Sylvia and Alexander

Glassy eyes stared back at Sadie from the mirror. She grinned, flicked her ponytail off her shoulder, swiveled, then bounced out of the bathroom. A soft melody, perhaps Debussy, sailed through the house; Alexander was playing the piano. The music summoned Sadie to the living room, where her brother coaxed warm tones from the cold keys. Sylvia stood by the window, half-hidden by a silky, translucent curtain, staring at the brown leaves that drifted by.

“What are you playing?” Sadie inquired. Alexander, enveloped in his song, did not respond, while Sylvia glanced at her sharply and put her finger to her lips. So she wrenched herself away from the elegant sound and grabbed some cereal from the kitchen. Those two were so terribly sad. Lost. Something in them was missing, Sadie was sure of it. No sane person would sit and play Debussy for hours on end, or listen to their fiancé doing so. Sadie plopped herself down at the kitchen table and munched as she reflected on her brother and his lover.

Five years ago, when she had first met Sylvia, you could follow her by the tinkling laughter she left in her wake. The sound lingered everywhere she went, and when people were around her, they’d radiate some nearly visible… cloud of sorts. Perhaps she woke up their souls. Sadie had loved her back then, loved her at least as deeply as she admired her older brother. Alexander seemed Darcy-like, solemn, and haughty to people who didn’t know him, but then they didn’t bother to find out about his intense passions—piano, poetry, ornithology. He opened himself up to very few: his sister, his best friend Oliver, his father, and Sylvia. Everyone had loved Sylvia back then.

Sadie didn’t know what had transpired. Up until two years ago, everything seemed beautiful and light and whimsical, and if she and Sylvia and Alexander wanted to make an unplanned expedition to the beach then they just slipped on their sandals, and then one day, the lightheartedness died. Sadie had woken up to the lively chatter of a House Sparrow early in the morning, for once arising before the others, even her mother (who got up early to start the farmwork). Cottonwood seeds frolicked on the breeze, the sun peaked over the horizon, the kittens batted their catnip toys.

That day, that May morning, the world had darkened when Alexander and Sylvia came downstairs from their bedroom. One minute, the pale gold of dawn streamed through the living room window; the next, when the two lovers entered, an impenetrable mass of black clouds had stifled—extinguished?—the daylight. Sadie had shivered and lit a candle, inexplicably afraid of turning on the lights the same way she was afraid to look behind the shower curtain when she had to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Rolling her eyes at her own cowardice, she had spastically flung her arm up and flicked the light switch. The room had flooded with artificial brightness, hurting everyone’s eyes.

“I enjoyed the quiet,” remarked Alexander, his mild tone failing to conceal an underlying tremor.

“You mean the dark,” Sylvia had replied. Sadie jumped at the harshness of her voice, a voice that always used to sooth her like the rustling of leaves in a summer breeze. It had suddenly transformed into a howling November wind, rattling dead branches and churning rough waves. “It was dark. It’s still quiet. Where did the birds go? They always sing in the morning.”

“No, no, no. I miss the quiet, not the silence,” Sadie’s brother had corrected. Sylvia laughed grimly.

Sadie desperately suggested, “Let’s sing, let’s play!” They traditionally gathered round the piano to sing all sorts of silly things—carols, folk songs, Beatles, musical numbers—almost every day, with Alexander playing accompaniment. But for the first time, he had shaken his head. And finally she had noticed the look in their eyes: defeated, somehow. Gone was the gleeful carelessness of the past three years, replaced with this dull, drooping gaze. Thirteen-year-old Sadie glanced back and forth between the two dead faces, then grabbed her candle and rushed out of the room, shuddering.

Now, the sadness clung to Alexander and Sylvia more heavily than ever. What killjoys, Sadie thought, wrinkling her nose. Always moping around the house playing sad music and watching dead leaves. She sighed. All the fun was gone. Shaking her head to snap her mind back to the present, Sadie put away the cereal then tugged on her boots before venturing outside. The wind blew right through her thin jacket, so she sprung back inside to grab an extra sweater before marching out to help her mother harvest squash. She loved to hack at the rough stems, to pass her fingers over the smooth, cold skin of the squash, to hop around the winding, thick vines that covered the ground. Something active, solid.

When they could find no more ripe squash to harvest, Sadie and her mother wheelbarrowed the squash back to the shed for keeping until they could use it—judging by the plentitude, they would probably be able to sell some as well—and returned to the house.

Expecting to find Alexander and Sylvia in the living room, Sadie stepped into it. No one. That was weird; there were no sounds or signs of them anywhere in the house. Perhaps they finally started exploring the outdoors again, after so many years of gloom and inactivity. She picked up a note lying on the piano:

Dear Sadie,

         I know you’ll find this letter before our parents. Sylvia and I have escaped from this mundane existence. Take that in whatever meaning you wish. But I cannot refrain from leaving a small clue, just for you, my young sister. No promises of reticence, even to my love, can keep me from feeling that I owe you some disclosure. Look for the barn owl when the moon is high. She will lead you to something you might wish to find.

Forever yours,

a disappearing brother

Sadie furrowed her brow and stuffed the note in her overall pocket.

That night, around ten, Sadie went to the old oak tree on the edge of their farm, where the screech owl lived. The ghostly face peered out from a hollow in the trunk. Suddenly, silently, she swooped out of her dwelling into the forest beyond. Sadie ran after her, tripping over her own feet in her hurry but scrambling back up quickly enough to keep the owl in sight. She chased the magnificent bird of prey deeper and deeper into the woods, leaping over thick roots, trampling raspberry brambles that tore at her skin, kicking up twigs and pebbles, until finally, the owl landed on a tree overlooking a small brook.

Mysteriously compelled to peer into the running water, Sadie crept towards it with irrational dread. Moonlight exposed the drowned faces all too clearly. No pieces of rotting flesh remained on their bones, hollow eye sockets stared eternally upwards at the vast emptiness of the sky. The corpses must have been at least two years old, as old as that day when the games with her and Alexander and Sylvia had stopped. Sadie’s heart stopped when she realized that the corpses wore the very clothes that her brother and his fiancé donned that morning, before Sadie went to help with the squash. Pristine, wet yet not decayed. Sadie sprinted home and slammed the door behind her as soon as she got inside, breathing heavily. Then she took the note from her pocket, lit a match, and burned the despicable memory. Indeed, through her own volition she managed to forget her night’s adventure by the next morning. For the rest of her long and uneventful life, Sadie could not understand why the screeching of barn owls made her shudder.