudent places, the puppet and its painted-on wardrobe appeared to have remained impressively intact: blue shirt, red vest, brown pants, black shoes. Back then, he couldn’t wait to hear them tap across the kitchen table.
Make him dance.
His imagination was getting away from him. Someone—probably him!—had simply rummaged through that box in search of something else and had carelessly tossed the puppet aside, and left it there to contemplate its perilous position.
But, no, that wasn’t true. The only reason Dillon ever came to the attic alone was to check the lock on the trunk, to see if its contents had finally become accessible, to maybe find the internal mechanism disengaged, perhaps by a reticent mother finally overcome with sympathy for her most curious and pining son.
It was even less likely that his compulsive mother, drunk or not, would have cavalierly left that box, or any box, in such a disheveled way. To learn that she had done so would disturb Dillon considerably, as it would indicate a breakdown of a serious magnitude—the collapse, finally, of an already untenable foundation.
Then he noticed another toy lying in a heap directly below where Anton was hanging for dear life. Dillon was instantly struck with the ludicrous notions that either the puppet had thrown it out just prior to its attempted escape, or had dropped it as it dangled from the edge, the thing having finally become too heavy for its scraggy arms. To have imagined one of those scenarios was ludicrous, Dillon decided, but to have so easily entertained both indicated—blushingly so—that he’d not completely outgrown a juvenile inclination to woo the supernatural.
The other toy was a thaumatrope, or ‘magic disc,’ as his father had called them, a thin, simple disc held on opposite sides of its circumference by pieces of string. When rapidly spun, the images on either side of the disc appeared to become superimposed. As a young boy, he’d amassed quite the collection. One of the simpler designs he recalled having depicted an empty jar on one side of the disc, and a pincered beetle on the other. When spun, it appeared that the insect was trapped within the jar. It was basic in conception, but still fun. Other such pairings were only limited by the artist’s imagination.
Thaumatropes had beguiled him, garnering a more involved level of respect. His father had explained to him the principle of ‘persistence of vision,’ the retinal determination to hold onto the image of something for roughly 1/20th of a second after it’s gone. Recalling that definition now seemed eerily befitting for the moment, and was soon inspiring him to stretch its meaning to cover peripheral aspects more internal in scope, to quaintly remind him that some untiring, unwavering things never left the mind’s eye.
Like the marionette, he’d forgotten all about the thaumatropes. That relatively short span of time between then and now had him feeling unworthy of his emotions; to bridge that distance with a particular sentiment was to cheat and go to the head of a line, a line stretched by natural order.
Suspiciously, Dillon walked over to the dangling puppet, then reached down and picked the thaumatrope from the floor. The paired choice for this one was also basic; perhaps the most popular union of them all: on one side, a bird at rest upon a straight line, and on the other, a rounded cage. Spin it and you got a caged bird, perched contentedly. Dillon did just that, and was instantly perplexed by the effect. Instead of the bird’s resulting incarceration, Dillon saw only the image of the cage, but with its door open . There was no bird, perched or otherwise.
He flipped the disc over, then once over again. There was clearly a bird, then a closed cage. He took hold of the strings and spun the disc again. Empty cage with its door open.
Dillon dropped the toy, too stunned to back away.
He stared at the marionette, as if for an explanation. But nothing was forthcoming; just that startled look, appearing even more apt for the occasion.
Directly across from the rocking horse stood his sister’s large and elaborate dollhouse, one his father had built. His sister had moved away long ago, married some man of ‘less than modest means,’ and now lived in a town so far away that her face had all but disappeared from his memory. In fact, he’d last seen her at their father’s funeral, and her visage was the only image he could no longer clearly recapture from that day.
It had been a closed casket affair, but Dillon hadn’t needed that opportunity to remember his father’s creased face. His sister, on the other hand, should have been so lucky.
There was a family picture album, within which he could satiate that privation of memory, but locating it would require an extensive search through these very boxes, and whatever bond he and his sister may have once shared wasn’t titillating enough to initiate such a quest. After she’d left the house for good, he would sneak into her room and play with the family of whittled figures she’d properly found to tenant the dollhouse—a distinguished family made to emulate her own in both its number and wardrobe, he recalled. But his fascination had really been drawn by the structure’s aesthetics: the joinery, the imbrication of the roof shingles, the stately entrance of the tabernacle frame; rather than aspects customarily doted over by maternal pretenses. Dillan was captivated by the intricacies that were so much his father, a man consumed by detail.
