These Hollow Bones

Introduction

The Family on the Hill

In the corner of the desert, in a house on a hill, there lived a family of four birds. The family consisted of:

An eagle

A crow

A hawk

And a raven

Now, these were not birds in the sense of them each having feathers and beaks as a defining characteristic. This was a family of birds because the sagebrush and the rattlesnakes would have devoured anything else but a family of carnivores. They knew that fingers were at the end of their arms and that feet were at the end of their legs. They felt the absence of their wings like phantom limbs. Mirrors were a touchy subject, not only because the crow had warned of the fair folk using mirrors to steal children, but because there were only human reflections present in the house. It was an odd thing to be a hawk but to see the distinct features of a person with human eyes and a human mouth staring back in whatever reflective surface that they walked by. Sometimes they would find black or tawny feathers lying in odd corners of the living room and would feel themselves begin to ache.

Each of the birds had their own unique way of avoiding the ground. The eagle sat atop a horse more often than not. The crow kept herself aloft by setting ambitions for her children, nailing them into the side of the house, and curling her gnarled talons over the edge. The hawk was the least concerned with heights and spent most of her childhood finding rooftops and swings, mostly just to test the patience of the crow. The raven was especially good at daydreaming and tended to keep a piece of floss tied to the crow to keep her grounded.

Most zoologists would argue that the only thing that would keep four predatory creatures in such proximity without massive bloodshed would be a miracle or magic.

There was plenty of blood and miracles and magic, but scientists most often like to explain these phenomena away as something you can read in a textbook. The four birds in this house knew magic for what it was. This family had their own particular brand of magic. Their magic was sun-bleached and soaked in salt-water but it was magic, all the same. The hawk and the raven would argue about the importance of reading what the zoologists had written in their scientific journals. The hawk would have argued that the men in their white lab-coats didn't understand magic. She would have argued until her face turned red underneath her freckles and the raven would have resigned to reading the whole article, anyway, because she collected words as a hobby. The hawk and the raven both loved their share of books and knowledge but they preferred stories about ghosts or witches to something assigned in class.

The four birds in their house on the hill defined magic a little differently than the neighbors. Their neighbors would have said that magic looked like Sleeping Beauty being woken up by true-love's kiss. The hawk had read Grimm's version and tried to impress upon the raven that touches from strange men were not an ideal way to end a story. While the rest of the city thought of magic as something immortalized by Walt Disney, the eagle knew you could see it in the neon signs and on the hills, if you squinted. The crow stirred magic into every cup of coffee she made for a visitor. Of course, she drank her coffee black like her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother but she was a magic woman and coffee had always been a vessel for her craft. The raven was taught to hear the magic in the coyote songs and the sound of silence after it snowed.

Magic was graveyards and Halloween night and fresh cut lilacs. Magic was pine needles and juniper berries and clay from Pyramid Lake. You could not rip the magic from this family if you wanted to. It was embedded deep in their hollow bones and the irises that bloomed outside the guest house. You could see it in the crow's eyes and the way that the hawk stood. Magic was tucked into the corners of the eagle's smile and the raven had it carved onto her skin the day she turned eighteen. Neighbors would come forward and say that the family of birds had an odd way of speaking incantations. There were no "abracadabras" at the House on the Hill. There were only ominous signs with directions like "Please don't feed fingers to the horse"s and lyrics to Johnny Cash songs.

There were no seances in the house on the hill, no Ouija boards, no ghost hunting sessions. The dead were already so present that you could see them at least twice on Wednesdays and during sunsets or heavy rainstorms. The raven was especially good at catching glimpses of ghosts, which she later read was a symptom of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder but she didn't think it was appropriate to call her great-Grandpapa a "symptom". Ravens and crows are often seen as messengers of Things Beyond the Veil and these two particular corvids were especially attuned to the macabre. The crow, a devout Catholic, did not enjoy conversations about the dead. She preferred to ignore those who had passed through the veil which was a strong contrast to the raven who had no choice but to acknowledge the dead, lest they get restless. The raven had seen what happened when you pretended the dead were just specks of dust and she did not care to see It again thank you very much. She did not tolerate horror movies well and preferred to watch reruns of Scooby-Doo. The Scooby gang had reassured her that most villains were just old men trying to rob someone, which was already an innate truth of life. 

The House on the Hill was more or less a haunted house, a magic house, a house built to hold birds and ghosts and growing up. There was a quality to the House on the Hill that could not be replaced or replaced, an ethereal glow that left a faint light under the skin of every visitor. It was something taken for granted and simultaneously revered. The story of the House on the Hill follows the path of time, which is to say it goes in a vastly circular motion. It tells its own story, it has grown into an entity that can listen, see, and remember. This is the story of the House on the Hill and the four birds, who only had human hands and no feathers, who lived inside. This is the story of how a house transcended its own walls, how it became more than brick and mortar. This is the story of what was left behind.