Lauren Groff: Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

There, they’d find a huge basin filled with the bloody, dismembered remains of other girls. They’d be so surprised, they’d drop the egg in the vat, and wouldn’t be able to wipe the stain away. When the wizard would come home to find the stained egg, he would dismember the girls and toss their remains into the vat.

Eventually, he did this to the two eldest girls from one family, and came back for the third daughter. This girl, though, was uncommonly clever. She hid the egg in a safe place and brazenly went into the room, only to find her dismembered sisters in the bloody vat. But instead of panicking, she pulled their severed limbs out and pieced them back together again, and when the parts were reassembled, the girls miraculously came back to life.

The clever girl hid her sisters in a room to await the wizard, and when he returned and saw she hadn’t bloodied the egg, he decided to marry her. She agreed, but said first that she would send him home with a basketful of gold for her parents. She hid her two sisters in the basket, which he carted home, now a servant of his clever bride. In his absence, the little girl dressed a human skull in flowers and jewels and put it in the attic window. Then she rolled herself in honey and feathers to transform herself into a strange feathered creature, and ran out into the bright day.

On her way home, she encountered the wizard, who thought she was a wonderful bird and said, “Oh, Fitcher’s feathered bird, where from, where from?”

To which she responded, “From feathered Fitze Fitcher’s house I’ve come.”

“And the young bride there, how does she fare?” he asked, imagining his marriage night, and the soft young body of his wife.

And she, smiling softly under her down and honey, said, “She’s swept the house all the way through, and from the attic window, she’s staring down at you.”

When the wizard arrived home to find the skull in the window, he waved at it, thinking it was his bride. When he went inside, the brothers and father of the little stolen girls locked the door, set a fire, and burned the terrible murderer up.

IN THE GRIMMS’ STORY, of course, the community at last cleansed itself by fire, and in the aftermath came out righteous and whole. This did not happen to Templeton.

We were under siege. The media trucks were parked all along Main Street. Our town, though small, was famous for the baseball museum and for its beauty, an all-American village. Right-wing pundits on television and in the mega-corporation-owned newspapers held up our town as a symbol for the internal moral rot of America, a symbol of the trickle-down immorality stemming from our Democrat president, who went around screwing everything that moved. People from Cherry Valley and Herkimer roared into town, pretending that they were natives, and the whole country saw us as drawling mulleted hicks in whole-body Carhartt, and hated us more. The handsome newscasters shivered in their fur-lined parkas, sat at our diner, and tried to eavesdrop, but were really only eavesdropping on other newscasters.

Our shell-shocked mayor appeared on television. He was the town know-it-all, a bearded hobbit of a man who gave bombastic walking tours to the tourists and wore shorts all year because of a skin condition. He had to pause to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief, choking up throughout his speech. At the end, he said, “Templeton will survive, as we have survived many other disasters in our illustrious history. Be brave, Templeton, and we will see each other through.” But there was no applause at the end, as there were no Templetonians in the audience, composed as it was of disaster-gawkers and newscasters.

Our Ambassador appeared on CNN and 20/20 to defend our town. “We are not perfect,” he said in his quivery old man’s voice. “But we are a good town, full of good people.” His cloudy eyes filled with fervor. It was very affecting.

We stayed inside. We went to the grocery store, if we needed to, to school, and a few of us went to the gym. Our team practiced in virtual silence, the only sound the water sucking in the gutters, the splash of our muscled limbs. In school, the teachers came to classes with red-rimmed eyes, traces of internal anguish happening in the homes of people we never imagined had private lives. The drama kids pretended to weep at lunch on a recurrent basis. There was a hush over the town, as if each of us were muted, swaddled in invisible quilts, so separate from one another as to not be able to touch, if we wanted to. Girls began walking in groups everywhere, as if for protection. The Templeton men did not dare to look at the Templeton women, furious as we were, righteous. And in this separation, in our own sorrow, we forgot about the girls, the Lucky Chow Fun girls, and when, after some time, we thought of them, they were the enemies. They were the ones who had brought this shame to our town.

TWO TERRIBLE WEEKS PASSED. My mother stopped talking about The Garbageman, tout court . He stopped calling. She stopped visiting him with plates of food. She grew drawn and pale, and spent a lot of time in her flannel nightgown, watching Casablanca. She picked a new fight with the principal and came home spitting. The Winter Dance was canceled: I spent that evening dating a pizza and an apple crumble, watching Fred and Ginger glide across the floor, pure grace. Pot acquired two new taxidermied birds, one finch, one scarlet macaw, its head cocked intelligently, even in death.

One day, I came home, skirting Main Street and its hordes of news cameras. I went to the mailbox and found six envelopes from colleges all over the country, all addressed to me.

I went inside. I sat at the table with a cup of tea, the six letters splayed before me. One by one, I opened them. And what would have been a personal tragedy before the Lucky Chow Fun was now a slight relief. Of the six colleges, all of which had recruited me for swimming, though I had indifferent grades and mediocre SATs, I had only gotten into one.

Rather: I had gotten into one. One, glorious, one.

I tossed out the bad five, and waited for Pot. My tea cooled and I made more, and it cooled again. I peered out the curtains for my little sister, but she didn’t come. I made cookies, chocolate chip, her favorite. I had half an hour before swim practice and she still wasn’t home when my mother came in, with her energetic stompings and mutterings. “My God, Lollie,” she said, “you’ll never guess what that ass-muncher of a princip—”

“Mom?” I interrupted. “Do you know where Potty is?”

“Isn’t she here?” she said, massaging her neck, peeping in from the mudroom. “She was supposed to come straight home from school to go to the grocery store with me.”

“Nope,” I said. “And it’s getting dark.”

She came into the kitchen then, scowling. “Do you have any idea where she could be?” she said. We looked at each other, and her hand floated up to her hair.

I stood, nervous. “Oh, God,” I said.

“Calm down,” she said, though she was flustered herself. “Think, Lollie. Does she have any friends?”

“Pot?” I said. I looked at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Oh, God,” she said.

“Let’s think, let’s think,” I said. I paced to the window, then back. “Mom. Let’s think. Where does Potsy get her birds? The stuffed ones. Do you know?”

My mother looked at me, then slowly lifted her hands to her cheeks. “You know,” she said, “I never actually wondered. I guess I assumed your dad was sending them. Or she was buying them with her allowance. Or something. I never wondered.”

“You haven’t given us allowance in six months,” I said. “So where are they from?”

“Is she stealing them?” said my mother. “Maybe from the Biological Field Station?”