It bothered him, a little, to be reminded that his father had lavished just as much extravagant talent upon his sister.
And now inside the dollhouse there faintly glowed a spectral tint, just a figment of a pigment, the same sort of insinuation of light that clings to the horizon moments before the day is snuffed, a light in passive transcendence. So dim, in fact, that it was most probably lit by his own fanciful notion. To suppose anything more would be … more nonsense.
If there were intentions behind this ghostly display, Dillon didn’t know them.
Outside, the sun had just sunk below the horizon, and the attic would very soon be a potage of shadows, with just enough light slipping in from the dropdown stairs to make the consommé barely negotiable.
Dillon managed to turn his attention back to the rocking horse, thinking to start there, that he must have missed a connection, however tenuous, to those other mysteries burgeoning around him. He considered each unusual instance in the order encountered, then quickly accepted that approach as disingenuous and wondered if a proper understanding could be had by knowing the truer sequence of events; assuming, of course, that such a progression existed outside his imagination.
He drew lines with his eyes, connecting first the rocking horse to the marionette, then quickly down to the thaumatrope, then back to the dollhouse—then, upon a startling notion, to the attic’s round and only window, now a spectrally charged sphere between the dimming sky and the darkening interior. His interest was not the window itself, but the sill. If flies had hatched from those casings, he reasoned, it was almost certain that some of their dried remains would be resting there, having found that ingress into the wild a deadly illusion.
He considered what he might find, and made his way to the window. What he discovered, upon initial inspection, were five ordinary flies, all clearly dead. He pinched one up from the curved sill, and upon closer examination, found it exhibiting a rather distinct and misplaced morphology: its eyes were … belonging to a different species. That is to say, they were the compound eyes of an insect, yes, but each seemed especially large and displayed a pronounced ‘pseudo-pupil,’ characteristically seen in certain predatory insects, such as dragonflies, praying mantises, tiger beetles … Three of the four remaining flies showed these same features. Despite these peculiar nuisances, Dillon would have disregarded them if not for another modification: the flies’ mouthparts, those mandibles having also assumed deviant proportions, appeared more suitable for chewing than ‘sponging.’
He closed his eyes, shook his head. Again, more nonsense.
Reluctantly, he looked back to the large trunk. His father’s things were in there. Of course they were.
Without any sort of describable provocation, his attention was fully and immediately diverted to the three feeders that he’d initially come to get. Did the answer lie with them? he wondered—and quite unashamedly, as he was allowing himself the privilege to ‘circumvent reality without the guilt,’ if only for the moment. Did one or all of those feeders retain some excess of magic brought over from their place of manufacture, that near-fictional carnival of enchanted repute? Did one or all possess the means to light, however dimly, a dollhouse? To alter, however vaguely, the morphology of insects? Emit enough diabolism to animate a marionette and give it the initiative to abscond, if only partially, with a cleverly deceptive thaumatrope?
Did it have to necessarily be a theft? Could the puppet have been attempting … a delivery?
He smiled, fully letting go of his momentary endorsement of the speculative. Being a willing student of biology in one classroom, and a rather reticent one of the human condition in another, he was aware that his species was powerfully inclined to recognize patterns. Preferably, more logical kinds of patterns and behaviors, but certainly willing to take just about anything, and in growing degrees of absurdness as options waned, the chief example here being that a puppet had attempted to get to him a curious toy—one obviously altered to affect upon him a profound realization.
Or, had his imagination simply become a liability? At the very least, he understood these sudden mysteries around him to be the stray and unraveled ends of a boy’s once gullible imagination; at most, they were some of his childhood’s favorite things having become impossibly enlivened. What was that word his mother had used? Rekindled .
But to what purpose?
He considered the flies and their odd modifications. What did the changes represent? Something purely biological, or profoundly metaphorical? Despite a staunch adherence to the scientific method, he went with the latter, deciding that in order to understand, he simply had to glean a simple yet poignant inference from the flies’ peculiar metamorphoses. A corollary …
Then it came to him: aggression . The flies were turning from prey to hunter.
Strangely, that reach didn’t seem so far: an allegory he easily recognized for his hormonal rage from boy to manhood.
