FICTION BY EPIPHANY FERRELL

Epiphany Ferrell’s stories appear in more than 80 journals and anthologies, including Shakespeare Unleashed, Ghost Parachute, Unnerving Magazine, Pulp Literature, Predators in Petticoats, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and a Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize recipient. She lives on the edge of the Shawnee National Forest.

You can find her here:
epiphanyferrell.com

LIKE FURIES
by Epiphany Ferrell

Pigeons cooed around the corner as Treve Johnson walked to his motorcycle. He heard their noisy avian take-off from sidewalk to air. Then a thin, high screech. A dark shape detaching from the early evening shadow, the sensation of displaced air, and a whomp of feathers. Just a blur in his peripheral vision.

No way. Can’t be real. The sudden stone in his gut told him maybe it was. I have to know.

He was already running past his Honda while he made up his mind. He jogged around the corner into the grassy lot behind the edge-of-town diner. The place where the old-timers swore they’d sometimes seen it. He hadn’t believed them. Not then.

Something dark moved near the silo that sat in the shadow of the old flour mill building. He paused and squinted into the last of the day’s sunlight. A shape turned its head. Looked right at him, he could feel its eyes. He was too far away to see any details, but he had no doubt it had seen him.

Treve had a moment of absolute clarity—this is what the town fears, it’s real, it’s right in front of you, it’s going to kill you, you have to run. He could feel his heart beating against his t-shirt, the trembling surge of adrenaline, but he felt he was watching himself from somewhere else, wondering in a detached way why he was still standing there. The cloud moved, the sun blazed, and the spell was broken. Treve bolted for his bike. God let it start, just go, man, go, it’s fast!

Not fast enough.

Something hit him on the back, ripping at his face, slicing his cheeks, biting his ear, tearing it but still he could hear it screeching. He’d die with that sound in his head.

Talons tore into his lower back, and he wobbled, righted himself for one wildly hopeful moment, and then skittered across the road on his side, his leg leaving a smear of red before he and the bike tumbled into the deep ditch. He threw up an arm, trying to fend it off, and that thing—oily black tattered feathers like a cloak and bright-black eyes in a dead-white face—took his arm off, ripping it at the shoulder like a seam, and threw it down, the jagged humerus slicing his cheek. He was still conscious when it tore at his guts, but mercifully, not for long.

It would be days before anyone reported him missing. By then, there was nothing to find.

*****

Mike Matthews carefully stepped over a clump of gray feathers when he opened the diner to his first customers of the morning. He was quiet as he gave his regulars, Boot and Gene, their coffees and got together a to-go order for that kid from the florist.

“Did you hear it last night?” Boot asked.

Mike looked around the diner. “Boot, jeez. We don’t talk about it—you know that.”

“No one in here but us.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, setting out some eggs by the grill. “I heard it.”

“Are we going to do anything about it?” Boot asked. “Now that it’s back?”

Mike turned to the grill. “Yeah. We’re going to not talk about it.”

“Someone should tell Laine Schilling,” Boot said. “She’s got that girl artist staying with her.”

“Girl artist, really?” Mike said. “Join the twenty-first century. Artist. Just artist.”

“She’s got that artist staying with her. For a month. You don’t think that’s a problem?”

“Could be,” Mike said. “But not our problem.”

“It will be if she winds up dead,” Boot said.

“Laine will keep an eye on her,” Mike said. “She’s not going to want blood on her hands twice.”

Gene shook his head. “Neither one of you knows what you’re talking about. That thing has never been gone. It’s just that we’re getting careless.”

*****

A perfect white feather was lying on the sidewalk.

Tori Harrington picked it up and turned it over in her fingers. She slid it into the book she carried. It was the fifth feather she had collected on this walk. She’d passed up a few that were scattered down the sidewalk like flowers on a wedding aisle, but she saw that on those, chunks were missing, so she only picked up the perfect ones.

Yesterday, she had found a long, dark feather as the day’s prize—maybe from one of the vultures that drifted in looping circles above the city park. Vulture feathers were good luck. She’d added it to the mason jar where she kept the other feathers she’d found over the past few days—cardinal red, blue jay blue, lots of pigeon smoky grays and rusty browns. Though there didn’t seem to be more than the usual number of birds, Black Creek had more than its share of loose feathers.

