Free The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert

held tightly to Mabel’s hand, and Lily pressed her hand against the glass of the window.Each birdwatcher headed off in a different direction, slowly searching a different parcel of land. Worse than them finding the bird dead, Mabel thought, would be them finding it alive. Then they’d all know that someone had left it there alone to suffer unrepaired.

5.
    ON THE NIGHT OF HER BIRTHDAY , after leaving Lily’s school-bus apartment, Mabel got in the Jimmy and drove away. She recognized every field and fence post her headlights swept across. Some people thought of it all as open spaces of nothing, and that’s what made the land feel close to Mabel’s heart. She knew the rhythms of the rattling planks as she drove across old wood bridges, and she knew which roads were heavily rutted from heavy farm machinery. She knew which corners hid dangerous blind spots and which railroad tracks had no red lights of warning. She knew intimately a nearly private part of the world. There was a kind of privilege in that, Mabel decided.
    Mabel drove to the Platte River, to where her father liked to take them all for a swim beneath the bridge. After they’d given up on chasing the bull the night of her eighth birthday, after the bull had run across the graveyard and into the darkbehind the white church, escaping entirely, they’d gone to the river. Mabel’s father parked at the edge of the bridge and they all stumbled out of the pickup. He flipped forward the seat and took a flashlight from a toolbox and two warm beers from a paper sack. He gave a beer to Mabel’s mother, who held Lily asleep in her arms, then took Mabel by the hand.
    “Did I ever show you this?” he said, shining the light before them, leading her to a thick wooden post partly broken and slightly bent. He pressed her fingers to the break, to a spot of blue paint. “When your mom went into labor with you, I was out here getting drunk with the guys. Your grandpa came out to tell me, and I was so out of it and so excited that I got in my car and thought I was going in reverse, but I was going forward. I ran into this post and knocked my head against the steering wheel or something. Knocked myself out and cut myself up and made a wreck of my car. Ten stitches,” he said, shining the flashlight on the little scar on his forehead. He’d told her about it all before, but she liked hearing it again and touching his scar. She liked hearing about how her birth, a month too soon, disrupted everything. “When I came to, I just walked down the hall to the nursery to look in at you. You were all squinty and fuzzy and crabby in your crib. A fussy little mess. But who can blame you, you’d just been through a lot.”
    Mabel drove the Jimmy up to the post, still bent and broken. She got out and knelt beside the break and touched at the bit of blue paint that remained. Above the rush of thewater over the sand, Mabel heard wind whistling through the holes in the bridge, and she thought of the blades of grass her father would pluck from the side of the river. He’d put the grass between his teeth for sharp, quick whistles that neither Mabel nor Lily could reproduce when he placed the grass on their tongues.
    Mabel stood and leaned against the post and worried about her father on that day of her birth. He was drunk and clumsy and could have been hurt worse, leaving Mabel even sooner than he had, leaving her without Lily, even. But what business did he have having babies and leaving his friends on a warm summer day at the river? He was only a kid, still knocking himself around, getting stitches in his head. Mabel took off her shoes and stepped into the river water, and the feel of sand between her toes and the bite of a minnow at her ankle reminded her of how her father had dangled her over the side of the bridge when she was very small. He’d hold tight to her feet and dip her toward the river and she’d stretch to touch the water’s top. Feeling the wind, and the spin of the blood