Free Trading Rosemary by Octavia Cade Page B

of further flight, and buried her purchase in the stacks. Buried her flight in cages, and small birds that could be tamed and contained.
    Rosemary had birds as a child, peach-faced lovebirds that cooed and died in elegant, lime feathers, too delicate for her chubby hands. They fed on fright, and more often than not expired of it. Rosemary buried them in the garden where she had once lost another bird, one that had escaped from its cage when she was cleaning it, one that had flown around the room, bumping into clear glass until it found a window that was open and flown away, into the cool green garden and the brightness of sky. She went to the neighbors, asked if they had seen it pale green against the deep, clear silhouettes of ferns. She left food on the veranda dutifully, having no real expectation of the lovebird returning with its silly face blushed with adventure. She heard her parents talking. “It’s obviously not from around here. The other birds will gang up on it—it’s probably dead already.” Well, they were clannish, Rosemary supposed. She could understand it, and felt surprisingly little sympathy for the wanderer. What a nuisance bird to cause all that trouble, to go where Rosemary could not follow! Hadn’t she fed and watered it, done her best to ignore what a disappointment it was as a pet? Freakish, flighty . . . unfriendly in the extreme. The bird didn’t return, and Rosemary did not grieve for it, jealous for the freedom she could not contain and could not mimic. She searched briefly for a well-pecked corpse, fallen stiffly into the long grass of the hedged garden, but she never found anything. She looked at the remaining bird with dislike, and her parents misunderstood. “We’ll get you another birdie, darling.”
    She had better luck with budgies, lazy mincing birds prone to fits of screeching temper, but they spent the rest of the day nibbling on cuttlefish and ignoring Rosemary’s attempts to be friends. She liked them, even when, unprovoked, they showed all the character of feather bolsters. Even the cat (an earlier model, but with the same greedy stare) didn’t bother them greatly. A lovebird would have keeled over in terror.
Perhaps budgies had less imagination,
Rosemary thought. They spent their days squatting and bobbing, producing infertile eggs. Only one hatched. Blue-gray, reminiscent of grave clothes and sacraments. It was weak and had no strength to fly: sat shivering on its perch, small squeaks rocking its body like earthquakes. With its downy baby feathers fluffed up, it was almost the size of its parents, and they fussed over it, preening, feeding, clucking. It made no difference, the lovebirds were back, a cuckoo in the nest. The blue budgie sat ghostly in the cage of its predecessors, a well-scrubbed cage that still had echoes of lovebird, for the budgie trembled, possessed with terror. Rosemary hung over it, hoping to claim one success, but for all her hovering the baby died. She wondered if it was from fright, if her presence had stifled the bird, suffocated it. Perhaps she was a plague on the feathered population of the world, and yet albatross flew about her.
    From that time on, Rosemary kept cats. They could be trusted not to keel over when her back was turned. Their independence was a comfort.
    (When Rosemary took her bird-memories and handed them over, she lost her liking for cats.)

Tararuas
    It was a hard walk in the scaly, ridge-backed mountains, but Rosemary had paid porters with bright handfuls of summer holidays and the flat presses where oil and wine spilled like blood through her fingers, dripped onto her tongue, staining brilliant teeth. It was worth it to walk freely and unburdened, to the remote hut of her next vendor.
    The wind across the tussock tops spread her hair like streamers, lifted her arms as if they were wings. She let it toss her along the mountains, careered down slopes with arms winged open, and felt she was flying. The wind was so strong that