Murmuration
by Jasmine Liang, Jacob Witt, and Rebbecca Brown
The river rushes to meet the setting moon, carving valleys across an empty field. A rustling was all that sounded in the plentitude of a night gone dark with minute shadows. The snap of a stick, the rending of a branch, and, then, nothing; impacts, collisions, bends around trees, and, then, nothing.
In the nearby town, Adalaide meets morning like a forgotten friend. Her bones brittled along the back of the night, she reaches for a coffee with a crinkled hand spotted with time’s collisions. Her mind seems to drift—the black of the coffee, the color of the sky, the snap of the sticks in the woods, the rustling. Adalaide remembers a day much like this, when the weather was slightly too chill and the town too quiet. The townspeople had been in the fields all morning, scouring around the verdant land with closed mouths and riotous hearts. By nightfall, they moved in a grand exodus to their homes—sheep being shepherded, lemmings in a small-scale stampede, entering homes, dying their lamps, disappearing into the night’s dark.
Adalaide clutches her heart—had she lost her wisdom? Only Benedict remains to listen to her sometimes scrambled meanderings, what she might have seen receding along a horizon in stuttering lines of flight. He recalls a conversation with her, a sense of interpersonal responsibility mooring him to the seat while his eyes peered to the window.
“It clung to the sky like shadow, darker still, two wings parallel on either side.” Adalaide rubs her icy fingers against the table’s sheen, her reflection a spidery thing, while Benedict watches an ant crawl along the peeling sill. The small black shape on the sill, the large black one, flying in Adelaide’s mind. Benedict waits for her continuance, tries to conjure an image to fit the description in the meanwhile, but an empty sky returns.
“You wouldn’t believe the beauty, though, Ben, but I was the only one with upturned eyes,” she said. A memory: Adelaide walking in the fields, barefooted in the slush, a man asking Ben what was wrong with her and he remaining tight-lipped, incapable of a reply.
“Maybe we should go inside, Addy.” He had grabbed her hand, which quivered like a dove abandoned in a tangled nest. She stood still, rooted in the ground, and Ben attempted once more to coax her in, knowing already she’d refuse, and then he left her be, glancing over his shoulder at her as she stared up, gazing into the sky.
There—in the corner of her eye—it soars.
Jasmine Liang, Jacob Witt, and Rebbecca Brown are members of the Writing and Literature Program within the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. We are students, teachers, collaborators, and most importantly, writing practitioners who love words.