“You got skinny,” I remember John saying. “They didn’t feed you enough?”
His blue eyes had been clearer than I’d remembered, his sharp face patched with eczema.
A haze was hanging over the city and the trees behind it. The sun was high up in the sky, and we cast no shadows. I remember watching his eyes wander over my body in a way that men’s eyes rarely do. At first I didn’t recognize it, because it had nothing to do with hate, or sex, or both.
“I figured you would be hungry.” He said, and he looked down at a container he was holding. It made me cry for some absurd reason, the fact that he’d brought me food.
“I missed you,” I answered, because it was easier than telling him what happened; how they gave me food sometimes with piss and broken glass in it, how I just got used to being hungry all the time and after a while stopped noticing, just like when we lived in the squat on Wharf Street and there was never any food.
I wonder now if he’d been able to see how I’d changed, that day– before the words actually came loose from my mouth, before I showed him. I wasn’t the saucer-eyed, speechless thing that used to run from him into the shadows whenever he stayed up all night pacing through downtown, looking for a girl that didn’t exist anymore. And I wasn’t that girl anymore either. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when Danielle was still around and everything was normal. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I was still a person at all, in any practical sense of the word.
Sometimes when I think back, I try to pinpoint the exact time when Danielle started slipping. I don’t know why I do it, other than as a way to think of more avenues to blame myself. When I really pick away at that last year, it usually comes down to one thing.
Before the drugs, before she started working, there was something else that was eating away at Danielle. I still remember the day she first told me about it, although towards the end it was all she ever talked about. She and I had been walking to our secret river, the one you have hike down hours of logging roads to get to. The wind had been full of pollen and asphalt fumes, milkweed pods bursting with their silky wool. Time had seemed to be passing too quickly. Just weeks before, the spring had been young and new—the riverbank lined with budding crocuses and tender shoots of grass. Not the brambled, overgrown place it was now, thick with insects and wilted from the heat.
“Summer never smells like this, where I used to live,” she’d told me, stopping, looking at me with her red-rimmed eyes.
Her hair was soft tatters of faded, sea-foam green, falling across my face when she bent to kiss my cheek, like she was trying to console me over some bad thing that hadn’t happened yet. Soon she would start dying it a fake yellow-blonde, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know that any of the things that happened would.
The logging road we were on is visible from the ferry when you’re coming to the island; they all are, dusty veins worming through the green quilt of spruce trees that otherwise covers the mountains. You can see the clear cuts too, and they look like the bald patches on a mangy dog. I’d seen them from the ferry the day John came to take me back to the city, and my heart had lurched and hammered against my hollow ribs.
“What’s wrong?” I’d asked her, and she said that she was crying for all the girls who’d disappeared. I knew what she was talking about; I’d known before the papers ever admitted it, just like we’d all known.
Sometimes they would find them tied up clumsily in shredded tarps and yellow rope, stuffed into the mouths of culvert pipes that leak toxic sludge from the logging sites into the rivers, which carry it eventually to the sea. Sometimes they would find them all cut up, a foot in some residential trash can, its protruding bone mangled by the teeth of a chainsaw. An arm or a leg might wash up on the shore in Esquimalt, or be dragged up in a fisherman’s net. But most of them, they never found. Not even in pieces. Most of the girls, nobody ever looked for. It might have been that the rest of the world didn’t even notice that they were gone.
The mission downtown where Paula works has photos of them all on a big memorial wall; not just the girls, but everybody. The old man who died of exposure three years ago on the steps of the government-run shelter because they said that all the beds were full and they couldn’t let him in. Reggie Elchuk, who the cops shot dead in the park last January because he’s not all there and for some reason they thought that made him dangerous enough to shoot.
People think that killers are exceptional individuals, but that’s not necessarily true. The shelter workers who locked the door, and the cop who pulled the trigger on Reggie, they’re what most people would think of as normal. The people who killed the girls, or hurt them so badly that they wanted to kill themselves, they were normal people too. When something is commonplace enough it becomes ordinary by default, even when that something is killing. The world is full of everyday, ordinary murderers. They’re everywhere you look.
