The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📗

to one Jeffrey Grant, a 35-year-old man, unemployed, who lived alone. The toxicology report showed large levels of heroin in his system. Authorities were able to determine the time the fire started by the sole object that survived it: a bird clock, frozen at midnight.

Hagride

Justine Gardner

“Devil bird,” the man muttered from the bench behind her.

Josie ignored him, as she did most mornings when she came here to scope the lake, assess the weather, the day before her. March, the air still cool enough to fog her breath, make her shiver when the wind hit the spot between collar and neck.

“Devil bird,” he said louder. And then again: “Devil bird!”

She looked at him this time and saw he was pointing toward the fallen tree sprawled into the water to her left. A resting place for the birds—the coots and ducks usually—but today there was someone new.

“Cormorant,” she said to herself. “Double-crested.”

The large, black bird was posed on the farthest branch, wings stretched out in the faint morning sun, holding still.

“Devil bird!” the man shouted again.

She usually rotated around the lake; the same five or six hits on the clock, more or less. But she always started there, at the cement viewing platform that edged into the water, ringed with benches, no fishing allowed. It was the touchstone, the fork in the road: did she go left and through the wooded peninsula, past racing, unleashed dogs, under the bridge, sliding down muddy banks to the water’s lip? Or did she head right, toward the marshes, the sloppy edges where the men drank and smoked. Where Pop-Pop used to sit, his feet on that old log, whites of his eyes as yellow as bottled piss.

Today she went left, toward the peninsula, craving the brief flash of woods, the absence of ghosts. The weather seemed right for it; damp, the moist air making it feel colder than it should be a week out from Easter.

Cold Easter, late June, Mama used to say. She meant it was gonna be winter for a while longer. The cormorant had come back, though. Standing on that branch, wings out like a crucifix.

Devil bird.

No, not that. A fisherman’s bird. Josie’s kind of bird. Cormorants knew where the fish were; where it was easy to nab them without all the fuss. Follow a cormorant, he’ll show you the way. Thing was, these park cormorants kept themselves on the other side of fences; their fishing spots protected by signs with red slashes. Josie obeyed those signs, but not everybody did.

The woods were empty, as she’d hoped. Not even a sign of Jack—not his name, just what she called him—the skinny rat-headed man who sometimes slept by the path under a raft of tree branches. He was Jack to her because, well, he had a proclivity. “Lady fish, lady fish,” he’d mutter at her from behind a tree, trying to get her to look. She’d looked once, years ago, and never again. Now, if Jack came anywhere near her, she threw a rock in his direction. Still, she’d sometimes catch a sight of that woolly hat of his, full of sticks and leaves. Lady fish, lady fish.

She set her kit down on the bench of the wooded pavilion at the peninsula’s southeastern tip. Shook her shoulders out and cast off, releasing herself into the feeling, the first line of the day. The lure flying through the air, landing with a soft plop, water rippling outward. She watched it float on top of the silver water, moving with the chilled breeze and nothing else. She breathed, smelled wet leaves and mud. If she schooled herself, she could ignore the cans and plastic cups left by Jack and others and see nothing but woods, water, sky.

She reeled in, feeling for a tug, anything. Early yet she knew, fish not biting. Fish still dozing their slow winter away, dreaming of summer flies drowning on the shining sky above them.

She cast off again. She should move on. Only time enough before home, to Mama, then work. She counted to sixty in a slow tick and reeled in.

The next stop was not far from her first, still on the peninsula, but more covered, off the narrow dirt path that just skirted the edge of the water. The mud was thick here: March mud, sticky and persistent. She’d be bringing it home with her, caught in the cleats of her brown boots. Mama used to make her shed her shoes in the hall, leave them there till the mud dried and then she’d bang them together over the trash, sending clouds of dusted earth everywhere. Now Mama didn’t notice if Josie came all the way inside, took her boots off on the couch, leaving streaks of lake mud across the floor.

Josie found a leafy pile to rest her kit and cast off into the shallows. Waited.

The cormorant’s head appeared like a dark snake in the water to her right so abruptly she jumped back several feet, dropped her pole. She scrambled to pluck it from the mud and reeled in to keep the bird from getting caught in her line. The cormorant paused, seeming to wait for her to finish, before paddling by and leaping onto a log to her left. Beads of water rolled from its back as it shook its great wings dry. The feathers weren’t just black, she noticed, but a deep bronze in places, rimmed in darker ink. The bird turned its head, catching her with a sapphire eye, and then lifted into the air, the wet breeze from its wings just touching her cheek. For a second she thought she could smell the rich, icy heart of the lake.

She moved on. Her third spot was farther in, on the path along the upper wedge of the lake, toward the boathouse. To get to the water here required scraping down the steep banks, curving around tree trunks to find a two-foot slice of space to stand. She liked these spots