“The Cock in Cadwalader Heights” by Ariel Delgado Dixon
In the abandoned rowhome behind our house, there lived a rooster that crowed every day at high noon. Though the phenomenon of the bird might have begun earlier, I only noticed it at the onset of that summer, as I was wandering away humid weekday afternoons while my mom worked.
The noises of barn animals were decidedly scarce in Cadwalader Heights, though there had once been a quarter horse corralled in a patch of yard two streets over, whose braying traveled easily over snow-flattened winter days. By the time the rooster showed up, the horse was long gone, hauled off to somewhere—a placid farm retreat for city horses, I imagined—and the cock’s noonday call rose above the customary street refrain: the double-thunk of cars wheeling over manholes, dogs conversing blindly with one another from blocks away.
Our house was an old one, even by our neighborhood’s standards. The colonial revival came with a crumbling brick garage, a derelict wooden loft barely afloat near the rafters. This, I was forbidden to climb. As consolation, my mother’s brokedown Saab became my home base. For as long as I could remember, it had been stashed in the brick garage, which had become a building-sized junk drawer full of castoffs: rotted firewood, a decommissioned lawnmower, bike inner tubes that I frequently mistook for monster garter snakes. The Saab was the centerpiece of the scrap and my own personal jungle gym. Its permanently open moonroof made the perfect hatch for climbing in and out, and I’d often retreat to the backseat with a Highlights magazine lifted from the library, or a handful of pebbles to lob through the gash in the garage’s side window.
The summer before, I had made it my mission to dig a giant hole in the backyard, a venture I pitched as a tunnel to China. I’d always hit a root system a few feet down and give up, then move over a few paces to begin again. By that summer’s end, the ground was pockmarked with three-foot-deep craters, as if massive ice-cream scoops had been taken from the earth. This summer, I was less motivated.
My sister Eneida was off spending the summer at Camp Dulcet for Girls with her best friend, living in three-walled cabins in the mosquito-specked Poconos. She mostly kept her bedroom door closed anyway, but without her the house was sedative, stale.
The first time I heard the rooster, I was taking a sweaty nap in the backseat of the Saab. I woke confused, in someone else’s dream—where a bird had a duty to mark the day. I was ready to run to Eneida’s room, to tell her of the sound. Then I remembered that she was off in ceramics or riflery class, maybe piloting a canoe.
So, I went to inspect the noise myself. Sidestepping the backyard’s cavities, I headed toward the battered fenceline, a third of its posts knocked out. The connected rowhomes on either side of the pale brick dwelling had been bulldozed a few years earlier, leaving just the one—a crooked and protruding tooth of a building shaved down and disowned. There was overgrowth to wade through, thorns that snagged my socks. I listened for something to tell me where to fix my eye. I heard the howl of an ambulance, wind nudging the heavy bows of summer-ripe oak trees. Then: a flash of white in the second-floor window, where the boards were pulled away.
It might’ve been the flutter of a curtain, or light bouncing off some scrap of metal. I looked for signs of life among the litter in the onion grass and trained my eye on the second level, just as a breeze picked up. The wind whirled its way through the rowhome’s lone open pane, livening the dust from the floorboards and corners. That’s when I saw them: two long feathers crisscrossing in mid-air—one black, one white.
* * *
My mother had lived in the city all her life. I knew how she’d passed her summers when she was my age: sweeping tufts of forsaken hair from the salon floor for tip money, or herding her younger brother and sister while my grandparents worked doubles on opposite ends of industrial Trenton.
My uncle told me that when they were little, my mother had once stormed into his room brandishing his sneakers by the laces. She screamed at him to stop leaving his dirty shoes in the front hall, that she tripped over them every time she came in the door. He shrugged her off and went back to teaching himself a Beatles song on his guitar. My mother stomped into the hall, opened wide the basement door, called out to him—“Okay Mario, here you go!”—and threw the shoes down the flight of steps, into the perpetual inch of stormwater runoff that floated jade atop the concrete floor. He always put his shoes away after that.