That day on the logging roads Danielle told me that the crows who perch, screaming all along the telephone wires downtown are the ghosts of the girls nobody looked for. She said they build their nests way up high, where nobody would think to look. I turned my face to her, and when I looked in her sootblack eyes I realized that the trees around us were filled with the squalling of birds, as though I’d been deaf to the noise before she said it. Their razor voices filled the woods, so loud in my ears that they could almost drown out the hum of faraway chainsaws, the snap and creak of felled timber. The scraping of their voices swirled in her eyes, so dark they looked like they were all pupil. She looked more animal than girl, I thought, her sharp features tensed like she was in pain. When Danielle said things like that, it always seemed like there was no reason they shouldn’t be true. The world she saw was more beautiful than reality, and it was full of possibility. My world had no possibilities in it, back then. In my world those girls were just dead, lying in unmarked graves or cheap pine caskets. They were invisible, just like their killers had wanted.
We’d been standing by one of the clear cuts when she said it, and I could see almost forever across the ripped-up wasteland of what used to be the forest. The crows were circling above us, mirrored by their shadows. Black, bird-shaped patches that glided over the uprooted stumps and the hacked off limbs, the parched earth that stretched out to the horizon. I had never seen crows circle before; I thought that only vultures did that. Now sometimes I wonder whether I imagined it.
I wanted to keep looking, but Danielle hooked her arm through mine and kept walking down the dirt road, like there was nothing to see. I remembered cutting peppers on a wooden chopping board once, years before in the kitchenette at Danielle’s mom’s apartment, and accidentally cutting into the pad of my thumb so deep that the knife grazed my bone. It didn’t bleed as much as I’d though it would, and when I rinsed the blood off under cold water in the sink I could see a cross-section of all the different layers of skin and muscle. The layers went in concentric circles, all the way to the bone. They looked like growth rings, I thought, the ones you see on a sawed down stump that will tell you how old the tree was, if you count them.
Please Danielle, I’d said, although I hadn’t said it out loud.
Never let me see you as one of the crows.
In those days it was always just me and Danielle, and usually John too although unlike us he actually had a few other friends. Humans inevitably seem to form some sort of pack when they don’t have normal social bonds like families around them, and I guess Danielle and John were my pack. I remember how the alley we used to sit in was roofed in metal grating, and through it I could always see the shapes of circling police helicopters. Ghetto birds, John used to call them, and Danielle would elbow him in the arm and tell him to fuck off, even though she thought it was funny too. That July had been the hottest month of the hottest year, and the city was just a coffin of black asphalt, a jungle with no canopy to shade us.
We’d been so thin and ascetic, always sprawled in the hidden alley or huddled in the alcoves of vacant stores like statues in a grotto. I would nod off into the black muck of opiate dreams and wake up with offerings placed in front of me in my overturned hat, like magic. A few dollars in nickels and pennies, a bent cigarette, sometimes the small miracle of a crumpled bill.
The three of us had never really fit in, even among the other social rejects, although I think it was the worst for Danielle; most people didn’t talk to her at all, probably because she seemed crazy to anybody who didn’t understand her, which was virtually everybody except me, John, and her mom. I could see it hurting her, the way everybody else’s ideas of what was real didn’t match up with what she saw and heard and felt. I think in the end that’s why she slipped so much more easily, so much faster than me or John did.
I remember the first time I saw the bruises on her thighs, under her short white schoolgirl kilt. Her body seemed to be getting smaller every day, like the drugs were eating all the softness off her frame. The white skirt and high heels looked so out of place on Danielle, sad and absurd next to her picked-at skin. I missed her old jeans and sweatshirts. I missed not worrying about her. I looked at her face and the thought struck me that maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did, or at all. I didn’t know any more if she needed to do this to pay for her growing habit, or whether her habit was growing because it was the only way to cope with working on the Drive.
