The Spring Bird Calls
When I first moved to the desert my grandmother said, “There’s something unforgiving about these lands, some ancient kind of magic that makes people tough or scatters them into pieces over the sand.” As the years went by, I’ve grown to love the dry darkness that chalks up my throat, my feverish skin in the mornings. But most of all I love the absence of thick looming trees in the distance. Though on some nights I still wake sweating and gasping, the air damp, heavy and impossibly charged. On nights like this I hear my sister’s voice calling, “Maribelle, come, you have to come.”
As I lay awake, limbs shaking, spine paralyzed, eyes blistered open until sunrise seeps through the blinds. I hear cars in the streets, but I’m not here. My mind is suspended from my body and I’m eleven years back in the murk of the swamp next to our old blue house, staring at the sharp turn and thick tree line at the end of the road.
Growing up by the swamps you’d always hear stories about things and people that, if not by magic, couldn’t be explained—stories of handsome men luring young girls back into the waters in order to defile and devour them; people found drowned after following strange lights; children spirited away from their homes in the night; husbands who, swept up in sudden frenzied delirium, murdered their families.
There was a kind of sickness that spread through the air in these parts; it seeped through the bones and we all feared it. But there were those of us who instead of fighting it chose to respect it, to humble ourselves before it. These waters feel heavy, murky with bygone rituals and spells long imbued in this earth. It does no one any good to try to christen them. But my parents didn’t know this—or rather they chose to ignore it.
My parents’ God disguised himself as a pastor and his word was louder than any evidence. Pastor William Richton was a man respected, revered by his community. He was a family man with a beautiful wife, Marlene, and four perfect children, Matthew, James, Peter and Lily Jane. He was also the man indirectly responsible for the murder of my older sister, Annabelle.
When I think back on my childhood memories my parents always treated us differently, but I never understood why. I was six and she was seven when we used to live in the old blue house at the end of the gravel road. It was that sort of place where the nearest neighbor is far away enough that not even the wind carries their cries.
Our parents liked the isolation; they used to say Christ lived in the silence, in contemplation. I remember my sister hummed like the pretty birds we’d see in the spring, their blue feathers shining the deep sea blue we’d only ever seen in our father’s picture books.
I don’t recall what my father did for work, but some days he’d be gone for hours. And regardless, my mother believed that it was a woman’s job to cook for her husband and she took great pride in that work. It was her duty to teach me the ways. My sister used to play outside when it came time for my womanly lessons. My mother would send Annabelle through the backdoor and I’d go out to call her back once we were done.
I remember that day clearly, when clouds were charged and gloomy and the afternoon air felt heavy, damp and unforgiving. I remember calling out Annabelle’s name to no avail, the feeling of something slithering up my spine as I stared at the side where the trees grew thick and the road turned sharply toward that place.
One of our neighbors was a lanky, slumped over man whose brother had given him the neighboring property. The adults had whispered about him enough times for me to know there was something wrong with him, some kind of defect. And the brother, a successful business owner, had been ashamed or was done dealing with him and so set his brother in the middle of nowhere.
My sister and I never went past that sharp turn. It was an unsaid, unwritten thing. We never knew why we weren’t supposed to go there, we just didn’t. Looking back, staring up at that turn never felt good, either. And when I couldn’t find my sister that day I just knew that’s where she’d gone.
I cried in fear as I forced my legs to walk. And the further I walked, the longer the road seemed to stretch. It felt like days had passed by the time I reached the trees, by the time I turned that sharp road.
I found my sister lying face down, her dress torn open, exposed, blood painting her thighs. Her eyes locked into mine. She was missing one sock; I don’t know why that detail stuck to me. It was the socks with blue lining and a flower embroidery she liked because she said it reminded her of the color of my hair, marigold. I don’t remember who found us, maybe it was our father. I think my mother took me to their bathroom, gave me a bath and told me not to leave my room.
By the next morning my sister was dead. My parents told me she got sick and died. I don’t remember how long they kept me from going to school, but eventually my mother took me to the bus stop and she told me to say that Annabelle was still sick at home. I must’ve been a shitty liar because on my second day back at school the police came around.
They found my sister’s body floating down the swamp not too far from our home. She had a thick rope tied to her foot, the one without a marigold sock, rope that was meant to keep her body from floating back to the surface. But the rope had been cut off by something, ripped to shreds by something that refused to have her down there.
My parents confessed to being told by Pastor Richton that my sister had been possessed soon after she was born. They never mentioned anything about how I found her that day, or what had happened to her, “She was too far gone into the devil’s embrace,” I remember hearing my father say. “We only meant to cleanse the devil away from her!”
I was sent to live with my grandparents in Arizona and my parents went to jail. I remember the judge, his skin so black it almost shone blue—blue like my sister’s sock lining and like the feathers of the spring birds that sounded like her hummed little nothings. A life’s sentence, the judge said. I never saw my parents again.
Eleven years had passed; eleven years I’d ignored her call.
“Annabelle, I’m coming.” I whispered back.
To be continued…?
30 Days of Writing Challenge – Day 25, Prompt: Swamp
I’ve been obsessed with Southern Gothic horror tales as of lately—not like it’s hard to see. A lot of my writing process is done abstractly in the sense that I’m in a certain place and that place has a specific texture and color palette, a fragrance that guides me like a dog on a hunt. This piece definitely reads like a prologue, and it was thought of as one. I have some ideas and seeds that were intentionally planted in case of a continuation—I guess we’ll see! I’m not sure what kind of response this will get, but any kind is much appreciated (I come from a lineage of fanfiction writers, and we live on a base of comments and kudos). So, should we revisit Maribelle’s story?
On a side note, I’ve only ever been to Florida in the Southern United States, so I hope I’ve done it justice through my ongoing research of the area. The Spring Bird Calls could be set in either Mississippi or Louisiana.
