OCR Text |
Show 67 and looking out her window for what she saw. All the rain was ice. The temperature had hit twenty-four and it was now twenty-seven, rebounding, crazily rising. The horizon across the lake was sun, where, two hours before, it had boiled black. But every drenched branch, ever soaked surface was a layer of ice. All five of Leah's bird-puddings in their onion bags had a terrible crust at least a quarter of an inch thick. They shone almost, globed in dreadful light and wind like wild, fiendish ornaments. And the birds! And the birds! Leah could hardly breathe. How did something like this happen?! How did nature design such an event?! Their entire yard was strewn with casks of birds. Grossbeaks in ice lay on pine needles. Juncos and chickadees jacketed by the bizarre rain-to-ice-plunge littered the mud and brown-cropped grass of the lawn. In every visible direction, stretched a frozen bird assylum: birds bound, incarcerated wings in glaze. The temperature was twenty-eight, and Leah was screaming. She was alone in a sanitarium. She pulled her hair. She made her fists as tiny as she could and beat them against her head. She made sounds, percolated a pain that she had never heard escape from herself before. Hunt! It was Hunt! Hunt had done this! Somehow it was all connected in her mind. All of Hunt's sorry seekings and indecisions had made a heaven, had made a sky that acted with such swift, stupid cruelty. Leah ran outside. No birds moved. It was thirty degrees now, another upswing, and like blind cadmium oil, sun splashed everywhere in the trees and in the yard where it made no sense. Leah moved in one direction. Then another. Her throat still unwound its terrible sounds. She saw her work, she saw her labor in the |