“Why would you shoot up into your shins?” I’d asked her, when I noticed the dark little circles along the edge of her bone. “Doesn’t it hurt there?”
“Exactly,” she’d grinned. “I’m trying to stop.”
Her eyes had glittered, wet in their dark hollows. She scratched one of the scabs on her shin, sniffling, wiping her skinny wrist across her face. Her watery eyes, her permanent runny nose. It was like Danielle was always crying.
Sometimes at night when I’m trying to sleep I still think about that day, and I find, more often than not, that the pain never really dulled after all. Sometimes I’m just more capable of deluding myself into thinking that it did.
On those nights I usually lie on my back in the dark and stare up at the tiny perforations on the acoustic ceiling tiles in the apartment that John and I have shared for the past couple years now. I start counting them, but the task is always too simple to distract me and I just forget what number I’m on and end up having to start over. It’s one of those things you learn, like pacing, like learning to thread your eyebrows with the string from a no-name brand tampon because tweezers are sharp, and you can’t have anything sharp. Like meticulously peeling the staples from the spine of some pulpy religious pamphlet, just so you can have something to hurt yourself with, just to watch the blood bead up in the diminutive little scratches and remind you that you’re still alive.
Outside, that stuff doesn’t work quite as well. The real world is too big and too bright, and it takes a lot more to keep your mind from wandering.
Later that day Danielle and I had gone to her mom’s apartment and helped her bake sugar cookies, the three of us spooning powdered milk into endless cups of sweet coffee, listening to the oldies station on the radio and talking about the weather, and places we’d like to travel, and movies that we’d seen. Danielle had put on pants before we went over, but I could still feel the dark tenderness of the bruises on her legs, always cautious not to bump into her, wincing at her soreness as though it were my own. I pressed maraschino cherries from a little jar into the soft, white lumps of cookie dough that Danielle was arranging on the sheets of tin foil. I slid the first sheet into the toaster oven and set the timer.
I thought of the bruises on Danielle’s legs and I thought of all the women in the world who have killed people, who have murdered the men that hurt them, who have been swallowed so deep into the darkness that they lash out at the first thing that moves. I thought of them pressing maraschino cherries into soft balls of cookie dough and placing the tinfoil sheets into toaster ovens, knowing all the while that they are killers.
I’m not sure exactly of the last time I ever saw Danielle, and in a way I’m glad that I can’t remember. If I was the last one to ever see her alive, I don’t want to know. I worried when I didn’t see her for a few days, and naturally the thought crossed my mind that something bad could have happened. I went to her mom’s house, and she hadn’t been there. I went to the drop-in at the mission where they serve free food and coffee every morning, and Paula said that she hadn’t seen her either, which was odd, because lately she’d been coming in every morning as soon as the place opened, usually looking like she hadn’t slept.
I’d been about to leave when I noticed a guy sitting alone at one of the tables, staring at me. He was wearing a yellow and brown striped toque, and his longish hair was half-knotted into unintentional dreadlocks. He held a cup of coffee in his bony hands, hunched over its warmth. I recognized him from other times I’d gone there to eat, but I couldn’t remember his name.
“I saw her about a week ago,” He’d said to me, and his words carried across the dull murmur of people talking and laughing, the drone of the television mounted on the far wall. Paula and I both just stopped and looked at him. When neither of us answered, he kept talking.
It had been a cold night, he’d said, and he was going to go to one of the bank ATMs by the Drive so he could have somewhere warm to sleep. He’d seen her sitting in the bus shelter there, nodding off with her head down, her long yellow hair hanging over her face. A car had stopped for her, and she’d talked to the person inside and then got in. I asked him what the car looked like, what the license plate number was, but he couldn’t remember. His bloodshot eyes looked sad.
“I’m sorry,” he said, or at least I think that’s what he said. I wasn’t really listening to anything, anymore.
