The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker Page B

look okay?”
    Seth shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.
    I slid off the piano bench to see for myself.
    Inside the cage, a bowl of chopped apples sat untouched, the fruit flesh browning in the air. Two mealworms, which I knew from Sylvia were also part of the finch diet, wiggled freely in the bowl.
    “They’re not eating,” I said.
    “Maybe she just fed them,” said Seth.
    “Or maybe it’s the sickness.”
    Up close, Seth smelled like detergent, but his T-shirt was badly wrinkled—as if, in his home, the folding of laundry had become a lost art, an outmoded custom turned obsolete by suffering.
    I heard the creak of Sylvia’s footsteps moving back and forth upstairs. The metronome continued to click, segmenting time in its ancient way.
    Adagio was sitting like a miniature hen on the newspaper that lined the bottom of the cage.
    “That one looks really bad,” I said.
    Seth tapped on the bars with one finger. “Hey, little guy,” he said. “Over here. Hello?”
    The tapping upset the healthier bird, whose head darted toward the noise, but Adagio did not react.
    Seth glanced behind his shoulder, checking for Sylvia. Then he unlatched the cage door and swung it open. Slowly, he reached inside, touching Adagio lightly on the back. The bird wobbled like an egg under his finger, and Seth pulled his hand away.
    “Shit,” he said. “It’s dead.”
    “Are you sure?” I said.
    “Definitely.”
    “It
is
the sickness,” I said.
    “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe not. Maybe it just got sick with something normal and died.”
    We heard the upstairs bedroom door snap open. Seth shut the cage door. We looked at each other but said nothing. We made a sudden silent agreement.
    The other bird remained at the top of the cage, uselessly flapping his wings. I felt sorry for that bird, all alone in his world.
    We heard Sylvia’s feet on the stairs, her hand on the banister, the cordless phone landing in its cradle on the kitchen counter.
    “What’s wrong?” she said when she appeared, unclipping her hair and then tying it up again.
    “Nothing,” said Seth. He sat down in the old leather chair, his long arms dangling on the sides.
    “We were just looking at your birds,” I said.
    “Stop worrying about them,” she said. She waved her hand as if shooing an insect. “They’re fine.”
    Sylvia apologized for cutting my lesson short, but she thought she’d better start Seth’s.
    As I packed up my things, I tried to catch Seth’s eyes, but he wouldn’t look in my direction. I gathered up my books and left the house, not knowing then that I would cross that threshold only a few more times in my life.
    I was getting used to it, to the sight of lifeless things. I’d been learning, since the slowing, about the qualities of the dead, the way a bird’s body deflates after a few days, the way it drains, growing flatter and flatter until only the feathers and the feet remain.
    Outside, the sky was a pure, flinty blue, streaked by two delicate clouds. In science, we’d begun to study the atmosphere, and I’d memorized the names of all the different types of clouds. These two were cirrus, the highest, finest kind.
    Higher still than the clouds, two hundred miles above my head, I knew that six astronauts—four Americans and two Russians—were stranded at the space station. The shuttle launch that had been planned to retrieve them had been postponed indefinitely. The complex calculation, the giant cosmic slingshot, that for decades had brought our astronauts back and forth from space, was judged, for the time being, too dangerous to attempt. Whenever I looked at the sky during that time, I thought of them up there, stranded so far away from earth.
    As I crossed the street, an ocean breeze washed through the eucalyptus and the pines. A single sparrow sailed across the sky. I picked a dandelion from the yard and shook it in the wind while our cat Tony slept, belly up, on the porch. The sidewalks shimmered in the sun.