Read Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds for Free Online Page B

orphan and had no family at all, so
there were not so many hurdles for Cassie and I to jump when
adopting Kameko.
    Those were wonderful years really, and I
treasure them. Cassie’s heart failed suddenly, when Kameko was ten,
and I finished the job of raising her alone.
    Well, me and the backyard.
    The hummingbird wasn’t really dead, Cassie
would say, zeroing in on the climax of her story.
    The backyard loved Kameko almost as much as I
did, maybe even more than it loved me. Cassie and Johnny would have
been amazed to see it. I never worried about Kameko when she played
back there. Picture this. She’s three-and-a-half and wearing the
white, red, green, and orange tie-dyed dress we’d bought her at the
Saturday market, and she’s barefoot, and she’s in the backyard
talking up to a tree. Her jet-black hair is long down her back. She
raises one small fist and shakes it in the air. Or maybe she’s
talking to a squirrel up in the tree. Whatever it is, it’s getting
a piece of her mind.
    So there he was, Cassie would say, with his
crackers and cheese and wine, grinning like a bear. The backyard
had gone completely silent. It was a deep listening quiet that you
couldn’t help but notice. Any little sound you made yourself
bounced around like a scream. And in that deep quiet came a muffled
desperate cry from Cassie’s lap. She pulled her purse onto the
table and opened it, and the hummingbird shot out like a bunch of
angry bees! The backyard blew out a huge sigh of relief that
brought all the rustling and whispering night sounds back all at
once.
    She’d say I said, “Was that a bird?” And I
suppose I might have said that. I don’t remember the details she
remembered. I remember that I was already in love with her and that
I ached for her and that I was wondering if she would spend the
night with me. So she had a bird in her purse? I could live with
that.
    Cassie would say the backyard was trying to
make me think she was a thief. The backyard was trying to say look
look she snatches helpless hummingbirds out of the air and puts
them in her purse. Tell her to go away! Tell her to go away!
    Well, that didn’t happen, I would always
say—my only contribution to the telling of Cassie’s story.
    My phone made the special sound that meant it
was Kameko calling. An odd time for her to call. Shouldn’t she be
in school? It would be tomorrow morning in Japan. Maybe she was on
a break. We were totally video these days so I put on a smile and
took the call ready to see her face swim up on my small screen.
    I could see something was terribly wrong.
    “Earthquake!” she shouted. “The crows!”
    I thought she meant my crows here who were
suddenly everywhere. How could she see that? My crows. The ones
that always came back to the backyard. The ones who were cautious
but not afraid of me. The crows who had told Kameko they could take
her to Japan. Did they promise she would find her mother? They
poured into the backyard in a huge heap. I had never seen them do
such a thing. It was as if they had all pounced on something.
    “He’s gone!” Kameko said on the phone.
    “What?” My eyes were jumping back and forth
from the phone to my crows in the backyard. What had they
caught?
    Then the crows all suddenly leaped away from
what they had been covering and took to the air. A boy, I
thought.
    The figure unfolded itself and beat at the
air with its own dark wings. I made some kind of startled sound,
and it turned black eyes on me, and then it jumped up and scurried
toward the rhododendrons. The backyard closed around it like a hug.
Not a boy, I thought.
    “Gramps?” I looked down at the phone again.
Kameko swept the camera in a wide panorama, but I couldn’t make
much of the blurry images and couldn’t tell if things were still
shaking.
    “Is the quake over?” I asked.
    “I think so,” she said.
     
     
    4
    The Bulgarian
     
    Kameko wondered if the backyard would like
this new man in her life. She wondered if the creature