In spite of herself, Tori was becoming interested in living again.

She’d settled into a routine. Coffee on the patio, sometimes with her host and benefactor, Laine Shilling. Painting in the morning, often outside. Lunch in the cottage’s tiny kitchen or at the diner where the town ended and countryside began. More painting. Then an evening saunter, book in hand. As artist-in-residence, she was expected to produce something to hang in the community art center, and to give an art talk at its unveiling. Laine was on the community arts board.

Tori hadn’t known that Kat, her friend from home, sent an application on her behalf for the artist residency until she got the email saying she’d won it.

“I’ve never even heard of Black Creek.” she’d said. “I mean, do they even know what I paint?”

Kat had laughed. “Yes, they know. Landscapes dark and dreary, disturbing portraits of roadkill. The inaugural Black Creek Artist Residency goes edgy, by Tori Harrington.”

“How did you even hear about this place?” Tori wondered.

“A guy at work,” Kat had said. “He lived there for a semester. He said it’s got loads of atmosphere. Too much weird and secretive for him, but it sounds perfect for us.”

So they’d decided. A two-week honeymoon—which was as much time off from work as Kat could get. And then Tori would stay and finish the month-long residency, while Kat returned home to the apartment they shared.

*****

“Such a lovely evening,” Laine said, calling to Tori from her well-lit back porch. “I always have wine on Thursdays. Join me. You’re certainly getting to know the town, with your daily walks.”

“So many wind chimes,” Tori said. “And lots of birds. Lots of feathers, anyway. I have a found-feather collection.”

Laine set her wine glass down, her face pale. “Feathers? You haven’t picked up any, have you?”

“A few,” Tori said carefully.

“You must return them. Put them back as near as you can to where you found them.”

Tori laughed, a nervous reflex. “They were just on the ground. Not like from a display or anything.”

“I’m serious about this,” Laine said. “You mustn’t disturb the feathers. Don’t touch them, don’t step on them.” Her eyes sought Tori’s, held them. “Tomorrow. In the morning. Right away. All of them. Don’t just dump them. Put them back where you found them.” Laine’s fingers clutched the paisley skirt she wore. “And for God’s sake, don’t pick up any more.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Promise me.” Laine’s forehead was furrowed, her eyes bright with hysteria.

“I promise,” Tori said, unnerved by the other woman’s intensity. “Um. I didn’t hurt anything. Did I? Is it, like, a town ordinance or something?”

“Something like that,” Laine said. “And don’t ever walk at night. Please.”

“Why, though? What’s wrong?”

Black Creek was quiet, a neighborhood of tree-lined boulevards and smooth sidewalks. Hardly even a dog barking. Sometimes Tori heard the clack-clack of a distant freight train, but nothing much seemed to move here.

“All the feathers, Tori. I’m so sorry, love, I have a terrible headache, I must go in. Put them back. Do it in the morning. Right away. Good night.”

*****

Tori was too spooked to ignore Laine’s plea. She was up early, after a restless night filled with a metallic sound like hawks shrieking. She crept around town, furtively laying feathers on the ground, feeling eyes on her from shop windows and passing cars as she stooped and put this feather at the entrance to an alley, these three behind the diner in the grassy lot. A police car, the first she’d seen, cruised past her twice.

The sun was well up when she returned to the cottage. Laine was on her porch, but went inside when Tori reached her patio. Tori kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed, itchy with sweat, her chest clogged with unshed tears.

Kat would have laughed at Laine. Kat didn’t take shit from anyone. How could someone so alive die with no warning? How could a heart that loving simply stop beating? Grief was supposed to lessen with time, people told her. It’d been six months, and the only difference was the shock had become numbness.

She closed her eyes and still saw Kat, dead for hours—the whole day Tori was at work—cold and stiff in their bed. They should have been getting ready for their wedding these past weeks; this should be their honeymoon. Tori shouldn’t be alone in some stupid little town where it was a crime to pick up bird feathers.

