Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

That didn’t stop the Taunton defenders. They had scarcely moved a muscle when the ball was snapped, yet now they came at what seemed an impossibly fast clip. Their outlines blurred, and it looked as if they weren’t running but were skimming over the grass. Three of them piled onto me, but the impact didn’t have much effect. I felt something jabbing at me and fought to get clear. As I did, I thought I saw a lemony eye open in the chest of the guy lying atop me — just a flicker, then it was gone — and heard above the noise of the crowd a single, unmistakable jee-eep . I scrambled up, confused and frightened. My jersey was covered with tiny rips.

The ref had thrown a flag for unnecessary roughness, and he was chewing out the Taunton players, threatening ejections. They appeared unconcerned, picking themselves up and walking stiffly, laboriously away. I showed the ref my jersey, but he was mad at the world and told me to shut up and play football. In the huddle I said that something funny was going on, but Justin was all afire to score and paid no attention. After the penalty, we had possession on the Taunton nine-yard line — he dismissed the play Tuttle had sent in and called a quarterback draw. And then Tony Budgen, our right tackle, said “Holy shit!”

The Taunton Warriors, the players on the field and on the sideline, were disintegrating, dissolving into flights of grackles. Their uniforms, their bodies. their every particular had been composed of birds, compressed into ungainly shapes, and now those shapes were breaking apart. A helmet appeared to open into a bloom of glossy wings; the numbers 3 and 6 lifted from a jersey, assuming plumper forms, becoming two birds that flew at me, creating a gap from which others emerged; a headless Warrior winnowed to nothing, deconstructing from the neck down like one of those speeded-up time-lapse films detailing the building of a skyscraper, only this one ran backward; the defensive front four exploded into a shrapnel of birds.

Alarmed yet fascinated by the display, we backed toward midfield as the grackles flapped up from the last remaining relics of our opponents, some to perch on the Taunton bus, lining its fenders and roof, a row of hunched, silent spectators, while the rest ascended beyond the lights to join a vast, indistinct disturbance in the sky. Screams issued from the bleachers. Portions of the crowd were disintegrating, too, leaving patches of empty seats, and people pushed and clawed at one another, desperately trying to flee. I had in mind to do the same but was rooted to the spot, staring up into the toiling darkness above the field. It began to get close, stuffy, like when you pull a blanket over your head, and the reason for this soon came clear.

The disturbance above the field was a host of grackles, an unthinkable tonnage of feathers and hollow bones and stringy flesh — as they descended to the level of the lights, the air thickened with their sour smell. They descended farther, whirling and whirling, obscuring the lights so that they showed as dim, flickering suns through a water of black wings.

I could no longer see the sign on the Toddle House beyond the east end of the field, and this led me to believe that the flock had sealed us off from the world. Everyone in the bleachers had poured onto the grass. The pep band’s instruments were scattered about. Somebody had stepped on a French horn, crushing the bell. A cheerleader, Beth Pugh, crawled past, black hair striping her face, encaging her demented eyes — when I tried to help her, she slapped my arm away and screamed. People were on their knees, weeping and praying; some shielded their eyes and mouths against the droppings that fell, intermittently peeking at the grackles.

There must have been millions. They must have been stacked to the top of the sky in order to bring such a stench, such an oppressive presence. The great seething of their wings and the rusty chaos of their cries reduced the sounds of human terror to barely audible interruptions in an ocean of white noise. They descended lower yet, roofing the field with their swarming, swirling bodies, darkening the light, and I lay flat, my face buried in the grass, certain that I would be torn apart or crushed or carried off like Amy Carlysle’s daughter and dropped from a height.

But when I looked again — after no more than a minute or two, I think — the flock had retreated beyond the tops of the light poles, and they continued their retreat, going beyond the range of sight and hearing until a mere handful were left swooping and curvetting overhead, and those few still perched atop the Taunton bus. Then the bus itself exploded, vanishing in a flurry of the purplish black wings and lemony eyes and cruel beaks that had composed its shape, and we were alone, less than a thousand of us, splattered with bird shit, terrified, wandering the field and searching for our loved ones. I had no one to look for other than Doyle, but I could find him nowhere.

We won the game by way of forfeit and lost in the regionals the week after by the same means. No one wanted to play, and despite some blah blah blah spouted by Coach Tuttle about how the dead would want us to soldier on in the face of tragedy, how events like this could define our lives, the team voted unanimously to accept a painless defeat.

Actually, our losses were not so severe as they had been at first assessed. Coach Cunliffe and the entire Taunton team were found unharmed, albeit bewildered, in a field three miles from Edenburg, their bus intact, and those missing — fourteen, when all was said and done — were peripheral figures like Mr. Pepper and Sally Carlysle, the aged and the unwanted.

And Doyle. I attended his funeral, received a sloppy kiss from one of his gravid sisters and a hug from his daddy, who had made of his death a newly righteous excuse for his drinking; yet I was not terribly surprised some months later when I heard he had been spotted in Crawford, a mill town less than a hundred miles away. I drove over there one evening, intending to question him about his involvement with the flock, whether it had been conscious, coerced, or otherwise — I knew he must have had something to do with them or else he wouldn’t have run away.

I tracked him down in a roadhouse on the outskirts of Crawford and stood watching him from a noisy corner. He had his arm around a depressed-looking blonde — she was perhaps a decade older than him — and the meanness that now and then had come into his face seemed to have settled in permanently. I left without confronting him, doubting that he would have anything to tell me and realizing that I wouldn’t believe him even if he did.

Football, as Coach Tuttle and others of his mentality are fond of saying, is a lot like life. By this I take them to mean that the game seeks to order chaos by means of a system of rules and demarcations. Even if you accept the metaphor as true, it begs the question, what is life like?

In the weeks following the Taunton game, those who could afford to leave Edenburg did so. Dawn Cupertino, for instance, hooked up with a paper towel salesman, and after a whirlwind courtship, they got engaged and moved to his home in Falls Church, Virginia. Most people, my parents included, could not afford to leave and thus suffered through the fumblings of the police, an FBI investigation, an inquiry conducted by the State Bureau of Wildife and Fisheries, and questioning by countless investigators of the paranormal (they continue to trickle through town). None of this yielded a result that could explain the advent of the flock, but talking and talking about it, and then talking more, it helped dial down our temperature and we began settling into our old routines, both good and bad.