Two decades later, my mother spent her summers almost the same: waging long hours and steering her two daughters toward bedtime. She worked under the golden dome of the statehouse during the day and often into the night. Meanwhile, my sister and I always knew which corner store we could buy frozen pizzas from, which of our neighbors were always home. When my mother would come in a little after dinnertime, we’d hear her heels in the foyer, the clatter of keys tossed onto the hall table, a sigh that told us her day had been just as hectic as the one before. She had always wanted to leave the city, and now she worked at the very heart of it—returning each night to a house she’d bought at a bargain, tending roots too deep to sever.
The day I heard the rooster for the first time, my mother came home extra late. I was in the TV room wearing out a video. She kicked off her heels, nudged me a few inches down the couch and laid herself out horizontally, arm slung over her eyes.
“What a day,” she said. “I’ve just about had it.”
“I think I heard a rooster in the backyard,” I said, eyes on the TV.
“A what?”
“You know. Cockle-doodle-doo. A rooster.”
She took a long inhale through her nose and blew it out through pursed lips. “I’ve seen stranger things in this neighborhood,” she sighed. A few minutes later, she began to snore.
* * *
Now that I was eleven, perhaps I had mind enough to notice things I hadn’t before. Or maybe circumstances in the neighborhood were actually worsening.
One Sunday afternoon, I was riding my bike in circles out back, on the strip of concrete that led into the garage. The bike was small for me and my kneecaps wore a mottled green bruise all summer from knocking into the handlebars. My mom was inside on a cleaning binge and the vacuum droned through the open, unscreened windows. I was on loop eighteen when my aunt pulled into the driveway behind my mother’s new Nissan. She had barely cranked her own car into park before she was out on her feet.
“Can I fucking help you?” Titi Lulu yelled. At first, I thought it was something I had done and froze on my bicycle seat. I blinked and saw that the driver’s door of my mother’s new car was slightly ajar, a teenager crouched behind the wheel.
“You, hey—can I fucking help you?” she shouted again, her body shielded behind her open car door. Slowly, the boy unlimbered himself from the Nissan as if he’d just driven home from a tiring day at the office.
“This is my mom’s car,” he told my aunt, jutting his thumb back toward the Nissan.
“Your mom’s?” she said. Her voice telegraphed a frank fury that her tiny frame barely contained. Her fingers whitened around the car door. She leaned toward him on her toes.
The boy looked back at me and then to my aunt. “I’m just picking it up,” he shrugged.
Titi Lulu jabbed a slender finger in his direction. “Get the fuck out of here, asshole. Before I call the cops.” She spat at his feet.
The boy said nothing for a moment and then cut up laughing, as if he’d been processing the punchline of a joke. While he caught his breath, he scanned the car’s interior through the open door. He sighed and began walking toward the sidewalk.
“You better walk your ass faster than that,” my aunt said as he passed her.
“You crazy,” he said, and laughed again.
She watched him saunter away, never turning her back to him until he was out of sight around the bend. Her finger found me next.
“Madín,” she said. “Inside. Now.”
There had been other disturbances on the street—bikes and patio furniture stolen from neighbors’ yards; illegal fireworks exploding in the alley for hours in the dead of the night; a cat dead from rat poison, found deflated and sapped of its orange tabby tint beneath a porch crawlspace, reeking on the first warm day of spring.
Though we were boxed in by Stuyvesant Avenue and Bellevue—historic homes subdividing to smaller apartments the farther they stretched downtown, punctuated by flat-faced complexes with few windows and exotic names: The Capri, The Norseman, The Sunbeam—Cadwalader Heights was, by comparison, a reprieve.
My mother had grown up on Clinton Avenue, shaking out her pants and shoes each morning for roaches. Once, a block from her front door, she’d been mugged for her gold chain with St. Anthony, the Patron Saint of Lost Things, embossed on its charm. She chased the gangly perpetrator a mile until she lost him near the river.
Our neighborhood still required a low-grade wariness that kept heads on a swivel, but there were fewer bars on the windows and most of the lawns were level with grass. The maturity of the houses and trees made the street seem dignified, a rarefied holdout in a city past its prime.
