PodCastle

* Author : Kate Lechler
* Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris
* Host : Graeme Dunlop
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
*
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PodCastle 432: The Beautiful Bird Sits No Longer Singing in the Nest is a PodCastle original.


Disturbing imagery


Rated R for adult content, disturbing imagery.
The Beautiful Bird Sits No Longer Singing in the Nest
by Kate Lechler
The hair-pulling is a habit recently acquired. I do it only when I’m alone, after Grace has left for the evening. I roll each hair between my fingers like a rosary. My fingers crawl across my scalp until I find one: coarse where the others are thin, kinked where the others are smooth. I enjoy the feel of it pulling against me, tenting my skin. Then I yank it out, suck on the end, and drop it on the floor. The area around my bed is littered with black straw.

While I do this, I take stock of my prison. Four ancient tapestries: thick and silencing. A bed: nailed to the floor so I cannot barricade the door. Three of Edward’s candlesticks: tall and heavy, but nailed to the wall. A bowl and pitcher for washing: made of aluminum, soft enough to dent on a human skull instead of caving it in. Plate and spoon: same. Pencils: short, stubby, dull—I sharpen them with my teeth. One set of bedclothes: linens that I could tie together for rope, if they were not sewn together like a sack, if the tower were not so tall, if I were ever left alone for more than an hour.
And one window, high enough for me to rest my elbows on the stone sill and gaze.
Outside: the moors. Spread below me like an altar cloth, like a rolling sea. Not the Caribbean, though, that laughing dance of blue and green; Mother always said it smelled of flowers. This sea of land and sky is endless grey, like the pictures I draw with my pencils.
Inside: Myself. A ball of teeth and nails and uncut hair swinging around my calves.
And, for ten hours each day: Grace Poole, the witch.

My husband has hired Grace to come each morning, bringing food, medicine, and, as she puts it, “comp’ny.” She isn’t truly a witch—my father taught me that a belief in augury is the sign of an untutored mind—but I loathe her just the same. Each day, she drags the rocking chair from the adjacent room and sits knitting in it, her heavy breathing filling the space. At the end of the day, she scrapes the chair back through the door.
Who knows what trouble I might get up to with unfettered access to a rocking chair?
She is a dour woman, graceless despite her name, built like a block and with a mouth to match. The only color about her is red: coppery hair, bloated face, bloodshot eyes. The first time we met, she bent forward and shouted her name, “Mis-sus Poo-oole!” dragging the syllables out as if I were dimwitted instead of merely mad. I responded in rapid patois, repeating insults I had picked up in Kingston’s market.
“Tha’rt as addled as I was told,” she muttered and sat down to knit. I returned to my bed, my drawings spread out in front of me. We have not spoken since.
Some days I regret that. Some days I’d appreciate a voice other than the ones which fill my brain.
***
After supper, she leaves and I look through my papers. They tell my story in the blandest of terms. A birth certificate, identifying Bertha Antoinette Mason as an English Creole from Jamaica, born in 1815. A marriage certificate from a parish church in Kingston. A letter from a Yorkshire doctor, diagnosing me with hysteria.
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