The birds hold a breathtaking sort of birdness. There are loads of them, a hundred at least—years of work—and they sit in a swoop. A murmuration. They look like movement though they are not moving: the way their wings stretch and dip, the way their bodies are all angled slightly differently; they look suspended, in flight, all together in sync but also each themselves. They feel like birds, which maybe is the point, although they are made, Alice knows, with toxic materials—cadmium yellow, manganese blue. Henry must think it’s for the greater good. The birds are small yet somehow vast, delicate and broadly reaching as a unit. Alice thinks again of Henry’s hands working to shape them, and she feels a thrill.

Quinn lies a little awkward, her arm and leg and waist pressed next to Maddie’s. The birds are disappearing is a thing her daughter’s told her, and she wants to make sure this moment stays inside her body, such that she always knows that they’re still here.

Kate stands up, and all the rest of them are still and silent. She climbs up onto a stool next to the kiln and lodges her phone into the scaffolding that Henry’s used to install the birds and sets a timer on the camera, and then climbs back down to get in her place between Bea and Josh.

The camera clicks twenty different times, and Josh holds Kate’s hand, and she holds Bea’s who holds Stella’s who holds Colin’s who holds Jack’s who holds Jamie’s and they all continue not to move, and Quinn’s body is still pressed against Maddie’s, and Tess still has one eye on the kids, and Martin looks at Tess and then up at the birds, and Henry watches Alice the whole time: her whole body, the way it is still so full of whatever thing it is that made him love her, whatever singular and specific formulation of blood and bone and thought that make her her—her strength, the brilliance of her, long legs and fingers; the way her toes curl under when she likes whatever she is seeing when she’s looking, really taking something in, the way her eyebrows straighten out. He doesn’t look at first but then he does, and both sets of toes are curled just as he hoped they would be, her eyebrows too, and a shot of something sharp and bright runs from his head down to his feet and, among all the photos, which Kate will swipe through later, there will be one in which no one’s eyes are closed and no one’s mouth is open, their heads aren’t angled in ways that are strange or awkward; there will be one in which—the flock in flight held still—they all look up.

Acknowledgments