Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir Read Free Book Online Page A

everything I can.” I sounded like an ad for a weight-loss drug. “I’ve done everything I can!” Now it was an antidepressant.
    â€œYou keep saying that,” Helen pointed out, blowing steam off her tea. “Maybe that’s what they don’t like. Are you sure you’ve done everything you can, to tell the truth about your invisible animals?” I thought hard, while the rainy wind outside disturbed a shingle.
    â€œWhat more can I do? I gave a biologist the key to it all. I’m not a scientist.”
    Helen glanced up, and her eyes were cold water over granite. Still cradling her cup in both hands, she unfolded her legs, rose in one movement, and walked away across the barn. I scrambled up and followed. Helen stopped by a worktable, lifted a strip of transparent chiffon, and let it hang quivering as the air nudged it. It was long, trailing over the other side of the table and onto the floor.
    â€œThese are digital lists of the names of soldiers who have been killed in the war,” she said. Looking closer, I saw faint gray lines and characters—printouts of a Web site, names afloat like ghosts. “The idea came fromVictorian mourning handkerchiefs, and it’s turning into an installation. I’m not the president,” Helen continued. “I can’t order the war to stop. I’m not in Congress. But I can do this. Here, you look.”
    Helen walked off to the loom room. I understood her message: do what you can do. But what could I do? I stood holding her impalpable memorial on my palms, the names of dead young people sliding across one another; the chiffon whispered. Its whisper brought something back to me. It was the way I’d wake in the morning. When that first, fresh ray peeled off the sun and struck my bed, I’d sit up, so grateful to be delivered from fogs of dreams, and toss back my hair, feeling for the little soft pendants, humming like batteries, threading the air of a new day with inaudible vibrations, unheard pings and pips and pipings . . . that was what I missed most. My bats didn’t know me, as I thought of “me.” But I loved them—those winged, voracious, still small voices who unfailingly returned out of the night, as long as I didn’t fail them. Without them, I was less than myself, cut off. The sound of falsehood in my voice was the sound of disconnection from my fellow creatures. If I loved Truth Bats, it was because they restored me to the authentic weave of being; and how many amateur naturalists like me, in thrall to that connected feeling—bird-watchers, shell collectors, fanciers of mosses, rockhounds, stargazers—had faithfully recorded the odd facts that scientists eventually (when theories allowed) undertook toexplain? The love of truth was an animal feeling. For its sake, I must not fail my Truth Bats.
    Laying down my cousin’s work carefully, I paced to the back of the barn, where a dressmaker’s mannequin stood before a three-sided mirror. The stuffed torso was unadorned and full of pins and chalk marks.
    â€œHelen,” I called, “you’ve given me an idea! For something else I can try.” Now, despite every effort to recall this episode, I can’t remember how my voice sounded when I called out those words. I was so taken by the idea of a book about invisible beasts that I failed to notice. What I do remember is that I glanced automatically at myself in the mirror, then came closer to inspect my hair.
    Like a cluster of black grapes in the tresses of a bacchante, a flock of Truth Bats hung from my crown to my shoulder. With catkin bodies and jet-pointed wings, they made a voluptuous, yet dainty, headdress. I heard a baby bat shrilling for its mother, a sound as fine as a beading needle passing through the eye of a sewing needle. Helen came up behind me in the mirror. Guessing the news immediately from my expression, she grinned and unrolled a length of cloth.
    â€œSee