Murmurations

By Stephanie Scissom

The field beside my childhood home attracts starlings. When I was young, I’d sit on the wooden fence and watch them. My father was always working in the garage behind our house, but whenever he saw me there, he’d stop and join me.

“Those are murmurations,” he’d tell me, as dark clouds of starlings rose against the gray winter sky.

Their flight patterns amazed and entranced me. Thousands of birds, moving in perfect synchronicity, never colliding as they swooped and swirled through the air in an elaborate, aerial dance.

This cold February day, by that same fence, I watch them surge and withdraw, tighten and disperse, crashing like the ocean in a storm.

Their bodies are like a magnetic resonance imaging of my thoughts. Heavy at times, wisp-thin at others. Some things are so hard to remember. Others, impossible to forget.

I stare at the old white farmhouse, wishing I could go knock on that door and tell my mother I am sorry for everything I put her through as a teenager. The drugs, the anger, the times I ran away. If I could redo it, I would. I hope she knows that.

I glimpse a snowflake and watch it dance before it’s joined by another. Then I glance at my father’s garage. Panic beats into my chest like the wings of a thousand birds. The grass around the garage is pristine—no junk cars, no plastic bins of parts. Do they not live here anymore?

How long has it been since I’ve been home? Sometimes it’s so hard remembering even basic things.

A memory rushes to the surface—of slipping out my bedroom window, grabbing onto the limb of the old oak tree, and working my way down until I dropped the last five feet into my mother’s bushes.

That memory remains vivid, sharp. I can even remember what I wore that night, from the Bon Jovi t-shirt and ripped jeans with spandex underneath to the red Reeboks. I can remember the face of the man who waited in his service truck down by our mailbox for me, but I can’t remember his name. Johnny? Donny? It certainly doesn’t matter now. He was cute, older, and he had the drugs my body had already began to crave. That was the night I left home for good.

A car pulls into my parents’ drive, and my thoughts swirl away, regroup, and resurge, focusing on the new arrival.

The lady who climbs out of the car and retrieves groceries from the trunk is a stranger. Too old to be my mother. Too thin. My mother would never wear her hair that short. She unlocks the front door and walks in like she owns the place.

My thoughts break into a million pieces, and I fling them into the air.

Who is she? Where are they? Why didn’t they wait for me?

The lady comes back for another load, and I stare at her. She looks familiar, then not. Something about her lined face spooks me, and my thoughts scatter again, only to reform in a thick, black cloud that pushes against me, forcing me to recall a memory I don’t want to revisit.

Lying in the seat of that service truck. The smell of motor oil and starter fluid. The needle in my arm, and that man slapping my face, trying to wake me up.

He panics. I float, twist above my body, pleading with him not to give up yet. To help me.

I’m still here.

The next house down belonged to a widow lady. Mrs. Johnson? Mrs. Jackson? The memory escapes my grasp like a kite string from a child’s hand. I let it go. It’s unimportant. But he and some other men were doing work for her that winter—I can almost remember the red logo on his truck. That’s how we met. He pulled alongside the road one day as I sat on the fence watching the starlings.

The memory of his smiling face shatters, scatters, then regroups.

His face is strained, stricken as he pulls on the lid of Mrs. Jackson’s septic tank and shoves my body inside. He covers it himself the next day with a backhoe and a load of red Alabama dirt—in front of all his unsuspecting coworkers—while I churn somewhere above him, screaming.

Unheard.

The memory is too grim, too brutal. I am grateful when it finishes spilling over me, then retreats like the tide. My thoughts and memories are light again. Hazy.

Just a trace of me remains as I wait for the starlings to take flight again. I feel calm. Lazy. Floating like a soft breeze. I can almost hear my father’s voice, and it comforts me.

I think my name is Sarah.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Scissom is from Altamont, Tennessee. She inspects tires and plots murder by night at a tire factory and attends a somewhat excessive number of Jake Owen concerts on her nights off. She’s published in romantic suspense and horror, with four full-length novels and numerous shorts. Her story Dandelions recently placed first in an international competition.

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