Always sad, always philosophical, that the good of the whole must outweigh the individual, as the Company voice decreed.

How else to explain, except that in the magical garden, the son recognized that “to fix” meant “to make into a better self.” Why fix the thing in place, in its former place, like a butterfly on a killing board? Pretty, but there was always something better it could be, under the son’s watchful guidance.

Every night before bedtime, the son would have a wonderful playtime with these creatures of their own creation. In that green and verdant closet, with so many miniatures of what the son hoped would someday be life-size. Charlie would lie down behind the false wall among the velveteen crush of so many hands and hooves and claws and webbed feet, the rough and the smooth and the lacerated, and surrender to that embrace, find a kind of peace. To let the voices of the fixed lull him to half sleep. To be enraptured in that space and that living bed. Certain that someday soon the magical garden might lawfully spill out into the wider world and his father would understand and the Company would understand, and so, too, might God.

But instead, one night too soon Charlie found his father at the door to the room, one hand on the doorknob, and Charlie could not look upon his father’s face, for the glow of satisfaction, the wide, wide grin was too much to bear, and by this look bestowed upon him knew he would be fixed again.

Except the fixing took yet another form this time.

For his father threw open the door to the magical garden and said, “I have prepared a feast for you, for all of your hard, hard work, my son. And I have used only the finest ingredients. Your own ingredients.”

There, upon a long table, lay dead and cooked all those creatures I had kept hidden for so long. Every single one, silent and flame-besotted, save the duck, which he knew I loved and he must have loved, too, in his way.

“And you must eat it all,” my father whispered in my ear. “You and the bird both. Every last scrap, between you.”

And thus the bird and I set to our feast with vigor, even as the tears trickled down my face and I felt as weak and exposed as anything my father had worked on splayed across the cutting boards in his laboratory. My nerves a network like a brittle starfish and my father breaking off pieces with no regard for the pattern.

Ah, Mother, even if I knew your face, how could this not be hell?

Another time, for time was fluid to the dark bird and she could not always distinguish between them, or moments stacked atop one another so there was no difference, no difference at all.