Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(11)
“Eight’s for Heaven,” I say, turning back to him. “Nine’s for Hell. I counted nine when David died. When you took him, because you were ten. Ten’s for the Devil his own self.”
“You need to get out of here.”
I show him the knife. His face goes white as whey.
“Eleven is for the gates of Heaven,” I tell him. “Sometimes it’s for penance, and twelve’s for sin, but when it’s for the gates of Heaven, twelve’s for the man who lets you in. I want that for David. Don’t you?”
He doesn’t answer me.
“Thirteen is for a broken promise,” I say, and the distance between us is nothing; I am flying, I am flying, and the knife is in my hand. “Fourteen’s the feathers underneath your skin.”
Carl screams when the knife comes down. I stab and I stab, and I count the punctures one by one, until I reach nineteen, nineteen, nineteen is for the one who wronged you. Twenty is for a place to stand. Twenty-one’s all you have to offer. Twenty-two’s the knife bare in your hand.
The count is done. I pull away from him, a red girl in a red room, and the knife falls from my fingers: I don’t need it anymore. I have counted off my corvids. The math is done. My mother will call the police eventually, if she hasn’t already, and that’s right, too; that was where this equation had to lead us. This is the mathematical inevitability to which I have been building all my life. I can feel the feathers under my skin, aching to be free.
My fingers leave red smears on the window when I pry it open. I know I can only fly for a moment.
I know that it will be enough.
Something About Birds
PAUL TREMBLAY
THE NEW DARK REVIEW PRESENTS
“SOMETHING ABOUT WILLIAM WHEATLEY”: AN INTERVIEW
WITH WILLIAM WHEATLEY BY BENJAMIN D. PIOTROSKWI
William Wheatley’s The Artist Starve is a collection of five loosely interconnected novelettes and novellas published in 1971 by University of Massachusetts Press (the book having won its Juniper Prize for Fiction). In an era that certainly predated usage of YA as a marketing category, his stories were from the POV of young adults, ranging from the fourteen-year-old Maggie Holtz who runs away from home (taking her six-year-old brother Thomas into the local woods) during the twelve days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the last story, a near-future extrapolation of the Vietnam War having continued into the year 1980, the draft age dropped to sixteen, and an exhausted and radiation-sick platoon of teenagers conspiring to kill the increasingly unhinged Sergeant Thomas Holtz. The Artist Starve was a prescient and visceral (if not too earnest) book embracing chaotic social and global politics of the early 1970s. An unexpected critical and commercial smash, particularly on college campuses, The Artist Starve was one of three books forwarded to the Pulitzer Prize Board, who ultimately decided no award for the year 1971. That The Artist Starve is largely forgotten, whereas the last short story he ever wrote, “Something About Birds,” oft-reprinted and first published in a DIY zine called Steam in 1977 continues to stir debate and win admirers within the horror/weird fiction community, is an irony that is not lost upon the avuncular, seventy-five-year-old Wheatley.
BP: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Wheatley.
WW: The pleasure is all mine, Benjamin.
BP: Before we discuss “Something About Birds,” which is my all-time favorite short story, by the way—
WW: You’re too kind. Thank you.
BP: I wanted to ask if The Artist Starve is going to be reprinted. I’ve heard rumors.
WW: You have? Well, that would be news to me. While I suppose it would be nice to have your work rediscovered by a new generation, I’m not holding my breath, nor am I actively seeking to get the book back in print. It already served its purpose. It was an important book when it came out, I think, but it is a book very much of its time. So much so I’m afraid it wouldn’t translate very well to the now.
BP: There was a considerable gap, six years, between The Artist Starve and “Something About Birds.” In the interim, were you working on other writing projects or projects that didn’t involve writing?
WW: When you get to my age—oh that sounds terribly cliché, doesn’t it? Let me rephrase: When you get to my perspective, six years doesn’t seem as considerable. Point taken, however. I’ll try to be brief. I will admit to some churlish, petulant behavior, as given the overwhelming response to my first book I expected the publishing industry to then roll out the red carpet to whatever it was I might’ve scribbled on a napkin. And maybe that would’ve happened had I won the Pulitzer, yes? Instead, I took the no award designation as a terrible, final judgment on my work. Silly I know, but at the risk of sounding paranoid, the no award announcement all but shut down further notice for the book. I spent a year or so nursing my battered ego and speaking at colleges and universities before even considering writing another story. I then spent more than two years researching the burgeoning fuel crisis and overpopulation fears. I travelled quite a bit as well: Ecuador, Peru, Japan, India, South Africa. While traveling I started bird watching, of course. Total novice, and I remain one. Anyway, I’d planned to turn my research into a novel of some sort. That book never materialized. I never even wrote an opening paragraph. I’m not a novelist. I never was. To make a long, not all that exciting story short, upon returning home and very much travel weary, I became interested in antiquities and bought the very same antiques shop that is below us now in 1976. I wrote “Something About Birds” shortly after opening the shop, thinking it might be the first story in another cycle, all stories involving birds in some way. The story itself was unlike anything I’d ever written; oblique, yes, bizarre to many, I’m sure, but somehow, it hits closer to an ineffable truth than anything else I’ve written. To my great disappointment, the story was summarily rejected by all the glossy magazines and I was ignorant of the genre fiction market so I decided to allow a friend who was in a local punk band to publish it in her zine. I remain grateful and pleased that the story has had many other lives since.