In the evenings, my mother could take her book of crossword puzzles out onto the covered porch she loved for its flowerboxes and protected vantage point. From there, she’d watch Eneida and me as we stalked bugs and brown squirrels, or played barefoot in the flow of the hose water, as it coursed down the driveway and became a river running clear.
* * *
Many efforts had been made to locate the bird. When my noontime stakeouts, library research, and birdseed bait at the fenceline yielded nothing, I moved to my bedroom window. Using a pair of birding binoculars gifted to me by my uncle, I took notes on the block: the ice-cream truck that played “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” on a loop for hours one afternoon, a rear neighbor who blasted disco at high volume early in the morning while plumes of barbecue smoke obstructed the view into the rowhome’s window altogether. All my notes revealed was the constant barrage of manmade noise that reverberated from street level, a cacophony that settled like atmosphere over our dot on the map.
Early one weekend morning, a month after I’d first heard the rooster crow, I was sitting on the back steps and slurping at an overripe peach for breakfast, plotting my next move. The screen door creaked open and my mother—bleary-eyed, with a bush of curls gone lopsided at her crown—shuffled out in her bathrobe, a mug of coffee in her hand. She squatted down next to me, smelling of warm skin and morning breath. She took a long gulp of her coffee and looked out over the yard, its sizable ruts holding shadows that the low sun had not yet disbanded. From the soft pocket of her robe she pulled a square of cardstock and handed it to me. “Postcard,” she said. “From your sister.”
The postcard depicted a camp scene. Bear cubs rendered in cartoon inhabited a log cabin, some crawling up the ladders of bunk beds, a pair twisting strips of pink plastic into lanyard key chains—one bear crossing the room in a shower cap and towel. They wore shorts and t-shirts that said Camp Dulcet and seemed to be abuzz with the excitement of their communal rustic foray. A cub in green shorts sat on a top bunk, skimming a magazine and looking bored. My sister had drawn an arrow to this cub, with the word “YOU” scrawled beside it.
She wrote that she was having a ball. Campers could eat whatever they wanted at breakfast—an endless buffet of bacon, eggs, and waffles ripe for the plucking. One of her counselors had tipped over their canoe in the lake as a prank, and they’d all shrieked and swam to the dock. She’d hit a bull’s-eye in riflery. There was even a rock-climbing wall. “I hope you are having fun at home digging your holes,” she wrote, and signed her name in lopsided cursive.
My mother turned to me. “We could try and get you to camp next year,” she said. “There’s one at the Y.”
“The Y doesn’t have a rock-climbing wall,” I said. I had never rock climbed, but now it seemed essential. I envisioned the massive gray face of a mountain boulder transported to the gleaming yellow of a gymnasium, children scrambling higher and higher until their fingers scratched the tile ceiling.
“The Y does field trips to Cape May,” my mother tried, knocking her shoulder into mine.
“Eneida gets to do everything,” I sighed, as if this were a fact of life, the way my mother rehashed her boss’s antics with Titi Lulu, resigned to the currents of the powers that be.
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” she said squarely. “So Eneida got lucky and her friend took her to camp. Maybe you’ll get lucky next summer.”
I said nothing and my mother tried again. “What about your holes?” she said.
“They don’t go anywhere,” I said.
She observed me a long moment. The temperature was creeping upward—along with the precision of the sun in the tree line. She stood and placed a gentle hand on my head, the terrycloth of her bathrobe at my cheek. “Madín,” she said, “I know you’ll figure it out.”
* * *
For the first time that summer, the rooster did not crow. For three days this kept up. Though it amounted to a restoration of the norm, I was unsettled. I thought of the horse a few blocks over that had vanished overnight. I wondered if the rooster had also moved along, off to peck away under the vacant sky of the countryside.
I decided to do some scouting. If I pressed my weight into the back fence, a panel of wood separated from the rest and I could slip through to the rowhome’s yard. My mother was going out after work with Titi Lulu, and Uncle Mario was coming to watch me for the evening. He had a penchant for falling asleep watching WWE matches on TV, creating a natural opportunity to slide out the backdoor. To prepare, I took to my perch in the Saab and made a list of the supplies I would bring: a flashlight, a disposable camera with four photos left on its reel, my birding binoculars, a snack in case things went long.
