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Show 68 globe of food hanging still slickly in the now-nearly-unwinded air. "Birds!" she called out in a throaty, almost resigned voice: "Birds! Oh, God! Oh, God!" And she walked toward image after image of encapsulated life. She was a murderess. She was a murderess: Now on top of everything. Finally, seized by the extraordinary beauty, the gold, white and black of an evening grossbeak glazed at her feet, seized by that beauty and unable to bear her own shredding sense of complicity any longer, Leah bent and snatched up the tight, glistening husk of a bird and hurled it as high as she could into the white pine branches. It was fury. It was rage. It was a dozen forms of denial. But a miraculous thing happened. The boughs of the pine, brushing past delicately, cracked the crystal of ice and it dropped away, like pieces of the finest wine glass, tumbling lightly down, bough to branch. And the bird!' The bird moved on through boughs but seemed to enlarge. It was as if down and feathers radiated from its center, and it took on shape, found substance, grew. Leah thought she was imagining. Leah thought she had gone entirely mad. But it was true! It was happening! And now the bird banded with gold seemed to shake itself to new life, seemed in hesitant starts to realize its own flight and freedom. And an instant later, yes; the bird spread its own unshakled wings and assumed the air. Leah shrieked. It was a new and wild and victorious scream. And she ran from imprisoned bird to imprisoned bird, falling herself repeatedly into the mud and ice, but hurling the encased and beautiful life into the pine. Now the temperature was above thirty, the sun more generous; there was a new benevolence in the air. Fractured ice crystals fell, sounding like windchimes, |