Brother Husa
A great goose descended on the ruffle of leaves in the breeze, a bird of inappropriate size to its surroundings, a phoenix formed before its flame. The voice reached the shadow who stood in the wake of an elm. Then it burst through the canopy above, a clarinet bellowing a call to judgment.
Immediately, the shadow separated into the most human of moments: a memory. He recalled a concertina uncoiling like a life between his fingers and the clarinet punctuated his waltz. The goose landed awkwardly, webfooted to a stop as if something stronger than nature itself had drawn it here.
And he was no longer alone as he had been ever since the living one, his doppelganger, left here minutes… or was it hours… ago. Oh, he hadn’t been alone all that time. There were the sparrows. Perhaps they were what scared the other one away. After all, he was still breathing, life pulsing behind his temples with each inhale and exhale. He knew only what he could feel, see, believe. Yet something deeper than death or the void that existed between them must have told him what they meant.
The birds came two by two, a semicircle enclosing the men. Then he who passed for a living person bolted, forgot the visit to his grandparents’ grave which occupied his mind today. Or was it something else, the tie that bound these two? Either way, he broke it as if it never happened.
And the wraith who was known as Jan during life was alone with the sparrows. They meant to have him, and yet he wasn’t prepared to accompany them… yet. He’d stood near this elm, mingled with the few undead souls in limbo but none of them had any better answers than he why they haunted this sphere, rising with each breeze only to fall to earth again, padlocked and hasped.
Even when the young man came that first time, it was as if he had… and hadn’t gone with him. The fellow mourned grandparents he never knew; that empty ache inside him proved an adequate vessel for a kindred spirit. He’d no idea how long or far he travelled with his fleshy counterpart nor had he expected him to sense a presence, much less expunge a clue here or there on the page.
Still, it proved the most facile of ways to relive all that had transpired, didn’t it? It seemed so… a hundred years ago. Reliving a life cannot lengthen its span, however, so the sparrows were to bear him over. In that instant, Jan noticed the plaintive dirge of a mourning dove and it was a sound to frighten even those who are neither living nor dead, simply beyond fear.
If the specter had words or the lips to form them, he would have run headlong into the sparrows’ midst, arms flapping as if he might take flight, screaming “Be gone,” bidding death farewell. But he just stood transfixed by the goose. Someone, perhaps the voice of God, stroked his ear, moved lips long since unmoved to speak, cry out “Brother Husa, wing away with me, pull my heart up high among the clouds, so high we could almost touch the stars. Can you feel it? Already your feathers and my arms merge, lighter than air yet heavier than muscle and bone, blood and beak thrusting its way south, aiming north as naturally as a human compass—guiding us home.”
And suddenly, he knew where the sparrows meant to lead him, a place Jan sought for so many years. This bird could bear him there as well. In a moment, he was astride its broad back—or did he dangle beneath a wing?—borne farther aloft than he had ever dared dream, carried away out over the verdant growth of the Bohmerwald, the meadows and groves of his youth and he was tumbling, swallowed up in the green arms of his family at last.
