Around a certain tree she came upon a wounded bird humped in the grass like an overturned spindle. At first she thought it had bruised its head in an accident, twisted its neck. She had never seen a side-beak merin before.

The eye above the treacherous beak stared at her. She felt herself being puled into the bird’s gaze, sacrificing her own centrality for a moment. She felt she was being seen and understood by the merin.

The merin is a waterbird, distant cousin to the duck and the swan, though devoid of both the duck’s work ethic and the swan’s narcissism. The unusual bil swivels sideways to filch morsels from other birds.

When not in use the beak, on a double-hinged jaw, can swing and tuck backward into creamy neck feathers so that in flight the merin resembles a coat-knob with wings. This merin, the color of a stag-head beetle, didn’t store its beak in its ruff. It merely looked at her and opened its mouth as if to speak.

She hadn’t yet known that some creatures can speak. She did not learn it now—at least not through evidence. But she could tel by the serrated stroke of remark, by the waterfowl’s stuttery smoker’s vowels, that the merin had something specific to say.

She tried to lift the bird but it wouldn’t let her. The subsequent scratches on her forearms, chalk marks at first, slowly beaded up. Crimson stitches on an ivory bolster.

She said, “You’re hurt, but hurting me back won’t help you any.”

It humped itself a few inches away, as much by wilpower as by mortal strength, and regarded her with need and fury.

“If I can’t pick you up and take you—”

But where would she have taken it? To some house, some vilage, some river?

She roled an apple at it in case it liked apples. The merin knocked it away savagely.

Then—so why did she remember any of this?—she took care of it. She didn’t remember how, just that she did. She found a way to feed it for a while until it had gathered its strength.

Say what you know.

I remember puling a golden minnow or smelt from my pocket, stil flapping, as if I had just rescued it from the weir, and feeding it to the merin. I remember how the fishlette flopped in the beak, dropped in the grass, and with what acumen and zip the merin retrieved it, and swalowed it whole.

But what a patently false memory this was. The rescue of an ice-bound fish happened in winter. The merin’s recuperation from some unknown attack or disease clearly happened in the autumn—al those apples decorating the memory.

So—if the oldest memories could contaminate one another, could prove impossible—what good was memory at al?

Was that why she remembered nothing more?

Except that when the merin had recovered its nerve and its composure, it staggered to its bandy legs and rushed at her, clacking its beak like scissors. Until it pivoted. Like a one-legged man picking up his false leg and tucking it under his arm before hopping to bed, the merin swung its beak into place. Then the bird raised its weird puppet-head and opened its wings. She could see that one wing had been wrenched at; its feathers thinned. An ugly viscous patch glistened on the leading edge like wet shelac.