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Birds in Fall

Brad Kessler
Chapters (35)
  1. Cover
  2. Colophon
  3. Also by Brad Kessler
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. I
  8. One
  9. Two
  10. Three
  11. Four
  12. Five
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. II
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Fourteen
  23. Fifteen
  24. Sixteen
  25. III
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. In April, he perched on a witch hazel. . .
  34. In Gratitude
  35. About the Author

Cover

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Colophon

logo

Also by Brad Kessler

Lick Creek

The Woodcutter’s Christmas

Copyright

logo

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Brad Kessler

Portions of this work were previously published in the Kenyon Review and in Bomb magazine in March 2006.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

DESIGNED BY KYOKO WATANABE

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kessler, Brad.

Birds in fall : a novel / Brad Kessler.

p. cm.

1. Aircraft accidents—Fiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Healing—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.E66955B57 2006

813’.54—dc22

2005054120

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9913-8
ISBN-10: 0-7432-9913-2

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

Dedication

For Stanley…For Mokhtar

halftitle

Epigraph

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies.

OVID, Metamorphoses

I

One

It’s true: a few of us slept through the entire ordeal, but others sensed something wrong right away. We grew restless in our seats and felt what exactly? An uneasiness, a movement in the air, a certain quiet that hadn’t been there before? Several men craned their necks about the cabin. We caught each other’s eyes, exchanged searching looks, and just as quickly—embarrassed—glanced away. We were eighty minutes into the flight. Orion on our left, the bear to the right. The motors droned. The cabin lights dimmed. The whoosh of the engines was the sound of erasure: Shhhhh, they whispered, and we obeyed.

The woman beside me clicked on her overhead light and adjusted a pair of reading glasses. She laid a folder of sheet music on her tray. Thin, black-haired, she smelled vaguely of breath mints. Her blue cello case lay strapped to the seat between us. She was giving a concert in Amsterdam and had booked an extra ticket for her instrument. I’d joked about her cello on the tarmac: Did she order special meals for it on flights? Did it need a headset, a pillow? She was retying hair behind her head and cast me a barely tolerant smile.