“Hi there,” my uncle said when he arrived that evening. He held out a frosty bundle of radiant, plastic-sealed ice-pops. “Stick these in the freezer.”
“Can I have one now?”
“Now?” he said. “Sure. Knock yourself out.”
I ripped three from their line and left the rest on the hall table, following my uncle to the TV room.
“So you got the run of the house while Eneida is away, huh?” he said. He had already begun to glaze over.
“She’s got a rock climbing wall,” I said. “They eat bacon every day for breakfast.”
“I love bacon,” he mumbled, and slumped further into the couch. I watched a commercial or two before backing out of the TV room and mounting the steps to my bedroom at a gallop.
I dressed for the occasion, donning as much black as I owned, even shoving a knit winter cap over my head as I’d seen done in spy movies. Down the steps I went and then out the backdoor, off to the fence line.
I pressed my weight against the right spot and a portion gave. I hopped through and into the yard behind ours, picking my way around overgrowth and debris—a mangled grocery cart and an altar of takeout boxes; fat bags of trash that been dumped and split, contents mossy with mold and flowering mushrooms. The bottom windows of the rowhome were boarded over.
I heard a crunch at the front of the rowhome. The sound began to near, moving alongside the property toward me. I dove into a bush dense enough to hide me. Between the leaves, I watched as a man rounded into the yard, holding something weighty under his arm. I could only see the bulk his figure cut: stocky and broad-shouldered. There was a long moment of stillness. I thought he might smell me on the wind.
He reached for a board beside the door, easing it from its notch just so and winding a hand inside the window frame. There was a tinkering of cheap metal and the door opened. He replaced the board and made to enter, and in a patch of moon glow I caught sight of him for an instant: a squashed nose that barely extended beyond the sunken topography of the man’s face; a bag of birdfeed under his arm.
* * *
The next morning, I finally had a story worth writing to Eneida. I didn’t have a postcard, so I pilfered Thank You stationary from a package my mother had bought through a school fundraiser. I wrote to my sister of the rooster’s first call, how it had woken me from my sleep in the Saab, of the twin feathers twirling on the second floor, the rooster keeper, the birdseed. I scrawled my name with a final flourish and scampered outside to see if the bird might call at noon, sure that he had been revived by my closeness, kept alive like a fairy—because I knew he was real.
I played a few rounds of basketball with myself as the day cooked. Then, I took to the hood of the Saab with a row of the plastic-wrapped ice-pops that’d liquefied where I had left them on the foyer table. I ripped open a few with my teeth and drained them like water. I was working on the last in the line.
“Have any yellow?” I heard. I looked up and saw a crushed nose, slits for nostrils, bridge flattened by force—an injury never recovered from, I was sure.
I thought of the time: nearly noon.
“Sorry to bother you,” the woman said. She had a head of short, thin curls I hadn’t detected the night before, though her stature I had assessed rightly.
“No,” I said and scooted off the hood. “I don’t have any more.”
“I’ve seen you around,” the woman said. “You got a good jump shot.”
“Thanks.” I let my eyes shift over her: the peel at the sole of her sneaker; her teeth, bright white. I noticed a wisp of a feather on her sleeve and my stare stayed put a moment too long.
“I bet you hear my bird,” she laughed, relaxing onto the Saab’s hood.
“The rooster,” I said.
“The very one.”
“Is he okay?” A lawnmower roared to life a few houses down and the woman turned sharply toward the sound before settling herself.
“Of course he is,” she said. “He’s strong. I raised him myself.”
“How come he doesn’t crow in the morning? That’s when roosters crow, right?”
“Not this rooster. This rooster sleeps in,” the woman laughed again. A moment passed in silence as she surveyed the yard.
“Y’all doing construction?” she asked, motioning to the holes.
“Yes,” I said, because the idea of heavy machinery made me feel confident.
