I soon resented my having to wear the mask. My sister prodded me in the shoulder with the beak of the mask. For what other explanation could attend the arrival of such a beast? I knew it could not hurt me, yet I simply feared being near such a thing of death as this. I shuddered at the thought of leaning so close to this wraith, this essence of another century. With the mask to her face, she had bent over the ghost bird, dropping bits of ground beef from her mouth into its scraggly beak. She had situated it within a nest of tissues, sticks, newspapers, and cardboard boxes in the middle of the kitchen floor. I had watched her earlier with the ghost bird. She presented the mask to me on the second night of the ghost bird’s stay, extending it out to me carefully, her eyes slanted, apprehensive. She made the mask from a number of secret materials, the origin of which she could not tell us, though it smelled of sassafras, straw, and dung. In the late hours after the arrival of this ghost bird, my sister constructed for the family a giant bird mask, which she insisted we wear as we cared for our new guest. I could not be sure what it was, though I feared the consequences of our welcoming it to our humble home. Our father referred to it as a hell-hen, one of Satan’s chickens released from the coop. My sister insisted that it was a long lost dodo bird arisen to again wander the earth. Our mother thought it some ancient raptor, a weakened bird of prey or carrion eater. Each of us, in fact, referred to it differently. We sat rigidly in our chairs at the kitchen table so as not to trouble the air-as if a disturbance might set off some further unnatural occurrence in our home-and watched as the bird settled itself to roost, first raising one leg, then another, before twisting its skeletoned head back beneath its wing and falling asleep.Īvid birdwatcher that I was, I struggled to identify the make of this ornithological skeleton, and as a result, for the duration of the bird’s visit, none of us could agree upon its being. It merely appeared one evening, perching there suddenly upon my sister’s shoulder, making to preen, but failing on account of its rotted feathers.

Ghost bird