A couple of days later, some ten-year-old kid found her body in the harbour. The kid had been flying kites on the docks with his dad when he looked down and saw her bleached-pale hair curling and wavering among the kelp fronds. There was a cement brick lashed to her feet, and a ligature of nylon rope around her red, abraded neck. There were marks all over her, like she’d fought until she couldn’t anymore. They’d called the cops, who hadn’t even been looking for her despite the increasingly desperate phone calls from me and John and her mom.
After that day, I started seeing monsters everywhere. I dreamed about standing by the side of the highway at night with my thumb held out and a long knife hidden in the sleeve of my sweatshirt, watching the headlights pass me in the dark. I would know somehow when the killer stopped for me. He would lock the car doors after I got in, and I would laugh and laugh.
I would walk alone down the street late at night with the fall wind stinging my face, just laughing to myself like there was nobody listening. The dry leaves danced and spiralled around my feet, like a living thing.
I stopped sleeping, and my eyes sunk into my skull. I went to the funeral in a borrowed black dress, and Danielle’s mom cried and cried, her eyes so puffy they were just slits in her weathered face. You guys were all my children, she said, throwing her arms around me and John. Don’t ever forget that, any time you need anything. Her body was warm and alien to me. I didn’t push her away; I think it’s the first time I ever didn’t push somebody away. The coffin was lowered into its rectangular hole in the ground, and I thought of the way the frost would creep into her body soon, ice crystals spreading like a pattern of lace over her cheeks, the way they do on window panes sometimes. I was the only one who wasn’t crying. Beaks and talons prodded my esophagus, trying to get past the lump in my throat. I could feel their damp wings struggling in my chest and throat, slick with swallowed mucous. They would find a weak spot, I thought, somewhere they could claw right through me and flap out through the ragged hole, perching on the boughs of fir trees and the shoulders of pallbearers, laughing and laughing and laughing.
The whole thing kind of scared John straight, and he started sleeping on the couch at his friend Jean-Marc’s house, saying he was going to get on welfare and get his own apartment, get away from the streets once and for all. Even though he technically lived there, he would come downtown and walk in circles around all our old hangouts for most of the night, sitting up at the All-Nite drinking dollar coffee with his head in his hands. If I saw him, I ducked down alleys or into thick shadows. He called my name a couple of times, and I didn’t answer. I crouched in dark alcoves, holding my breath until he went away.
When I finally found my monster, I wasn’t even looking. That’s how it works; they hunt, they have to be hunting you, not the other way around. I was walking alone just before dawn, dragging my feet down a back road that leads eventually to the highway. They all do, just like any river will eventually take you to the sea. He was driving a new BMW the colour of gunmetal, with windows so tinted that all I saw in them was my own wan reflection when he pulled over and stopped beside me.
“Do you need some help?” He asked me, and he rolled down the passenger’s side window. His smile showed teeth that were too straight and too white. He wore a gold watch on one wrist. His clothes looked expensive but ill-fitting, his stomach straining at the buttons of his shirt. A heart attack belly, Danielle’s mom would have called it.
I remember getting into the car, the leather seat squeaking underneath me. I remember hearing the click of the doors locking, and my heart flinging itself against my ribs.
I don’t really know what to tell you about trying to kill somebody. It’s harder than it looks in the movies.
Bodies are made to withstand things; the breastbone doesn’t just shatter like sugar-glass or puncture like that polyvinyl plastic that stunt dummies are made of.
I panicked when he tried to touch me, and I hurt him worse than I knew I could. I’d been frozen at first, my eyes clamped shut because I was so used to not having a way to escape, used to just waiting until it was over. Then I remembered what it was I held inside the sleeve of my sweater and the next time I opened my eyes the car smelled like blood and shit, the hole in his belly welling with dark redness as I reached around his heaving, shaking body to unlock the doors. I remember that, and I remember running. I remember curling with my knees to my chest in the cradle of a spruce tree’s erosion-exposed roots, asleep in the dirt and the rotten leaves where they found me. Lights and sirens blared from the roadside, flashing through the trees. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been there; it could have been days, but the blood on me was still sticky in some places so I figured it hadn’t actually been that long at all.