When she woke, it was dark. She’d slept the whole day. And she’d had terrible dreams. Bloody feathers, and screeching—keening, furious, inhuman. She fell back into a sleep that stayed dreamless, woke disoriented and stiff-necked.

*****

Tori stepped outside with her coffee. Laine was standing in the driveway next to a police cruiser, talking to the officer through his open window. Tori crept closer. “Of course I didn’t tell her why,” Laine said. “But she knows now. So.” The police officer nodded, and the car slid out of the driveway.

“What’s going on?” Tori said. “You have to tell me.”

“No, I don’t,” Laine said. “I’ll be late for work. Some of us around here have schedules.”

Tori walked backward, each step blocking Laine, who stepped around her like the ballet dancer she’d been.

“I have a right to know.”

“Just don’t pick up any more feathers, don’t walk at night, finish your residency and then get out of here,” Laine said. “It’s not something for outsiders.”

Tori felt shocked. “Do you want me to leave right now?”

Laine stopped, her eyes once again kind. “Tori, no. I don’t want you to leave. I actually like you a lot. It’s just—you won’t believe.” Laine’s shoulders drooped. “Come inside. Work can wait, but I can’t do this without whiskey in my coffee.”

*****

The Bird Woman. It, or something like it, had been terrorizing Black Creek for decades.

“I grew up with it,” Laine said. “I didn’t understand how strange it seems. I figured all small towns have dark secrets, things people don’t talk about, don’t they? I moved away for a while, got married, left Black Creek behind me. Then my mother died—natural causes. She left me this house. When we came back for the funeral, we started fixing it up to sell it, and Ron fell in love with the place. So we moved in. He opened a body shop and I did hair where the cottage is now. I had to tell him.”

She was quiet for a moment, then went on. “He thought it was nonsense, and I have to admit, it sounded pretty silly to me, too, as I told him. I’d forgotten what it was like, growing up, knowing you had to be indoors before nightfall, hearing the shrieks at night and wondering if she’d gotten a dog or maybe a person. Ronnie, he thought it was stupid small-town bullshit. No ridiculous legend was going to scare him. He went looking for it.”

Laine poured Jim Beam into her coffee cup, her hand shaking on the bottle. “It hung him from a dead tree behind the diner near the flour mill. By his intestines.”

Tori felt that her upset t hearing this was probably visible, because Lane continued, “I’m sure you think that I should have moved away again. But I think now that I never should have moved away in the first place. Anyway, the Bird Woman is gone. She must be! It’s been years since anyone has seen her. But still—we stay away from the flour mill and the old bridge. We pretend not to see any evidence of her—that’s why we don’t pick up the feathers or anything else from her kills. If we don’t provoke her, maybe we can keep the peace.”

*****

It stormed that night. Tori watched the lightning through the skylights, the weird shadows of the trees. She reached for her book. A pristine white feather marked her place. She’d forgotten this one feather. She held it in the palm of her trembling hand, but then she felt angry.

“This is ridiculous,” she scoffed out loud. “The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!”

Laine had described the Bird Woman as child-sized and nearly bald, with hunched shoulders and tattered, black feathers like a dress, who perched in the trees and hopped along the ground. Probably a homeless person, Tori decided. A poor old woman, possibly deformed, maybe even mentally handicapped, and no one would help her. Probably she was forced to scavenge and to hide from the myriad cruelties of the townspeople. Collective guilt was behind the violent legend. That’s all.

Tori switched off the bedside lamp, closed her eyes. Rain thrummed on the roof, thunder distant now. A shadow moved over the skylight. A sharp face with bright-black eyes peered through the skylight. Tori moaned in nightmare, pushing away at a black-clad figure, thin but strong, smelling of old meat. Wild screeching echoed in her dreams.

*****

There was a note on the patio café table in the morning, soggy and barely legible. In it, Laine was vague, saying she had to leave town unexpectedly. It read like an excuse. There was more, but the ink was smudged. Something about birds. The gist of it, it seemed to Tori: Laine had fled.

