Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

“Yeah, maybe,” he answers. But really, yeah right. The pictures are bad enough, he doesn’t want to imagine what’s in the boxes.

He rubs his mouth and sits up. He must have slept, because Kendra has stripped down further in the heat. Her pants are folded on the floor. She slaps her last card on the table and throws her arm over the back of her chair. She has last season’s tan, and in the sleeveless undershirt it looks like she’s wearing long, almond-coloured dinner gloves that cut high on her biceps. Where the tan is, her freckles are numerous, but half-blended into the darker tone. Her face, too: over her clenched chin, her cheeks, her nose, under her eyebrows and up her arched forehead into her hairline — copper speckles. The rest of her skin, whatever isn’t sun-beat, is pale. The candle has burnt low, but the stove is hot, and her upper lip and chest — the start of her breasts — are gold with sweat and light. She crosses her legs and the skin of her thigh peels audibly from the leather seat.

The prosthetic stands next to Axel. The room smells of coffee and body odour. He’s thirsty.

“I’m going outside,” he says. Kendra sweeps and shuffles.

Cody steps into an extra pair of boots and out onto the deck. He eats a fistful of snow off the rail and another off the steps where the stuff has piled and quit. What did the hospital do with Axel’s old leg? Burn it? Burial would be odd — a miniature graveyard on the side of the main site. Toss it? They couldn’t have put it in the garbage. What do they do with a bit of you that dies before the rest?

The clouds have gone. New ones start to roll in over the valley, but at this moment stars are out, even in the rising light. How can it be night and day? Dark and light at the same time? Snow melts under his boots. The sky above the eastern mountain is pale grey, like the night has been wrung out of it.

Across the paddock, a slab of snow falls from the eaves of the dairy house. The shift gives him the willies, like his presence has woken everything up. “Sorry,” he says.

Axel calls, “Is it light?”

Kendra adds, “Has it stopped fucking snowing?”

No, he wants to say. Don’t come out. It’s still so early. Don’t come out here. Let me be here alone. Inside they shuffle clothing and coats.

A cow lifts its head in the yard. In the yard. In front of him. How did he miss it?

It’s barely light, way too early — it would still be too early if she had slept — and cows are all over the place. There’s a cow in Axel’s yard, a few on the road, a number dispersed in the pasture. Like someone dropped a bag of marbles, they’ve scattered over the landscape. Milo, out on the highway, waves and yells, trying to herd them off the road. He flags a car and it slows as it passes the dairy. Her truck in the ditch is a white pyramid.

The big tan in the yard shies away from Axel as he breaks trail through the snow toward the training yard. Leaving the morning work to her, of course.

“Help me with the feed.” She hands Cody his hoodie and treks a path from the house to the hatchling barn. He follows her to the building and up the stairs. She unlocks the hatchling room. Cody lingers at the door and pulls on his sweater.

“You should see this place in the spring.” At the moment there’s no hatchlings and the room is dark, but in March, if the boy’s still here — and by the sound of that postcard he’ll be here a while — he’ll see the falcons start to lay. Axel has rearing timed to the second. Each pair lay three or four eggs per batch, and she or Axel remove them from the oil-drum nests in the breeding pens. They bring the eggs here, rows and rows of eggs — up to fifty, though there’s usually only fifteen or so at a time — and turn on the automatic rolling metal rods of the contact incubator. The eggs are weighed, and the humidity of the incubator adjusted accordingly. After ten days the candler will show half-shading — a network of capillaries and veins — and each heartbeat is monitored through the stethoscope. Thirty-one days and the first batch of hatchlings peep in tins under the red heat lamps. New life, that fast. “Yeah.” She finds the box of vitamin powder on a shelf and pushes it into Cody’s chest. “Other room for now.”

The feed room’s clammy with the damp, feathery scent of the feeder chicks stacked in trays in the corner. She wheels the cement mixer out from beside the deep-freeze and quarts of purified water. A small grey Kobalt, who knows why Axel got it originally, but it works to stir the vitamins into the dead birds. She lifts the top tray and tumbles the feeders into the mixer. “Add some of the powder.” The chicks fill three-quarters of the mixer.

Cody examines the label on the box.

“Parrot powder. Vitamins for the falcons. Axel’s scratched that off, of course. One of his trade secrets.”

He sprinkles a tablespoon of green powder on the chicks.

“It’s not sugar.” She gestures and he dumps more. “Good.” She picks up a gallon of distilled water and adds a slosh. “Then you turn the crank.” She starts right away. No point waiting for the kid to do it.

The kid backs off and leans on the freezer. “I’m okay to watch.” He plants his hands on the lid, hops on, and pulls his kilt over his knees. “You do this every day?”

“Course.” One of the rituals. “There’s more to it when there’s hatchlings.” She turns the crank at the back. The chicks toss over each other and the powder and water work into their down and form a paste. “Pass me a bucket.” Cody slides off the freezer and passes her one of the five-gallon chick-crushing pails. She tilts the mixer and the birds fall into the bucket in clumps, stuck together with the vitamin coating.

She carries the bucket down the stairs and across the drive to the training yard. No need for keys — Axel left the door open behind him. “Hey,” she calls. “Where you at?” He must have gone straight for the white. It would be so much easier if she hadn’t said anything. If she hadn’t taken the white out and not known anything. She trudges past the breeding pens and toward the back of the yard. The kid, behind her, uses her as a breakwater from the melting snow and cows and Axel. She sets down the bucket. “What gives?” Between flight pens, Axel paces and tugs on his glove. Snow grinds unevenly under his steps, his limp accentuated as his right foot doesn’t clear the snow. He flexes the glove and opens the pen. He lifts out the white.

Axel with a bird, it’s like seeing him with his leg on. Like it’s another appendage. Like the bird’s sitting in for something. Hop it on and it not only co-operates, it belongs. And Christ, the size of the white. Three years since it hatched, reached adult plumage, and it’s now ready to mate. This circle, this rearing, is why she’s here. Maybe she didn’t give the bird enough of a chance. Axel strides through the snow to the pasture and the bird tips sideways; its right wing beats the air while the left stays folded. He twists the jesses around his fist to help it keep hold. Enough of a chance? She’s full of wistful crap. Axel exits the netting, the lure — duck wing attached to a leather ball attached to a rope — over his shoulder.

“Starting off big,” she calls. “Maybe keep her in the yard?”

He raises the back of his hand to her as he strides away.

“I’m serious.” Fuck. “Wait.” She pushes by Cody and follows Axel over the drive and paddock, skirting the slurry lagoon. Milo’s property’s a mess. The tractor sits in his driveway between puddles of frozen sick and holes in the ice where, by the looks of it, gas spilled out of the syphon. Have to admire him, though — a night like that and there he is, out on the road herding heads, his shoulder pushed against a heifer.