Danielle always told me that you have to die to turn into one of the crows, but at some point after my home became a prison cell I began to doubt that. I pled guilty immediately, and then I just stopped opening my mouth altogether. I could feel my heart growing black, spined by the quills of lacquer-dark feathers. It flinched and stuttered in my ribs faster than it should have, like a bird’s heart, even though there was nothing to scare or excite me anymore except my own thoughts.
I refused to do the psych assessments they gave me, or answer any of their questions, so they couldn’t process me through the classification office and I stayed in segregation, away from the other women. I wouldn’t let the doctor touch me either. What if they could tell I had a bird’s heart?
Sometimes when they escorted me back and forth from various counselling offices I would see the women who lived on the general population cell blocks, walled off behind big glass panels so the guards could still see them. They looked beautiful and sad to me, sitting at the bolted-down steel tables together, braiding each other’s hair or playing cards or writing with pencil stubs on sheets of lined paper.
Sometimes they pointed and looked at me, probably wondering what I did to stay in segregation for so long. One of them had peroxide yellow hair that fell in waves past her shoulders, showing three inches of dark brown at the roots. She had a tattoo on her neck, a word I couldn’t read spelled out in looping calligraphy. She reminded me of Danielle, and my eyes filled up and overflowed with tears even though my face stayed slack, still palsied with shock.
I couldn’t hear the crows anymore but I could feel them, just outside the prison’s thick cement walls. The nodes of their minds were like a net, one that stretched and contracted depending on where they were, although it always stayed connected. My mind was part of the net, always anchored in the same place. I could feel the flutter of all their hearts in time with mine, the mad whir of them when they lit from the barbed-wire fence tops outside and launched themselves into the sky, drifting on the salt winds.
Weeks passed before I understood what was happening to me, although I think some part of me had known all along. It started with a feeling of tenseness that spread underneath the skin of my arms and shoulders, a feeling like the hairs on the back of your neck standing up when you’re outside right before an electrical storm. It was warm in my cell during the day, but it seemed like I always had goosebumps. I remember running my hands over the rows and patterns of small protrusions that covered my skin, hard like pebbles underneath my cotton uniform. They were bigger, more defined than normal goosebumps. I had an ache in my bones that was as bad as anything I’d felt, like my skeleton was changing shape inside me. In my chest I could feel something building, something that at first I thought must be the deep, wracking sobs that I still hadn’t let myself cry.
When I finally let the tension bubble up from my throat, I found that it wasn’t sobs I’d been holding back at all. Huddled in the far corner of my cell on the narrow metal cot, peals of laughter pushed their way out from between my lips. It was a coarse, croaking laugh that didn’t sound like anything made by a human throat. It wracked my whole body until I lay supine on the hard mattress, my arms wrapped around my rib cage as if I could somehow contain it.
I guess it helped that I was still in a maximum security segregation unit at the time. After the first of the feathers pushed their tips from the skin of my twisted arms, I had to stop denying what was happening. I’d mummy-wrapped myself in the thin sheets that reeked of harsh detergent, the sound of my own whirring heart and hoarse breathing only broken by the metal clang whenever they opened the slot in my cell door to slide the meal trays in, only to take them away again, uneaten, half an hour later. I knew it was half an hour, because I counted the seconds to distract me from the pain.
Once one of the night watch guards banged on my door while he was making his rounds and asked if I was alright. My new mouth had struggled to force out an answer, but somehow even without lips I’d managed some rough approximation of speech, shaping the sounds in the back of my throat like I assume talking parrots must do.
“Dope sick,” I’d grunted, which seemed to be a good enough explanation for him. I had been there for over a month already, but he hadn’t seemed to question why my withdrawals had taken so long to set in.