Tori went to the diner and sat on the bar stool closest to the grill. “Tell me about this Bird Woman, Mike. I’m not here much longer and I feel like I’m missing out on local folklore. Legends. Whatever.”

Mike didn’t turn around. “The what? Never heard of it.”

“Laine told me. Not much. I’d like to hear more.”

“Laine’s crazy.”

Tori considered this, but then observed, “I don’t think she’s crazy; it’s just that she really believed.”

Mike wheeled around. “Just because it doesn’t seem real to you doesn’t mean it isn’t. Laine told you about Ronnie?” Tori nodded. “That was no bullshit. That happened. It’s been quiet for a while, and we’ve let down our guard. A friend of mine is missing. A road crew discovered his bike this morning in a ditch. And what might be a piece of his ear. Don’t fuck around and think you know something about it. God, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this at all. We don’t talk about this!”

“The Bird Lady is a person, Mike!” Tori said. “She needs help. If she’s even real, maybe she’s a homeless person.”

“A person,” Mike almost spit out the word. “You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m closing up; you gotta go.”

Mike followed Tori to the door, his face stern. “Mind your own business, Tori. You don’t believe it, so you won’t understand it. I saw you picking up feathers. Don’t come in here with those things.”

“I put them back,” Tori mumbled.

Mike closed the door, turned the key and disappeared into the diner, leaving Tori standing on the sidewalk. A feather—white-tipped gray—floated down from the awning over the diner entrance. Tori let it fall.

*****

Tori sat on the patio watching the sun set, twirling a drying paint brush in her fingers. She’d painted all day, straight through lunch, without thought, without her usual careful consideration of form and color, sloppily, spattering paint on the white wicker patio furniture, on her jeans, her shoes. Today should be her three-week wedding anniversary.

She painted a dead-eyed bride in the distance, frail against a muddy sky. In the foreground, hunched figures on bare branches, bird-like creatures with nearly bald heads and bright-black eyes, gnarled fingers and the curve of wings, clawed feet, oily black garments hanging in tatters like bedraggled feathers. Small dead birds in a pile at the base of the tree.

She had no plan. Only a grim fatalism that had been creeping into her from the moment she’d found Kat’s dead body. Everything, it seemed, had brought her to this place, this unwed night, this savage nothingness. Kat’s secret application for the residency, renting this cottage; Kat all but telling her where to find the Bird Woman—Tori was meant to be here. There was no one who would understand things this way—not even Kat. Maybe finding the Bird Woman was the right thing to do, because she wasn’t sure she could continue to live…not with this never-ending grief.

She felt a kinship with whoever this Bird Woman was.

The humid night air was luminous under the early-rising moon, the widely spaced streetlights dim pools of yellow light buzzing with insects. Tori walked past the diner, silent, turned to the grassy lot behind it. She climbed the rickety four steps to the loading platform of the flour mill. The door hung on one hinge. She pushed past it, gagging on the stench of bird shit and rot.

The corners were in dark shadow, even with the missing panels of roof leaving gaping holes to the moonlit sky, and with the streetlight feebly wavering through a broken window. Piles of bones—bird, small animal, some bigger bones Tori purposely didn’t examine, some with remnants of old cloth. There was no Bird Woman here. Not this night.

The old bridge was about a hundred yards past the flour mill, down a closed road. Tori walked into the woods guarding its metal skeleton. The carrion smell was palpable. There, in a trio of tall pines: dried entrails, like cord on the branches. And something shiny, fresh, slick. Tori climbed the ladder-like pine branches, the air prickly on her freshly-shorn head, her frayed black cloak—just a swath of material, really—catching on branches, ripping into ribbons.

She looked only at the next branch, grabbing and pulling and stepping, mechanical. She wasn’t thinking beyond climbing. She meant to return the white feather, to offer it as a token of goodwill. She wasn’t sure what she would do when she ran out of branches. Perhaps she’d perch.

The tree swayed as something landed on a branch above her reaching hand. Tori looked up into bright-black eyes in a pinched, naked face.

The thing screeched and Tori knew in one moment how mistaken she was. There was nothing shared between them. Nothing in common. There was no kinship.