“I see,” she said and lifted her body from her seat on the hood. She sniffed and stretched at the hips before opening her palm toward me.
“High five,” she said.
Reluctantly, I gave her one. Her hands were fleshy and dry.
“C’mon,” she said. “Harder than that.”
I tried again. This time she snatched my hand as I made contact and held my fist in place.
“Gotcha,” she said and shook my fist inside hers for a long moment before releasing me. She kept smiling, the stretch of her lips held too long. Finally, she turned and began to walk toward the rowhome. She dodged the various pits in the yard with grace and in one solid motion, she held a hand to the fencepost and swung herself over. Returned to her territory, she looked back to me. Her expression had tightened, constricting in my direction. Though she knew I was watching, she turned and pulled the board out of its nook and opened the door, disappearing into the house just as the rooster cawed.
* * *
On the same day we met, I dreamt of the flat-nosed woman. A bank of worn windows lined the front wall of our house and in my dream, I saw her standing on our porch, looking in. In the next instant, our standoff became a race to the windows. One by one, I fastened the brass locks just as the flat-nosed woman made to wrench each open and climb in after me. Down the line we went. She trailed me by a half-second while I managed each lock in the nick of time. At the end of the row, I met the woman’s eyes through the glass. We bolted for the backdoor. I rounded into the kitchen just as I heard her sneakers squelch up the steps. I knew she had beaten me. As the knob turned, I woke up.
The alarm clock on the nightstand glowed 3:00 a.m. The shadows of my bedroom had been waiting, charged and ominous. From my open window, I heard the neighbor’s AC unit churn, then the sound of radio static, a murmur of voices barely audible.
I looked out toward the rowhome and its second-floor window was bright, shadows sweeping to and fro within. I weighed the nightmare I had left and the chance surfacing of the flat-nosed woman that afternoon. I remembered my letter to Eneida, the stamp I’d licked and fastened to the envelope, how much delight I had taken in lifting the flag on the mailbox.
I slipped out the backdoor to the garage. At this hour, the sounds I thought I knew came to me as menaces. An owl presided invisibly from her tree, hoots refereeing the other nocturnal rackets. Something in the alley rattled through the glass in a recycling bin. Cars hurtled down side streets at high speeds. Even the Saab seemed alive by night, its dull headlight fixtures like open, observant eyes. Gingerly, I began to climb the ladder to the loft. I thought of the rock-climbing wall, of brushing my fingertips through the dust of the low-hanging rafters above.
At the top, I clicked my flashlight on and cast it up to the ceiling veiled in the lace of spiders’ webs, then over to the busted window that overlooked the rowhome. I swept the beam across the loft floor and saw, there in the corner, a small stack of three thin-papered bags, taut with their contents. Birdseed. I held my breath and turned the light to the opposite corner and saw a ratty duffle bag, next to it a small, empty cage—the sort used to transport cats to the vet’s office. A board creaked and the light showed me nothing.
Spooked but determined, I moved to the window and aimed the binoculars toward the rowhome’s second floor. The bags of birdseed next to my feet seemed a living proxy of the flat-nosed woman, ready to snap at my ankles. I focused the lens, steadying my hands with a deep breath as I watched the scene unfold inside.
The room in the rowhome’s second floor was bare, save for a few battery-powered lanterns balanced on windowsills, and a loose circle of lively men—five that I could see—and there, stone-faced among them: the flat-nosed woman.
At the circle’s center, two roosters flared at one another, a tangle of quills and webbed feet. It was hard to tell one from the other as they tussled midair, brushing the floorboards before roaring up again in a lurching tangle. They dropped their squabble just as quickly and circled one another like boxers in a ring, beaks jabbing and scaly toes swiping at the air between them. The circle of men jeered and pointed by lantern light. The flat-nosed woman was straight-backed, face impassive, chin tipped above the heads bent to take in the fight.