It seemed like weeks that I lay there, too afraid even to move in case part of the blanket were to slip off of me. In reality it was actually only a few days before I felt the cramps of my skeleton changing again, back into its original shape. An itch spread over me as each hollow-shafted quill detached from its follicle, leaving me in a nest of shed black feathers. The pits they’d left in my skin contracted to the size of normal pores again, and when I touched my face it was the feeling of a flesh fingertip meeting a flesh cheek. I tried to gather all the feathers and flush them down the toilet before the next guard made their rounds. They heard the excessive flushing and assumed that I’d smuggled contraband which I was now trying to dispose of, which of course warranted a search and the ransacking of the cell. All they found were the sheets, shredded in places where I’d clutched them in my demented hands, which they filed under my name as a count of misconduct.
I don’t really know what to tell you about the rest of the time that I spent there. I drank the cloudy water, ate food that had been spit in. For months I just lay in my cell under the fluorescent lights that never really turn off, idly running my hands over the hard new plains of my body, travelling to faraway places in my head. I kept my eyes closed and felt the salt wind rushing underneath my wings as I coasted, free. When I slept, I dreamed Danielle was perched at the foot of my bed, a cloak of crow’s wings wrapped around her bare shoulders, the long black claws that used to be her feet carving grooves into the bed’s metal frame. She was always telling me something, although on waking I could never remember what.
John came to see me as soon as I was allowed visitors, and I’d cried and asked him not to come again. Seeing him through the thick pane of glass, untouchable, had been harder than not seeing him at all.
Eventually I was deemed fit to enter general population, but the girl who’d reminded me of Danielle was gone by then, released or transferred some other place. For a while I shared a cell with a woman whose ex-husband had covered her in gasoline and set her on fire; her skin was a palimpsest of whorls and knots, still smooth in a few places like tree bark that’s been peeled away, exposing the smooth, living wood underneath. Another time I saw an eighteen-year-old girl bite through her own tongue and spit blood at one of the guards who was trying to drag her to solitary. It would have been an ordinary assault charge, but she had Hepatitis, and her sentence was lengthened by another eight months.
Everybody knew there was something off about me, but the mind will do anything to find a rational explanation, even if that means deceiving itself. Sometimes I would notice some of the really far-gone prisoners looking at me, the ones who talked to themselves and took handfuls of coloured pills from the nurses every morning. It’s always the mad people that I think know the truth– maybe the world of magic only shows itself to them, because it knows nobody will believe them anyway. Or maybe when you live in the narrowest margin of society, you live in the margins of everything, reality included.
Years have passed now, but still I can feel people’s stares following me in a way they never used to. It happens when I walk down the Drive in the early morning, on the way to the job Paula got me at the mission. It happens when I weave my way through the crowded tables in the common room, handing out the soup and bread and overcooked pasta, chatting with some of the regulars before I have to run back to the kitchen again. It happens when John and I sit at the patio of the All-Nite for breakfast with Danielle’s mom, drinking the bottomless coffee, still tiptoeing around our shared pain like we might well be doing for the rest of our lives.
Sometimes when I look at her and I see the shadows in her eyes that weren’t there before, I think that she can tell what’s changed about me too. She can hear the words underneath the clatter of wings that fills the air when the three of us are walking together and the sky fills, inexplicably, with crows. They form a chorus line along the rotting eaves of downtown storefronts, and they stare at us with dozens of pairs of beady black eyes. She knows that they’re looking at us, and she looks back.
Even when we’re talking and laughing together, part of me is almost on edge around her. Part of me is always waiting for her to lean close to me and whisper, I know your secret, quiet so that nobody else can hear.
I know that you’re the reason the Drive is a different place now, she’ll tell me, and she’ll look at me with her eyes full of those roiling black shadows.
You’re the reason the cops don’t come there anymore, and neither do the news cameras.
You’re the twisted shadow that some people see perched on the mission’s peaked roof at night, although nobody ever believes them.
You’re the reason it’s not girls who are disappearing anymore.
And then I’ll feel my heart beat out of time with itself as the crows all descend, their scraping laughter echoing through the city, and John will absently lace his fingers through mine and squeeze my hand, like he always does when he’s nervous. And then something will happen, although to this day I’m not sure what I think that something might be.
Maybe it’ll be nothing. Maybe our mouths will fall open, and the three of us will laugh.