The Writer extra YOU CAN’T FIND THIS IN PRINT.
1. BIRDS, AGAIN ashwell, massachusetts, 1871
Wonders, wonders! —miles pearson, the darkening glass (p. 4)
The first of the birds Caroline mistook for her own mind’s work. When the streak of red crossed the kitchen windowpane, fast, disastrous-bright, she thought it was some bloody piece come loose inside herself.
Then her father appeared from the study and held the doorframe, leaning in. “Caroline! Did you see?”
They found it in the yard, real after all: high in their birch tree, pecking judiciously at the bark. The size of a dove, the shape of a crow, and a brazen crimson tip to tail feathers, the shade a cardinal might bloom to if dipped in wine. It had a crestless head, all sharp planes. As the Hoods watched, it took a choosy bird-step forward, then craned neck over back to root around in its wing. “No question at all,” Samuel Hood said. His hand on Caroline’s arm felt slight. This shock had dislodged his usual serenity, and in his face she saw old age, the way his features would fold in on themselves. To brace them both she gripped his fingers. “Trilling hearts. Who’d have believed?”
“A trilling heart,” Caroline said.
She had just one hazy red-tinged memory of the trilling hearts’ only prior appearance in Ashwell, twenty-five years earlier. Standing barefoot in the grass of the front garden, four years old and afraid to go down the path worm bits on the gravel. On the steps behind her, sewing in the sun, her mother.
