Down they came, limp and swinging waywardly, the black of their feathers streaking the murky sky before crashing into the white earth with a muffled thud and inking the periphery red. Then the hammer struck again. An ominous shot rang out. Another bird plucked out the sky some distance away.
The father lowered the barrel and motioned to Pal, as he had a thousand times before, to fetch the fallen bird. But he did not move. The thing growing in him, now bulging against his bony ribs, made him slow, made him other. An act of intrusion. A chasm in certainty. He did not move.
"I'll get it!" the boy suddenly announced, and then began marking a path, his arrhythmic footfalls punching through snow, wind lashing the thin sheet of skin that covered his bony face. And yet he persevered.
Pal watched the boy. Panting. Breaths ragged and thin as if he were the one fetching the bird. Exhausted, he collapsed, bones folding into snow and his body spread like something already disappearing into the frigid earth. The father looked at Pal. Some abstract distance bridged, a door closing somewhere in his chest.
The boy returned with the bird. Warm weight in cold hands. He handed the bird to his father and then he knelt beside Pal. Soft whispers. Then they were off. Boots digging through snow, dotting the white plain. Each step an assertion against the winter that would have them.
"He's suffering," said the father, as he watched Pal drag his body through snow. The boy, determined to shepherd him through, drifted down his arm and grazed Pal's coarse coat.
"He's fine," said the boy.
The boy spotted something in the distance. A pale shape against the white. Large enough to aim at. He took off running and Pal followed, dragging his body through snow, pitched toward the weight of the tumor. The father watched. Nearly called after him to stop. The words forming. Then wind lashed his gaunt face and his lips shut. Just as well.
The house was slightly pitched, as if standing on uneven ground or held up on one end by an invisible hand. Tall trees ran along the front and back of the house, feathering the edges with heavy branches. Shrinking into a blob from the edges in.
Later, the father lit the fireplace while the boy removed his ragged clothes, patched up at the elbows and knees three times over, before settling next to the fire with Pal. The dead birds hung from their wiry necks, tacked to the kitchen wall, perfectly matching the ethereal pattern of the wallpaper. A clock hung behind the dining table struck midnight, its hands moving with peculiar urgency.
The boy's head, heavy with the weight of the meal he'd just consumed, began to warm up, and his eyelids melted into a half-mast shape that beckoned him to sleep.
"Off to bed, kiddo," said the father.
The boy sprang up to his feet but Pal seemed stitched to the ground. The boy gently slid his hands under him, aiming to lift him off the ground.
"Let's go, Pal," said the boy as he vainly tried to peel him off.
"Let him stay, boy. He likes it here," said the father.
And then the boy stood and against the incandescent orange of the fireplace his shadow floated to the winding steps that rose to the attic where he'd sleep. The father watched him recede into the backdrop and swallowed whole by the darkness, only just following his upward ascent through the faint patter of his feet meeting the rough steps.
Later, in the space between one breath and the next, the boy woke to the apocryphal groans of the floorboards, then heard the yawn of the door as it swung open. Footsteps. The door latching. And silence. Groggy but intrigued, he looked out the azure-tinted window and spotted an inky blot in the shape of his father and Pal move away from the house and disappear amidst the silhouette of vegetation.
Downstairs, the living room clock displayed 2 A.M.
The boy stood at the mouth of the trail where his father and Pal had stood. When, he could not say. Wind shrieked past his ears, and his limbs trembled, but his bare feet found the first cold stretch of earth and then the next and then he was walking, and suddenly the house was gone, miles behind him, as if time had folded and delivered him here without his knowledge. He looked behind him and saw a peculiar constellation of bright dots undulating like fireflies in the wind, and he took to mean that he was now wholly unmoored and independent. So he turned and faced the trail again. Walking through the moonlit forest, he thought he heard whispers, words curling into gnarly, indistinct vowels before snapping and morphing into the crisp rustling of leaves. Wary incantations from another place.
