But of course, Rachel knows, they will. You stand in a field and marry someone and one day, many days, scream at them harder than you have ever, at anyone. She looks at all the eucalyptus, standing together like co-workers at a party. They’re together now; she has lost, what would you call it, her by-herselfness, and gained this man squinting toward one of the trees. A little of her life has been taken, misplaced in his pocket, like when she was on an airplane and misplaced a pair of sunglasses, and so many years later those sunglasses have yet to be found. The breeze moves on through. The path twists over. Ben steps past her to the tree he is frowning at and plucks from the leaves and bark a long feather, very long and gray, and waves it at her smiling, quills it around in the air like the Founding Fathers. It is almost impossible to be unhappy looking at him here. “The tree grows feathers!” he says. “It’s the only explanation.”

“Let’s not tell anyone,” she says. “We’ll start a company!”

“By our first anniversary we’ll have a bird of our own that we made ourselves, and then we’ll take it public. Look, here’s another one!”

He hands this one to Rachel and she whirls around with it. The trees, the whole place, whirls with her. It’s a little foolish, a little freeing. A goof, a talisman. Keep horses away. Keep us married, keep him fooled about how I am really. I will try, like these trees breathing and showering down two more feathers, to be a spell of breathless enchantment, even, especially, when I want to tear my own eyes out and cannot sleep from trouble. Let this nice giggling man shade me from my worries and cares and I’ll try, once a week minimum, to do the same. Another one, a small handful on the ground. Rachel grabs as many as she can see and confettis them like the end of the war, and then mid-toss she rounds a bush and there is the rest of the carcass, a crater of blood and feathers and more blood and a terrible gray-yellow bird foot of spikes.

“Eek,” Rachel says, but not a shriek; she just says it. “Yikes.”

“Well,” Ben says, and then tries to sort of nudge at it, as if anything looking like that could still be alive. “Well, that’s awful. Poor thing.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get a drink,” her husband says. “I meant Bottle Grove the bar, all along.”

They start to trudge out. “It’s jinxed now,” Rachel says. “Our wedding spot.”

“Kind of jinxed anyway.”

“Because of Reynard.”

Ben scuffles his shoes. “No, not that. I didn’t want to tell you until after the wedding. My old girlfriend—”

“Tina with the hair?”

“The other one.”

“OK.”

“She killed a guy’s dog here.”

“What?”