The Bird Eater Read Online Free PDF Page A

Those colors were too bright to suppress completely, and Aaron dared to breach the threshold of the house as the blanket drew him inside. Slowly approaching the couch, he allowed his fingers to drift across the delicate loops of yarn he still remembered her knitting while he sat at her feet with a pumpkin between his knees. It had almost been Halloween, and Edie had allowed him to carve the pumpkin himself, warning him that if he got the sloppy pumpkin guts on her precious blanket, he’d be spending the rest of his childhood upstairs in his room.
    He ran his hand across the top of the couch, feeling the yarn beneath his palm, only to watch the loops loosen and disintegrate before his eyes. His throat went sickly-tight at the sight of it, Edie’s precious blanket coming apart beneath his touch, a grim reminder that what was past was past. No amount of fond memory could bring back the dead.
    Aaron forced himself to look away, focusing the camcorder onto the fireplace mantel, still decorated with glass candlesticks and Edie’s antique silver-framed mirror, all in their rightful places. The mirror was tarnished by decades of neglect, the mantel covered in dust, downy feathers, and mounds of bird droppings that had oozed and dried down the sides of the white-painted shelf. A faded photograph of Fletcher grinned at him from next to the mirror—Edie’s favorite of her late husband, one she had displayed in various parts of the house after he had passed. Aaron recalled a glass-encased pillar candle burning next to at least one of them at all times: a tiny makeshift shrine, complete with an eternal flame. The candle was there, too, sheathed in a thick coating of webbing and dust.
    He glanced across the room to the hallway that led into the kitchen. The hall window was broken, shards of glass ground into the hardwood floor by years of trespass. There were footprints in the dust, smudges where curious intruders had run their fingers along walls and picture frames, traces of their fingerprints dotting the dust that papered the walls. And yet the place hadn’t been ransacked. Items remained in perfect, albeit fetid, order.
    A flower vase sat in the center of the kitchen table, dead stems jutting skyward in search of sunlight, flower petals surrounding the glass vessel in a circle of decay. The broken kitchen window was covered up with thick plastic sheeting, now tattered and half-pulled away from the frame by wind or curious hands or both, suggesting that if Holbrook House had become a trespasser’s haven, the police had made a half-assed attempt at securing the property. Aaron didn’t remember seeing a broken window on that long-ago Friday afternoon, but even if it had been broken, he wouldn’t have noticed. He didn’t remember much of anything, only that the mail carrier had picked him up nearly a mile down the road and driven him back home, a fourteen-year-old Aaron too winded and weeping to explain that he didn’t want to go back, that he didn’t want to spend another second in that house ever again.
    Aaron stared at a wooden sign Fletcher had hung above the window, a long slat of stained plywood he’d burned the words Edie’s Bistro into the summer before he had died. It had been an anniversary gift Edie had girlishly giggled at before pressing a kiss to her husband’s cheek in thanks.
    It felt strange to stand in that kitchen, surreal that a room that had once bustled with life was now so silent, so utterly inert.
    Moving down the hall again, Aaron dared to stop just shy of the staircase that had given him nightmares for years. Part of the railing was still draped in one of Edie’s prized blankets. Its rotting fringe hung low, brushing the top of a table lamp surrounded by sun-bleached photos, many of them of Aaron himself—Fletcher and Aaron fishing at Bull Shoals Lake, Aaron openmouthed and laughing while his uncle held a largemouth bass up in victory; Aaron standing in front of the double doors of his elementary