He sped up. Still no sign of his father or Pal. Numb limbs, woozy head, the edges of his vision smudged as if on purpose to make him think he was sleepwalking, that this was not actually happening, but then a bark split across the eerie quiet, and he knew it to be Pal, and he knew that he was close, and that maybe this was not just a dream. Closer still, and he peered through the thick bushes and spotted his father, rifle in hand, and Pal a meter or two away. It wasn't until he squinted, the corners of his weary eyes furrowed, that he made out the barrel of the gun, carved into sharp relief against the purple-hued sky and trained at Pal. His toes, frozen stiff, suddenly pushed against the wet earth, and his face poked through the bushes an inch or two more, braced for confrontation.
Then the hammer struck and a shot rang out. The boy retreated, his hand pressed hard against his mouth. Silence secured. Smoke rose from the barrel and drifted across the disturbed snow where Pal had been.
Morning came and birds sang a maudlin tune, but quiet was all one heard. Snow fell as if something above was stirring the air into flakes.
The door swung open and the father appeared at the threshold, aged by the night's work. The air had gone thin. The boy lay shrouded in his white blanket, head buried in the pillow, and beneath him Pal stretched out in repose, eyes open and fixed on the father. The father stared back, his mind refusing what his eyes reported.
The boy's room too seemed to have taken on a patina, the windowsill covered with soot, the window frosted. A stuffed doll sat in the corner, propped up against a peeling wall. Its round face, button eyes, and a small red button for a nose festooned with frayed fibers resembling a mane or a beard. It too was staring at the father.
The round dining table where they congregated to break fast was surrounded by wallpaper that was curling at the top, coming apart slowly. Clusters of bright glass bottles and vases stuffed with singed flower stems sat on dust-covered shelves, and a clock affixed to the wall behind the table spun at great speed, marking every 24-hour cycle in a minute, its hands a blur against the cracked face.
The boy sat at the table, and next to him, Pal hooped in a chair.
"Could you pass the butter?" said the boy, and the father pressed the back of his hand against a crumbling plate where a slab of melting butter sat. The boy watched the plate slide across the table, and his father's fingernails, blue and rimmed with coagulated blood, but said nothing.
A dead bird plucked out the murky sky dropped into a patch of snow, and blood spurted out, dyeing the snow red.
Fire raged in the hearth. The father sat in his rocking chair, and Pal on the floor. A shadow moved across the orange walls, like a clock hand tracing the seconds, and the boy ascended the steps to the attic. Then the moan of the floor, and his bare feet met the cold earth, and his eyelashes covered with snow as he trudged through the dark trail, here and there the blue of the moon leaking through the thick canopy of trees above.
A shot rang out, and he slapped his hand across his mouth and let out a muffled cry, and behind him, a doorknob turned, and when the father stuck his head through the narrow opening, he looked nothing like himself. Grey hair, eyes sunken, cheeks hollow, but no matter—when he looked upon the bed again, Pal was there, and the boy asleep, and the stuffed doll and the room and everything in it covered in new layers of dust.
The father sat at the table, his head rimmed by the oval of the clock now running twice as fast. A shadow and abstract outline in the shape of the boy and Pal streaked the dilapidated walls and decaying furnishings of the space, traced sluggishly by the father's murky gaze.
"He's suffering," said the father, dead birds drooping from his backpack as they slogged through the snow. The boy sat down to comfort Pal. The father drove on. Behind them, no footprint to trace the staccato trajectory.
Door latches closed, and the sound of a bullet carving through the cold air and a muffled cry. This time, the father's neck swiveled, head cocked at the source of the sound, eyes peering through the dark. The boy looked back in horror, and for the first time, the father heard it—that thin, breathless sound threading through the wind.
In the morning, the door opened, but the stuffed toy no longer had eyes to stare, covered in a thick coat of soot and dust, its fabric body slumping headless in the corner. The father appeared, his withering figure shuffling through the doorway, his gaze resumed its decades-long direction. Pal stretched out on the floor. And the boy's bed empty, sheets twisted and cold. His vision was gauzy and thin, his mind slow, unable to string the cascade of images that were forming behind him.
He turned around, crossed the threshold into the living room. A silver-plated candelabra glistened for an instant as a refracted figure of a man flitted across it—someone, or something, glimpsed and gone, impossible to make out.
The clock displayed 2 AM.
The house sagged around him, walls split and wallpaper hanging in tatters, and still outside the forest pressing closer, branches poking in like gnarled fingers.