Read The Bird Sisters for Free Online

either to the sky or earth; it hung between the two like a curtain. Twiss cupped at the air, half expecting to feel something solid in her hand. Though it was early, she could feel the heat coming. The Gazette had predicted temperatures in the triple digits—LOCAL WARMING! the front page said.
    “Promise me you won’t play today,” Milly had said before the mother arrived with the goldfinch, which now sat in Twiss’s front pocket, yellow as a tape measure.
    Although the goldfinch had done nothing but linger in the middle of the road for too long, and she knew he deserved a resting place as fine as that of any other bird they’d been unable to save, Twiss didn’t go after the trowel just yet. She’d heard what the mother had said to Milly— Only a person without children would say something like that —as if she’d known exactly how to sting Milly in a way that wouldn’t allow Milly to sting back. If it had been Twiss and having children had been important to her, she’d have slapped the woman’s face.
    Shame on you , the outline of her hand would have said.
    “Play what?” Twiss had said to Milly.
    “You know what,” Milly had said.
    Twiss walked around the pond, pretending to look for golf balls in the reeds when she was really looking for Snapper, a forty-year-old turtle that lived in the pond. When she found him, she tapped on his shell with a willow stick. The last time, he almost lopped off her toes just like his mother had almost lopped them off when Twiss was a girl.
    In his effort to attack her, Snapper tipped over and couldn’t right himself. Even with this disability, he snapped at her in a wild, entitled way. Though Twiss had the opportunity to win their ongoing war, she used the stick to hoist him back onto his limbs.
    “You owe me a bucket of Dunlops,” she said to Snapper, whom she was certain could understand her but chose to ignore her. Twiss had always been jealous of the snapping turtles that lived in the pond. When their plans were thwarted, they made new ones. When the new ones were thwarted, they swallowed a few golf balls and went about the rest of their day as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “Stop eating up my game,” she said.
    The game, which Twiss played on most days, took place in the barn and consisted of a bucket of balls and Persy, her father’s old No. 1 driver. She’d line up the balls at the threshold and aim for the pasture. Most of the time, she’d hit the roof of the henhouse or, worse, one of the windows. Twiss had always lacked the concentration—the stillness—to launch a ball with any real accuracy. She’d square her shoulders and position her feet, but the moment she went to swing the club, a gnat would land on her neck or a bee would buzz in her ear, and then the ball would lurch off in whatever direction it wasn’t supposed to go. Of the two of them, Milly was the better golfer, though neither of them took after their father, who’d held a club as though it were an extension of himself. Twiss often wondered what would have happened if he’d lived his life as gracefully as he’d played golf.
    She walked the length of the pond, up to the woodlot and shed, and back down through the meadow, which was crowded with prairie onions and bluestems that rose to the tops of her muck boots. Every day of her life Twiss had walked through the meadow, and still the beauty of it caused her to linger longer than she intended.
    This morning, she broke off the stem of a prairie onion and chewed on it like the cowboys chewed on stalks of straw in her childhood adventure books. She loved the taste of onions; the bitter and the sweet on her tongue always brought her back to a vision of her father before the Accident, sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings, sketching out strategies to shorten his game. In front of him would be a stack of scoring cards, which he used the way Milly and Twiss used flash cards in school. But instead of memorizing the