One of the roosters, smaller but stockier than the other, was magnificent in color: auburn hackles and a royal blue breast, scarlet saddle feathers and fan of deep purple quills at its hind. The body of the other rooster was almost pure white, stippled only with gray at its wing bow, as if beads of paint had been dappled onto the feathers there with a thick brush. His tail and sickle feathers were a bouquet of oily black, held high and proud like a flag flown.
Through the binoculars, I could see the sharpness of their spurs and a glint of metal caught my eye: an unnatural gleam fixed to the feet of each bird. It looked as if fishhooks had been unbent and hammered flat—thin yet unforgiving metal sharpened to a point. A man’s foot kicked out from the circle and the roosters riled again, cape feathers flaring as each made to kill the other. I watched for a moment longer and I knew my rooster would win. He had been the champion of the summer.
* * *
I did not tell anyone of what I saw. I spent the next week inside. I kept the windows latched and checked the locks every hour.
“It’s boiling in here,” my mother would say when she came home, wrenching off her stockings and tossing them in a ball to the laundry room.
In my mind, I had constructed a vivid scenario in which the items in the loft were just the first of many to be transported up there, and the flat-nosed woman was in the early stages of moving in completely. One day I would be lying down in the backseat of the Saab, eyes toward the moonroof, and I’d see a shuffle of dust from the loft above me, the flat-nosed woman stirring from a nap of her own.
What mattered most to me was that I missed nothing else. Each noon I waited to hear the rooster—news that he had survived another bout. And each time, I felt both guilty and elated: winning meant the violent end of his challenger.
At the end of the week, my mother, aunt, and uncle decided to grill out back. For two days they had been marinating a hunk of pernil in ground cumin and jagged leaves of oregano—a treat for Titi Lulu’s birthday. I watched from behind the screen door to the kitchen.
“Madín,” my Uncle Mario said, “get your butt out here already, huh? One-on-one.”
My mother was squinting against the smoke of the grill while my uncle made a series of brick shots that tanked off the backboard. I played a round of 21 with him while Titi Lulu lounged in a plastic patio chair, a cold beer between her thighs. My mother cursed as the grill smoldered.
My uncle halted our game. “I can give you a hand, Lyd,” he said.
“No, no. I got it,” she said, and winked at me. “See, Madín? Eneida doesn’t get to have all the fun this summer.”
Whether I sensed that she needed the encouragement, or because I was hungry for her reassurances, I was ready to agree. I could forget the climbing wall that stretched to the ceiling, the rocky canoe and the thrill of capsizing into a warm lake. I could even forfeit the Saab and the birding binoculars, my log of the street that tallied the spikes in sound and foot traffic, the rooster with his slick garland of black quills.
“What in the hell?” I heard my aunt say. She sat straighter in her chair and used the flat of her hand to shade her eyes. “Hey!” she shouted.
I turned to look in the same direction. At the fence line of the rowhome, a fat man was trying to amble into our yard. He fell into the brush but righted himself, casting a look over his shoulder as he took off toward us. He made it a few feet before he fell into one of the holes I’d dug the summer before. “Motherfucker!” he swore loudly, his face covered in dirt. He hobbled up on one foot and limped as quick as he could toward us, panting, then fell again.
My uncle, who had been watching with his mouth open, dropped the basketball. He stepped forward and my mother said his name.
“Mario,” she repeated firmly. He looked back at her and she shook her head. My uncle scooted my body behind his as the man made his way past us and toward the sidewalk. Behind him, another man emerged at the fence line, followed by another and another, all shambling over the posts and shooting off toward the street. A few steered clear of the holes but most succumbed just as the first had, swearing wildly and clutching their knees or legs as they fled the rowhome.
“Police!” we heard, along with the whoop of a siren, red and blue flashes of a cruiser mingling in sunlight: a raid.
“Inside,” my mother commanded us, collecting me from my uncle.
Charging across the dirt lot, one by one the squatters fell—jolting into the craters, arms flailing at their sides, puffing dirt where they landed. From the kitchen window, we watched a total of ten men emerge from the backdoor of the rowhome and use our yard as their perilous getaway route.
The few squatters the police had arrested stood cuffed in a line on the street behind ours. Meanwhile I watched as two cops banged around the empty space on the rowhome’s second floor. They exited empty-handed.
