Free Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill

and kisses her neck. “Don’t worry, baby, she’s not my type.”
    Maggie puzzles over his response. She seems particularly fortunate to have ended up living with two people so sure they’re not each other’s type.
    On the screen, the film still runs in reverse. Pauline walks backward from the bathroom to the playroom, approaches three dead birds on the windowsill, and points to them. Then she and the camera retreat down the hall, arriving at a place where another dead bird lies broken on the carpet. Eventually, like magic, it leaps into Maggie’s waiting hand.
    Maggie draws a sharp breath.
    “What is it?” says Fletcher.
    On the wall, the bird is now in Pauline’s cupped fingers and the girl’s crying, tears streaming from her cheeks back into her eyes.
    “You didn’t show this to Brid, did you?” Maggie asks. “I haven’t told her about the dead birds.”
    Fletcher promises not to say anything, and the two of them stay holding each other as the film winds back to its beginning: the sequence of objects left behind, the glimpses of the outhouse and the decrepit living room. Finally the end of the film flaps against the reel and the wall becomes a slate of light. Once he’s turned off the projector, they make their way to the bedroom. When they emerge and descend sheepishly to the kitchen, Brid and Pauline are already eating dinner.
    “At it again, huh?” says Brid.
    After the meal, while Brid’s tucking in Pauline, Maggie takes the scissors and Scotch tape from the kitchen toher new screening room, turns on the projector, and runs it until she reaches the scene with the birds. Very carefully she cuts it out, then tapes the remaining film back together. It seems too easy, but when she runs it again, her taping job holds; the film simply moves from the previous scene to the next. She’s glad, but somehow she can’t quite bear the thought of throwing away the excised strip, so she rolls it up, goes to the bedroom closet, and nestles it in the pocket of her winter coat.
    Her first camera was a Kodak Brownie Starflash, black plastic with a built-in flash gun, the socket for the bulb haloed by a silver dish above the lens. Her father gave her the camera for her tenth birthday, even though Gran told him the thing was too grown-up for a girl her age. Thereafter Maggie took revenge on her grandmother by repeatedly skulking through Gran’s house and lying in wait until the old woman came into range. Then Maggie pressed the button and a smack of light caught Gran full in the face. Gran shrieked exquisitely every time, her howls of indignation following Maggie across the lawn during the scamper home, the camera on its strap swinging against Maggie’s breastbone with a pain she accepted as her due for such wickedness. Each time she thumbed through a packet of newly developed photographs, she took a special pleasure from the shots of Gran’s face drained of colour, garish, poorly framed, her expression somewhere between terror and outrage.
    The rest of the photographs were always of Maggie’s father, because at that age Maggie assumed that photoshad to be of people, and because taking pictures of him was so simple and satisfying. Those moments when she held him in the viewfinder were the only times she could look at him without feeling overwhelmed by the melancholy in his eyes.
    What the camera never showed was the long scar on his neck from a piece of shrapnel when the Nazis almost got him in the war. Maggie had seen the scar only a few times, and the story wasn’t one her father liked to tell, so she’d been left to read about D-Day on her own and picture the invasion, the rough sailing and frigid waters, the hours of bleeding before a medic finally arrived to help him. The history books described it as one of the most important events in American history, yet her father never marched in the Veterans Day parade, and the scar was his only ribbon. He hid it behind high collars or under scarves that made him look