Delicate Edible Birds Read Online Free PDF

stolen girls locked the door, set a fire, and burned the terrible murderer up.
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    IN THE GRIMMS ’ STORY, of course, the community at last cleansed itself by fire, and in the aftermath came out righteous and whole. This did not happen to Templeton.
    We were under siege. The media trucks were parked all along Main Street. Our town, though small, was famous for the baseball museum and for its beauty, an all-American village. Right-wing pundits on television and in the mega-corporation-owned newspapers held up our town as a symbolfor the internal moral rot of America, a symbol of the trickle-down immorality stemming from our Democrat president, who went around screwing everything that moved. People from Cherry Valley and Herkimer roared into town, pretending that they were natives, and the whole country saw us as drawling mulleted hicks in whole-body Carhartt, and hated us more. The handsome newscasters shivered in their fur-lined parkas, sat at our diner, and tried to eavesdrop, but were really only eavesdropping on other newscasters.
    Our shell-shocked mayor appeared on television. He was the town know-it-all, a bearded hobbit of a man who gave bombastic walking tours to the tourists and wore shorts all year because of a skin condition. He had to pause to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief, choking up throughout his speech. At the end, he said, “Templeton will survive, as we have survived many other disasters in our illustrious history. Be brave, Templeton, and we will see each other through.” But there was no applause at the end, as there were no Templetonians in the audience, composed as it was of disaster-gawkers and newscasters.
    Our Ambassador appeared on CNN and 20/20 to defend our town. “We are not perfect,” he said in his quivery old man’s voice. “But we are a good town, full of good people.” His cloudy eyes filled with fervor. It was very affecting.
    We stayed inside. We went to the grocery store, if we needed to, to school, and a few of us went to the gym. Our team practiced in virtual silence, the only sound the watersucking in the gutters, the splash of our muscled limbs. In school, the teachers came to classes with red-rimmed eyes, traces of internal anguish happening in the homes of people we never imagined had private lives. The drama kids pretended to weep at lunch on a recurrent basis. There was a hush over the town, as if each of us were muted, swaddled in invisible quilts, so separate from one another as to not be able to touch, if we wanted to. Girls began walking in groups everywhere, as if for protection. The Templeton men did not dare to look at the Templeton women, furious as we were, righteous. And in this separation, in our own sorrow, we forgot about the girls, the Lucky Chow Fun girls, and when, after some time, we thought of them, they were the enemies. They were the ones who had brought this shame to our town.
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    TWO TERRIBLE WEEKS PASSED. My mother stopped talking about The Garbageman, tout court . He stopped calling. She stopped visiting him with plates of food. She grew drawn and pale, and spent a lot of time in her flannel nightgown, watching Casablanca. She picked a new fight with the principal and came home spitting. The Winter Dance was canceled: I spent that evening dating a pizza and an apple crumble, watching Fred and Ginger glide across the floor, pure grace. Pot acquired two new taxidermied birds, one finch, one scarlet macaw, its head cocked intelligently, even in death.
    One day, I came home, skirting Main Street and its hordes of news cameras. I went to the mailbox and found six envelopes from colleges all over the country, all addressed to me.
    I went inside. I sat at the table with a cup of tea, the six letters splayed before me. One by one, I opened them. And what would have been a personal tragedy before the Lucky Chow Fun was now a slight relief. Of the six colleges, all of which had recruited me for swimming, though I had