Birds and Body Horror

On the first day, it’s difficult to tell anything’s wrong. You wake, as you always do, with a frayed rope burning your flesh. Your skin’s long torn, long patched itself, seeming some days to have grown around the fibers. The tether itches. The tether will leave a scar. You look at it and think, What’s one more? It’s difficult to tell anything’s wrong. Sure, you’re close to her—but that’s natural. That’s your day-to-day. You’re close to her, because safety is found in strategy, and your strategy has been the same for a long time: pair up. Keep close. Keep your eyes peeled for anything strange, anything suspect, anything shadowy. You can never tell, falling asleep each night, who will open those eyes. You can never tell, so you stay close, stay keen. It’s good, anyway, to keep her near. Good, because you love her, you love her, you love her in ways distance will only carve open.

A blink of the eye, and graduation is here again. She’s packing up her dorm for the last time, smiling gently—if a bit awkwardly—at half-remembered girls who try to catch her eye down at the local watering hole. Her parents are embracing her, excited beyond words for the progress their daughter has achieved in only a few years. “Just think,” says Van lightly, “four years ago, your plane fell out of the sky. And now you’re Columbia-bound. You should take your story on the road, use it to spread hope across the nation.” Taissa very subtly flips her off in the reflection of her drink. Van beams. “Seriously, dude. Proud of you.”

This is shaping up to be one of the best summers of Van’s life, the irony of which is not lost on her. If she thinks about it too hard, that shit is impossibly depressing, so she doesn’t. She focuses on the good of it. The best of it. The warm freedom of it. God, to be this free again. It’s funny. Taissa doesn’t exactly come naturally to relaxation, even in the wake of graduating. Even with her school plans set in the fall, she seems unwilling to let her guard down, lest— “What? Another plane falls out of the sky?” Van teases.

Less than three days. That’s how long it takes the rescue team to swoop in. Not even half a goddamn week. Van’s not bitter. There’s really no point in being bitter, like there was no point decorating her room growing up. Some paths only ever lead to heartbreak—like knowing any treasure you tack to your walls is one more target for Mom’s drunken destruction. Like knowing, too, any thought of what should have been, how unfair it all is, can break what’s left of you. Van’s not bitter. She’s relieved on behalf of these people she’s been watching for a few days from behind Taissa Turner’s eyes. They’re like a weirdly realistic television show, a movie in which she can’t help rooting for every character. Weirdos, one and all—but, for the most part, the good kind of weirdos. She likes the way they interact. A team. She can see, even so far from a field, how they might have become champions.

The first thing Taissa notices in the wake of the crash is the high-pitched wail inside her ears. She’s on her side. On her side, panting, feeling cross-eyed with dizziness. Pine needles prick her skin. Pine needles. Where is the plane? She presses herself gingerly up, just a little at a time. Up off the ground. Up to a sitting position. Up, until she can stand, until she can test her strength on legs that wobble, but thankfully do not collapse. Where is the plane? Here—and also there. In pieces. It’s in fucking pieces because it fell out of the fucking sky. “Oh,” she hears herself say as if through a tin can. “We crashed.”

Light.

Cold.

Questions. Endless questions. Running over her like water and blurring into senseless sounds. She's in a bed, cold and stiff, her right arm restrained and her left pierced with a needle that feeds freezing poison into her veins. Men and women in white speak and speak and speak, and she mumbles out answers to make them stop.

Can you tell me your name?

No.

Do you know where you are right now?

No.

Do you know what happened to your teammates?

No. No. No.