By the time the commotion had settled, the pernil was ruined, a mammoth lump of smoking charcoal. My mother dropped it into a garbage bag with disgust.
“This place,” she grumbled. My uncle and aunt were inspecting my handiwork in the yard while my mother geared up for one of her soliloquys. With cathartic gusto, she scrubbed the burnt pieces from the grill grate.
“You work your whole life and then one day you get a stream of motherfuckers coming through your yard,” she said. “What have I done to deserve this? I am finished. I am done. I swear to god. Give me a break, I pray.”
When the grill was sparkling clean, my mother, aunt, and uncle ventured inside for beers. At first, they kept a close watch on me through the screen door. Once their attentions began to shift toward recapping the afternoon, I made my move. I crept toward the garage, trailing a finger along the dusty hood of the Saab before climbing the ladder rung-by-rung. Once I was eye level with the floor of the loft, I scanned for evidence of the rooster keeper, the bag, the cage, the birdseed. All of it was gone.
* * *
When Eneida came home at the end of summer, all she could talk about was Camp Dulcet. In detail, she recounted the snack shack, charades played in the outdoor amphitheater, the names of each of the cabins: Chipmunk Hill, Belly Acres, the Mutton Hut. She told me gossip, but I knew nothing of the players involved. She said she had never gotten around to summiting the rock-climbing wall.
After the raid on the rowhome, we learned in the paper that a cockfighting ring had taken up residence there, that neighbors on the street behind us had been complaining to the authorities all summer long. My mother felt guilty for arriving late to this information, though her dismay was split between the neighbors she felt dismissed by, and the long hours she resented.
Eneida told me she had never gotten a letter from me, and scarcely believed that I would have bothered to write her anyways. I thought often of the twin feathers in the square window, the gleam off the gaffs hooked tight to the birds’ legs. I told no one. After all, nothing had happened to me. I had only seen it.
Just before the school year began my mother made an elaborate dinner. She invited Titi Lulu and Uncle Mario, and sat all of us down for some news. She told us that for as long as she could remember she had wanted to leave the city.
There were too many memories, too much crime. My sister and I were young enough, she said, that we would adjust easily and make new friends. The schools were better, she told my aunt and uncle. The new house was in a distant rural suburb. It would triple her commute but it was what she could afford. It was a quieter life, which she had always wanted. Our only neighbor would be a horse farm, a mile down the road.
Eneida cried, saying she would never forgive her. My mother closed her eyes to this, and my uncle placed a hand over hers.
“Lydia,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”
My aunt nodded in agreement and patted Eneida’s shoulder. My mother, whose eyes had toughened behind their film, looked to me. I thought of the lifeless Saab in the garage, left immobilized forever in the shade below the loft, now empty.
“Madín,” my mother said. “What do you think?”
I nodded, pleased to have been asked my opinion at all.
* * *
The drive out to the new house snaked along a single-lane road in tandem with the murky Delaware River. Eneida was in the front seat pouting and I was in back, scrunched in among boxes of cookware. From the window, I watched the houses solidify into properties with meticulous upkeep: centuries-old willow trees brooding in their yards, flowerbeds lined with rocks of identical heft, two cars in every driveway.
The new house was tiny, a speck of bright blue in the center of an immense grass lot that had been cleared of trees. My mother parked the Nissan and I hopped out, walking solo down the gradual slope of our new backyard, to the edge of the property line. There, a blind of oak trees marked the start of the woods, the end of which I could not see. I wondered if I would know more when the leaves cleared from the canopy in winter, if I would learn where creatures made their dens, and what foreign sounds I might become accustomed to—the clatter of birds diving from frozen branches, or a fox on his kill in the night.
Ariel Delgado Dixon is a native of Trenton, New Jersey and a writer of biracial heritage. She is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at Boise State University where she was recently awarded the 2017 Glenn Balch Fiction Award, selected by Wiley Cash. Her work was also shortlisted for The Masters Review Anthology Prize. She works as a freelance writer and resides in Idaho.