THE SWALLOW

Polly

I rooted around in the box. There were lots more drawings of swallows. They were all signed by Winnie, and judging by how her signature changed, they were done over a number of years. The earlier drawings were simple, a child’s drawings, but gradually they got a lot better. She was really quite good, I thought, looking at one of a swallow perched on the side of a nest. The nest was built under the eaves of a house, and I could see the heads of two little baby birds peeking over the top.

There must have been thirty drawings of swallows in that box. Pencil, crayon, watercolors. There were more of the nest and many of the swallow flying. In the colored ones, the swallow’s feathers were carefully painted cool blue, its throat orange and its breast white. As Winnie grew older, the pictures became more and more detailed, down to the last feather on the swallow’s forked tail. One of the pictures of the nest showed the cemetery wall and the tops of gravestones, making it clear that Winnie was sitting at her window, drawing the swallow that returned to its nest year after year.

I noticed that in every picture where the swallow was flying, it was passing over a different landscape. The earlier drawings showed trees made of bubbles and sticks, rolling hills and square houses with triangle roofs. But as the form of the swallow improved, the countryside became more intricate. And it changed. A thick pine forest, a mountain range, a desert island, a tropical jungle, icebergs, ocean—Winnie’s swallow was traveling the world.

Rose

I felt suspended in time and space on that high bridge, far from the dim city lights. I moved as if I were in a dream, one foot after another. The blowing snow felt cold on my face. A few more of the old-fashioned cars trundled by, their engines loud. A stone alcove opened up at my right, jutting out into space. I turned in and leaned against the cold stone parapet. Darkness opened up around me—the big sky, the long drop to the valley below.

Cursed. My family was cursed. First Winnie, now me. It had killed her. Was it going to kill me too? Or—was I already dead, as Polly kept saying? Was there a chance that I really was Winnie? That all my life, everything I could remember, was just some pale dream I was having in the shadowy world of the dead? Was the reason why I could see ghosts the simple fact that I was a ghost myself?

I drew a deep breath of cold air into my lungs. How could that be? How could I be dead and still see these cloudy puffs of warm breath come out of me? How could I be dead and feel the tingling cold in my fingers and the bitter wind on my cheeks, the snow softly falling on my eyelashes?

“Easy,” whispered a voice in my ear. “You could be dead and imagining it all.”

I whirled around but there was no one there. I heard someone laughing, and then a loud thump, as if a car had hit something, and then suddenly I was caught in a dizzy, whirling black cloud, with that sensation I’d had in the graveyard of falling, lights tumbling around me, the scream—and then it stopped.

I was crouched on the cold concrete sidewalk beside the balustrade. Someone was standing in front of me. In the light from passing cars I could see black oxfords, dark stockings, a long black dress.

I raised my head.

Winnie stood there, staring down at me. Looking like my twin.