Tori went numb, frozen, one hand gripping the branch, knuckles white. Suddenly she very much wanted to live, but she knew with a cold certainty that she would not. Tori reached out to the Bird Woman, offering the single white feather crushed in a sap-smeared hand.

The Bird Woman clicked her teeth, like a human’s but pointed, and Tori’s blood turned cold. The wrongness of it…the unnaturalness.

The Bird Woman darted her head for the white feather, came back with Tori’s hand in her mouth. Tori screamed, her blood spraying the branches and the green needles, as she watched the Bird Woman toss back her head and bolt the hand down, swallowing in three gulps.

Something landed behind Tori and another something landed further out on the branch she grasped with her remaining hand. Three of them, like the Furies.

Tori arched her back and let go, falling, hitting a branch, then another. She felt claws on her handless arm, saw a black shape hurtling toward her through the pine limbs. She came to a precarious stop on a net of intertwined branches.

Live. She rolled toward the bird woman holding her arm, its face wet with her blood, and flailed madly, trying to push it away, to dislodge its hold on her forearm, to stop its teeth from ripping her bicep. Her movement sent the second bird woman hurtling past her, its screech murderous.

The bird women weren’t good flyers. The one that had flown past Tori bounced on the ground. It tried to take off again, flapping wings like a chicken, hopping, seeking the space it needed to get airborne.

Ten feet above it, Tori struggled to breathe, her blood pumping out through the mangled stump where her hand had been. She yanked her arm free, kicking and swinging her good arm. And fell. Thumped onto the thick bed of pine needles, dirt and moss sticking to her wounded arm.

The bird woman on the ground lunged at her, going for Tori’s eyes. Tori rolled, coming up onto her knees, snarling with desperate rage matching the bird woman’s savageness. They launched at each other, the bird woman’s teeth snapping. Tori grabbed a wing with her one hand as the two rolled, and when they hit the base of the tree, Tori was on top, the bird woman in a headlock. She put her sneakered foot on the bird woman’s shoulder, grinding, and pulled with all she had, falling over backward as the head separated from the bird woman’s body with a warm, wet plop.

Tori scrambled to her feet and ran, stumbling and sobbing and cradling the gory head and her handless arm. She felt light-headed as her blood seeped out of her now-stump where she had once had a hand. Adrenaline dulled her pain.

The other bird women didn’t pursue, but their shrieking filled the still night.

*****

Laine frowned at the paint spatter on the wicker furniture, at the open door of the cottage. She’d returned home, reluctantly—warned by Mike that her artist hadn’t been seen; that the cottage appeared to be unoccupied.

Laine stepped inside. Gobs of blood in the entry way, and in the cramped bathroom, blood on the towels, in the sink, dried in crusty patches on the floor and the walls. The remnants of a first-aid kit lay scattered on the floor with a shelf that had been wrenched from the wall.

She hit the light switch, illuminating the tiny living space. At the foot of the bed, there was what appeared to be a canvas on an easel: the fulfillment of the artist residency.

Laine squinted, noticing for the first time that the skylight was covered. She looked up. It had been painted from the inside, spatters of paint all over the bedspread, the carpet. She looked back at the easel. And found she didn’t have the breath to scream.

The painting—or sculpture, rather—was on a board rather than a canvas. In the middle, a beaky head the size of a cantaloupe with dull-black eyes pinned open, already smelling of rot. The rest of the board was decorated with long, black feathers, and petals from flowers that grew in Laine’s garden.

Movement drew Laine’s attention. Tori stood in the dark corner, her gleaming eyes feral, her scalp pale and raw in the uncertain light.

“Do you like it?” Tori asked, stepping forward, her voice harsh and raw. One arm was sloppily bandaged, and she was wearing a tattered black garment that barely covered her bloody and paint-spattered body.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Laine moaned.

“I do, though,” Tori said. “I do.”

Something thudded against the blackened skylight, shrieking in the gathering night.

Tori smiled at Laine, her pointed teeth bloody. She stretched, the glint of a talon on the bandaged arm, the hint of black feathers creeping over hunching shoulders. She raised her bright-black-eyed face and screamed.