What about the puppet, the thaumatrope, his sister’s dollhouse? Where did their shenanigans bolster his theory? Did each tacitly imply a bold assertiveness? He met with them one at a time and imagined a correlation for each. The animated puppet, he decided, represented initiative ; the thaumatrope, his pending release from a gilded captivity ; the dollhouse light …?
Dillon stared back at the large trunk. His father’s things were in there.
The dollhouse light: the assurance that the finality of life is just a cruel illusion . And the atmosphere he’d first encountered in the attic? The effluvium of magic . Or, more appropriately, he thought, the residue of a fuse set burning .
Looking closely again, then drawing back and taking in the whole landscape, Dillon had to finally accept that, yes, the feeders were influencing certain objects. The rocking horse’s flank, for instance, was blatantly exposed and in direct line-of-sight to those heirlooms, as was the tall box with the fleeing puppet, as was the dollhouse. No other objects, partially or wholly, stood between these items and the three feeders.
Then again, a majority of artifacts fell similarly within the feeders’ proximity, yet appeared free of their alleged effects.
It was as if these things, these childhood things , had been selectively targeted. Besides their magic, did the feeders also possess a kind of intelligence, one capable of wielding such discretion?
No, of course they didn’t! To imagine them emitting magic was crazy enough!
That would mean more than one force was at work. A cooperation, of sorts, between forces. Indiscernible forces, he imagined, that would have to be ethereally entwined. Entities sharing the same veiled realm.
Not cooperation, he further premised, but a mutually agreed understanding of what was to be accomplished in this attic.
Back at the rocking horse, Dillon stared intently at its invaded shank, at the egg mass and its nest of dried resin, finally concluding that at some point during the past year, specifically when the feeders were wintering in the attic, ‘something’ had attempted, either intentionally or inadvertently, a change upon the very most exposed area of the horse’s shank, turning the wood to flesh. Then, evidently, that ‘something,’ that magic, was abruptly taken away. Probably when the feeders were removed and relocated to the back porch, he reasoned, while spring was edging into warmer days. And while those feeders were absent from the attic, that patch of flesh began to rot before finally changing back to its original wooden state—but not before a common fly exploited the putrefaction, exposing itself and its offspring to that dwindling residue of magic.
Had there not been an interruption of that enchanted flow, he further suspected, Anton the puppet would have been able to complete his journey. It would have allowed the dollhouse to achieve and maintain its grand illumination.
He once again regarded the large trunk, half buried between a spillage of wicker baskets, a tattered shawl twisting between them like the sloughed skin of a paisley snake. A trunk, Dillon mused, that was like most other things: tucked too far away from any errant sources of magic, too far away from basking properly in the feeders’ glow.
Well, not for long , he thought.
~
Dillon made a fresh batch of sugar water, and before he had the first feeder back up under the porch’s eave, hordes of hummers were literally swiping his body, rushing aggressively past to get to the sweet serum. The fact that full dark had settled in made no difference to them whatsoever. They gorged, while seemingly never sating their hunger.
He watched for quite a long time.
Dillon smiled, no longer suspicious over their piqued and habituated demeanor. Most people never made it past the hummers’ tiny size and adorable reputation to realize that they were predators themselves, chiefly insectivorous and only ate sugar water and plant nectar to give them the energy to chase down those tiny bugs.
He would only hang two of the feeders, as he’d already committed the third to its permanent resting place atop the large trunk, the one in the attic, having deliberately and clandestinely hidden it beneath a cluster of fraying wicker baskets.
The trunk held his father’s most cherished things, his spirit .
It wasn’t about opening the lock. Not anymore. Maybe, just maybe, those cooperating forces could reach an understanding.
In preparation of his mother’s eventual questions regarding the last feeder’s whereabouts, Dillon practiced an excuse that he had carelessly dropped it, shattered into unrecognizable fragments, and that he had discarded the carnage with the rest of the refuse. He would gladly and sincerely apologize for not being more careful and accept his punishment, no matter how severe, confident that it would be.
Lastly, in the warm yellow glow of lanterns, Dillon noticed a peculiar feature upon some of the hummers: a serrated irregularity along their long, thin beaks, nearly imperceptible, made especially so in the diffused light.
He smiled wider upon realizing what was happening.
The hummers were growing teeth.
Dillon shivered, an act inspired not by the culmination of bizarre events, but rather an authentic cold. The snow would soon be here, and would once again herald the start of a new cycle, just as a waning gibbous moon hangs on the edge of an early morning sky to tell of another’s end.