Free The Journey Prize Stories 24 by Various

proper.”
    “We have to call the museum,” I said.
    “Museum? How can you say my daughter belongs in a museum?”
    “That is not your daughter.”
    “She’s not an animal, she’s not something to be shot with formaldehyde and stuffed in a jar. She’s a human being.”
    “All right, we have to call the medical examiner then,” I said.
    “No,” he said. “They’ll just take her away. It would be like everything else. They’d just take her away and then I’d never see her again.”
    This was long past reason. The dead creature’s eye gazed into the stark splinters of poplar night to a place where there was no family and no dawn.
    “We have to take her home,” he said. He had thought this out. “We’ll take her home and we’ll put her there on the kitchen table until it’s time. That’s where all children go. That’s the way it should be. We’ll burn frankincense and pray. Then I’ll find a minister and we’ll have a service. In the churchyard, the steepled one behind the train tracks. You’ll come, won’t you? I want you to come. You’re the only one who will come, no one else will. You’ll have to be with me when I tell my wife. I can’t do it alone. She’ll die. She’ll crumple in grief.”
    Then he wrapped his hand around the tiny set of claws that extruded from the wing and squeezed them. Balled inside the fingers was a coil of kite string.
    —
    Russell Fairbanks had slipped on the front deck of a Massey Ferguson combine and fell down into the blades. His leg was severed at the knee and his femoral artery was punctured in not one but two places. He was rushed to the hospital and I cannot recall if he lived or if he died, because his parents were religious and would not allow a blood transfusion. I remember Lilly Carmine died of frostbite and her parents looked for her everywhere, but someone else found her in an old latrine. Perhaps they were secular.
    I thought about these things as I walked up the steps to my neigbour’s house. He stayed in the back of the pickup truck with his waterlogged corpse. He kept whispering, “My little fallen fruit,” and there was no chance I’d be wading back through that. There are two ways to rationalize a criminal act. One is to say that it is not criminal, that it is for the greater good. Like a crusade, or starting a war. Perhaps keeping a handgun at home. The other is to embrace the criminality and eat your young. I knocked on the door and straightened my collar.
    His wife was standing in the sparse living room smoking Virginia Slims with her heel hooked on a coiled hot water heater. She watched the ceiling fan turn. She wore silver bangles on her ankles and her legs were tanned. The windowsill smelled of lemon pledge.
    “Oh, it’s you,” she said.
    I closed the door. On the table was a gin fizz and a pair of earrings.
    “Are you all right?” I said.
    “Why wouldn’t I be?” She pointed at a silver tray that held crystal decanters; bourbon, scotch, and rye.
    “You’ve no clue what’s going on?”
    “With him?” she said. “I’m adjusting.”
    She turned to the fireplace and twisted a portrait of a small child around to reflect the light from the kitchen chandelier.
    “Is that her?” I said.
    “Who?”
    “Your daughter.”
    She wasn’t listening. She stared into the glass for a moment and then glossed her lips with cherry balm. The portrait was a five-by-eight black-and-white photo of a small girl with blonde hair on a swing set.
    “I think I took it better than he did,” she said. “He’s always been the soft one. He’s always been the one that in the end couldn’t handle loss. For all of the loves we know, death makes us fonder. That might be Shakespeare. Or maybe it’s Hunter S. Thompson. Who knows?”
    “What are you going to do now?”
    “Do? I’m going out,” she said.
    “You might want to hang around.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s outside.”
    “What’s he done this time?” She scooped up the earrings and pushed