The Invention of Flight by Susan Neville Page B

in one wing and the broken wire sticking out of its breast that John brought her as a peace offering at the end of that same awful summer when she had the crush on the pastor. When he brought it into the dark entry hall, the wire was longer and embedded in a piece of driftwood. They knelt in the hall to put the driftwood on the floor and a thin wedge of light through the letter slot in the door lit only the glass bird, the round glasses on John’s face, a lock of his blonde hair, and the diamond on her hand as she touched the bird’s left wing. And filled with white light, the wire hidden in the dark and bending, the bird looked as if it flew away from her on its own power, then back to her hand. And she decided that she loved him again, through that bird. Then John placed the bird onher dresser where two days later one of the children, she’d forgotten which one, snapped the wire and left the bird lying in an ashtray. She told everyone she’d thrown it away then, but she kept it in an embroidered handkerchief in her nightstand, ashamed of being so foolish. Then last week she started thinking about it, and she put the bird and the handkerchief in a velvet-lined ring box and went outside in her nightgown to bury the box in the yard. When she came back into the kitchen and poured herself some wine and sat at the table she started to giggle, couldn’t stop, wondered how she’d become exactly what they expected of her, a crazy old woman drinking medicinal wine, going outside at night in her gown with a shovel, burying things in her back yard.
    The table fills. Everyone eats, the younger ones push the kraut to one side of their plates, wrinkle their noses. One great-granddaughter takes a napkin and dries the kraut juice from the knockwurst she chose instead of sausage, because it tasted the most like hot dogs. One granddaughter, the dancer, taps a tune on her plate with a knife. A son wolfs down his sausage, spears his wife’s uneaten sausage with a fork, finishes that, and looks around for more. Alma eats a roll, some Jello, wonders if any of her married children will notice that she doesn’t have anything else, decides she’ll wait to get more food until someone mentions that she doesn’t have any. Before her illness they would have noticed, now they’re afraid to look at her too closely. They talk to her of things around her, look at that car, at that photograph, and that’s where their eyes rest. A four-year-old great-grandson sitting on her right leans over and says,Grandma, are you sick? and his mother, putting her arm around him says, No, of course Great-grandma’s not sick, she’s fine, she’ll live forever, and Alma wants to stand up, make a speech, say, Listen it’s true and today I’m not all that afraid, things change form, why are you all ignoring it? But she doesn’t say anything, because she knows it’s hard not to be afraid. She wants to say that it’s only something about cells growing too fast. She knows enough to sound scientific about it, she can talk knowledgeably of organs and glands, but she doesn’t know enough to stop it from feeling like black magic. And it hasn’t been that easy to live with it. A few cells having a grand old time at the expense of her body, not just her body, but her self and everything she saw through her eyes in her own way. One consolation there. Revenge if she wanted it. The earth would lose one way of looking at it. No one would ever listen to her back yard quite the way she did. And that’s all the earth has required of her after all—a pair of eyes, ears, a nose, nerve endings in the skin, another organism to sense that it all exists. God required more of her, her husband even more, or sometimes it seemed that way. But the earth required only that she touch, and the earth contained the cell in her that was going wild. For a while she tried thinking of it in another way, that those cells