Corwin was the one who found the nest, high up in the split crown of a dead sycamore, and Corwin was the one who said they should eat.
They hadn’t eaten since the morning before. Their grandfather’s dog had barked them off the porch the night before that, and it hadn’t felt real yet, being unwanted in the only house either of them remembered — the woman who never once, in nine years, said are you hungry without meaning it, now shouting that they’d eaten what wasn’t theirs to eat and so had lost the right to anything at all. Tobin still didn’t understand what they’d done wrong. A handful of pigeon eggs. He kept turning it over like a stone in his pocket, looking for the sharp edge that had cut them loose from home.
Corwin climbed. He was sixteen and rangy and good at trees, and Tobin waited at the bottom with his arms wrapped around his own ribs, watching his brother’s shape go small against the grey sky.
There were five eggs in the nest, warm still, the mother bird off hunting somewhere over the ridge. Corwin ate four of them standing in the fork of the branch, cracking each one against his teeth, not looking down. He’d meant to save more. He told himself that later, and it was even true. But hunger doesn’t listen to what a person means to do, and by the time he remembered his brother waiting below, there was only the last egg left, and he put it carefully in his shirt pocket and started down.
His boot found the branch wrong. The world tipped. He caught himself against the trunk with both hands, and the egg — he felt it happen before he understood it — the egg slid from his pocket and fell thirty feet and broke open on a root, and something in Corwin broke with it, though it took a moment to show.
He came down the last of the tree slower than he’d gone up, and when his feet touched the ground he was already wrong. Tobin saw it first in the eyes — something flattening out in them, going yellow and hard and strange, the pupil narrowing to a black seed. Then the shoulders, hunching forward like a man carrying an invisible weight. Then the fingers, which curled and would not uncurl, and along the backs of his brother’s hands, where the skin had always been pale and freckled, dark feathers pushed up through the flesh like grass through snow.
Tobin screamed. He grabbed for his brother’s arm and it was not an arm anymore, not entirely, and Corwin — still himself, still enough himself to speak — said, in a voice going rough and low, “Don’t. Don’t touch it, it’ll hurt you too.”
“Fix it,” Tobin said, which was a child’s thing to say, and he knew it even as he said it. “Take it back, put the egg back, I don’t care, I’m not even hungry, take it back—”
“I can’t.” Corwin’s jaw was lengthening now, the words coming out around something that wasn’t quite a mouth anymore. He crouched — it looked less like sitting down and more like folding — and when he spoke again his voice had almost nothing human left in it, just the shape of the words pressed through feather and bone. “I ate what I shouldn’t have taken all of. This is just — this is just what happens. The ridge keeps what’s owed it.”
“I’ll come with you, then.” Tobin was crying so hard he could barely see his brother’s shape anymore, only the color of him, dark against the white sky. “Wherever you have to go. I’ll come.”
“You can’t fly,” Corwin said, and it might have been a joke, once, the kind of thing he’d have said to make Tobin laugh even in the middle of something terrible, and for one second his eyes went brown and human again, just his brother looking out of that strange new face. “Walk east till you hit the widow Anders’s field. Tell her I sent you, tell her — tell her you’re a hard worker, it isn’t even a lie. She’ll take you in. She’s got no one either.”
“Corwin—”
“I’m not gone,” his brother said, though they both understood he was already going, the last of the shape settling into wings, into a body built for the sky and not for staying. “I’m just going to be the kind of thing that watches from up high now. I’ll see you. I won’t be able to say so, but I’ll see you.”
And then there was no more brother in it at all, only a broad dark bird lifting heavy off the ground, circling once over the dead sycamore and the broken egg and the boy standing alone beneath it, and then rising higher, smaller, gone east over the ridge before Tobin could even finish saying his name.
He walked until dusk. He found the widow’s field exactly where his brother had said it would be, and camped at its edge, and did not sleep, and in the morning there was a hawk circling far off over the tree line, too far to be sure of anything, and Tobin lifted his hand anyway, in case.
KY-oh Rangi is a scientist and writer based in Australia. He writes tragicomic stories about the gap between who we imagine ourselves to be and who we actually are, often exploring themes of cultural identity and the immigrant experience.
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