Elisa wasn’t in the room, so I left the snacks on top of her bed with a little heart scribbled on a Post-it note. As had been drilled into my head the first day here: Presentation is everything. But I didn’t take off my boots or coat. There was an hour left before sign-in and the very idea of sitting in here and doing homework or staring at a wall made me claustrophobic. Going outside was worse, though. I glanced to my pillow. The crystal sat there, like a key to a large and imposing door—one that might hold a sack of gold or a vicious chimera. I knew, deep down, that I needed to take it, but the very thought made my entire body clamp up, constricted in a terrible vise. That crystal was keeping the nightmares at bay, but maybe that’s precisely where I was supposed to venture.
After all, hadn’t the darkness always been my second home? I’d spent the entire day trying to ignore the shadow hovering behind my shoulder. Mandy was dead. Suicide. Nothing strange beyond the fact that it was sudden and unexpected, and wasn’t that how all suicides were? Always the ones you least expected—always the ones who seemed the happiest on the outside. It was human. Horrible, but human.
So why couldn’t I force out Brad’s image? And why were the crows so adamant about making themselves known?
I wished I could lie and convince myself I didn’t already know the answer. That this was all just in my head and I was insane and that was perfectly fine. Because being insane was better than this alternative.
Munin wanted to talk.
And if he wanted to talk, I needed to listen. Never ignore an omen. Especially not from him.
A crow fluttered past the window then, and that was enough to tell me I needed to get out of here. I didn’t want to sit around and think until Elisa came back to distract me. I didn’t want to wonder if I should put the crystal on my altar so I could dream. I didn’t want to be toying with these thoughts—I wanted to be normal, to be focusing on work and graduation and maybe even Chris. I didn’t want to let my past catch up with me. I grabbed my coat and headed for the arts building. I’d been doing enough sitting around for one day and I wanted to see the new senior thesis show. I wanted to see if Mandy had left her mark, and if it would lend any clue as to why she’d taken her own life. Mostly, though, I just didn’t want to be alone with myself. Art was a good enough distraction, even if I wasn’t making it.
I wandered through the empty dorm lobby and out into the snow. In the five minutes I was inside, the weather had gotten worse. Snow whipped up the drive and turned everything an apocalyptic grayscale. The few kids who were out were huddled and running from one building to another. Everything was a shifting mass of black and white—even the buildings looked like they were moving through the flurries of snow. The only still objects were the crows on the power lines. They sat silently the entire walk up the drive to the visual arts building. When I opened the front door, they exploded out into the night in a black cloud, their caws lost to the whistle of wind and torrent of snow.
As usual, stepping into the visual arts building was like stepping back home. The warmth, the scent, the lighting . . . it made it easier to forget the crazy shit happening outside. This place was like a womb for creativity, a safe haven. It was my church. Though there was something eerie about entering it tonight. Home was haunted.
There, in the entryway and all down the hall, were Mandy’s ceramic origami birds.
They hung from fishing line in beautiful clouds along the ceiling; others rested on pedestals in flocks. Some even squatted along the floor, these ones with broken wings and bits of clay shattered along the tile.
It took my breath away. Literally.
I paused in the entry and stared at the hundreds of birds and felt tears well in the corners of my eyes as my breath caught in my throat. This was beyond beautiful. And hadn’t she said she was only making a hundred? How had she produced so many, and to such a beautiful extent? There had to be at least five hundred in here.
I walked slowly, examining every corner. The birds dangled and spun and stared into space, each folded wing a wish, a prayer. They seemed to whisper to one another in the emptiness, filling the space with her final thoughts, her devotion.
Whether intentional or not, she had created her own memorial. And it was more perfect than anything we could have done in her honor.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I looked over to where Jonathan was walking out of a side hallway, holding Helen’s hand. I’d never seen the two of them together, but there had been rumors they were dating. I couldn’t blame them. Jonathan was hot in that young-tattooed-professor sort of way, and Helen would always be the most beautiful badass painter I knew.
“Stunning,” I replied. Helen smiled sadly.
“She was a prodigy,” Helen said. “It’s such a shame.”
“But oddly poignant,” Jonathan said, staring up at the birds. “In Egyptian mythology it was believed there were three aspects to the soul: the akh, the ka, and the ba. The ka was what we’d traditionally see as a soul, but the ba was seen as a little bird with a human head, and it could leave the tomb and wander the world. It was the soul’s messenger, in a way, but it always needed to return to the body. There’s a sort of beauty to this being Mandy’s last piece. Like she was creating a fleet of vessels for her own eternal flight.”
“I don’t know if that’s the way to talk to her about this,” Helen said.