Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

He heard that Cope’s wife and daughter had left him, also. One of the side effects, evidently, of their mutual hunger for bones. He tried one more trick: to take Cope’s fossils, to commandeer them for the government. It was the end of the end for Cope. For both of them, really. Cope turned over his catalogue of Marsh’s misdeeds. The headline: SCIENTISTS WAGE BITTER WARFARE. Congress investigated and eventually saw an opportunity to eliminate the department of paleontology at the Geological Survey, along with Marsh’s position as its head. Woe and wickedness, said one of Marsh’s assistants, and he cried as they packed up the lab. Then he went to work for Cope, until Cope ran out of money, too.

That ass in Congress shouting about birds with teeth, birds with teeth, are we taxpayers funding such a foolish blasphemy? And the other jackals taking up the cry. It has me in a black and dangerous mood, the brandy not enough to keep the devil from my tongue tonight .

He eats the last of his egg, finishes his coffee, and reads the rest of the obituary. Small pleasures now, small hurts, too. He dabs at his beard with a napkin, feels his breath come shorter these days.

My own grave will be ready for me soon .

I have heard about your nightmares, he almost wrote to Cope, years ago, but he tore the paper out of the notebook and balled it up till the ink was smeared through. Nightmares where the bones of the dead assemble themselves, where they dance and gambol and knock their joints together in his ears, eternal ringing sounds and terrifying laughter. Nightmares where the creatures we discovered hover over Cope’s camp bed and keep watch like vultures.

I have heard about your dreams, he tried then, and put his head down, suddenly old, suddenly tired down to his own weary bones.

Sometimes I long to go West again, to watch the prairie grass ripple and the wind blow history clean. Like we could take it all back, this whole sordid business of living, and just fall into dust. As I suppose, one day, we will .

Every death is a love story. It’s the goodbye part, but the love is still there, wide as the world.

When my wife died, I began to understand this. I began to build the death houses. The name is misleading, since these houses hold not only death but futures, possibilities, hopes that the end isn’t the end. These are perhaps tall tales, but they stack up better than dead bodies and they burn longer than kindling. I sell these tales for the living, and for the dying, and I have done this since my wife flew away.

The story about my wife is a short and sad one, not so new or so tall. My wife was lovely, with a smile like the moon dipped in stars. When we first married, she would fit herself into the crook of my arm as we slept; she would write me love letters three times a day and slip them into pockets, under cushions, behind the backs of mirrors and along the linings of drawers. She loved animals even more than she loved me, and we always had a cat or two in the house along with the dogs, mice, chickens, hedgehogs, goats, and sometimes even pigs. We never had birds because my wife couldn’t stand to see them caged.

She sang on the stage, but soon grew to fancy herself an actual songbird. She would chirp and whistle instead of speaking and flap her arms as though they were wings. She started digging worms out of the soft earth in the early mornings, crushing them with her moon-smile and leaving pink fleshy bits in her teeth. She would hop to the window on light feet and watch the birds in the trees, weeping because she couldn’t join them in flight. She banished the cats from the house after one brought in a robin with its neck broken and dropped it on her pillow.

I have reached a milestone today. I have built exactly one hundred death houses, all over Europe and the United States. In those houses I’ve placed exactly five hundred Temporary Resting Containers, built to house the newly dead until they reawaken. Five in each house to start with. (The clients are free to build more, but I provide only five.) Five hundred love stories, begun at their ends. I do think of myself as a romantic. I think of myself as a false idol, or sometimes, a saint. Women often embrace me, and many offer me expensive gifts and sometimes more than that. Men shake my hand and choke up, clearing their throats. When I leave a village or a city with its very own death house, I can see it collectively sigh and relax, as if a great weight had been lifted from its massive shoulders. I can see the people’s relief rising like smoke, the residue of tamped-down fear.

I usually choose a restful spot for the death house, or Leichenhaus . It should rise gracefully in an arc, casting a long shadow on cobblestones and hearts. But I try to keep things playful, too. In many villages, I find that placing it at the end of a long road and a short curve mimic the element of surprise when death arrives.

One morning my wife told me that on the river, bodies crash like a car wreck. She said she had been waiting at the high bridge, watching and studying the jumpers for years. She had discovered the sound was almost glacial, glassy, like somebody breaking hundreds of china plates all at once.

Your skull splits right open sometimes, she said.

I feel sorry for these humans who cannot fly, she said.

I will show them how it’s done, she said.

So I put my lovely wife in a place where the windows were barred and the doors were locked, and where the bird-ladies that roamed the halls could find no worms to tear into.

I always assemble the finest materials and the most skilled workmen when building a death house, taking special care when choosing the images for the stained glass. I particularly prefer Gertrude, robed in a light, flat gray, or Margaret of Antioch, lines of blue cut glass flowing through her gown like small waves. St. Michael, too, makes an excellent guardian of the dead; I often put him in royal red with the Kingdom of Heaven as a backdrop. And always appropriate: St. Joseph, patron saint of a happy death.

She wrote me letters just as before — three times a day, I discovered later. She never spoke but she could scratch out a few thoughts. The doctors who cared for her thought it best to keep these letters from me, as they contained useless scraps and musings, hopping from subject to subject and leaving sense entirely behind. The doctors seemed also to harbor vague suspicions about me; they seemed to believe something terrible had happened to tear out my wife’s tongue like Philomela’s.