Lemon, trapped at ground level on her chain, whimpered. She’d been skunked the night before and she wasn’t allowed into the house until Jane washed her. May watched from Edmund’s windowsill, tail flicking, and flung herself at the bird in the tree. She missed, reached for a branch with her outstretched front paws, and missed that, too. She fell on her feet and looked up at them, tail slashing, and walked away sedately.

The parrot jumped to a closer branch. O little boy O little girl.

“Does he want us to jump, too?” asked Edmund.

Clearly, said Papa when he heard the story later, the witch sent her familiar to put a spell on them.

“Stop it,” said Dee.

When Polly woke the next morning and opened her eyes and stretched, May shifted on her stomach, purred, and fell back to sleep. The window was still open a few inches, and Polly heard rain. She dozed, and when she woke again the blanket felt wet against her legs and the cat was cleaning itself next to a blue feather.

“You’re evil, May,” Polly whispered.

Being a cat, May ignored her. Polly lifted her knees to boost her off and stared at a huge red bloodstain, a half dozen more feathers, tropical purple and orange and indigo. At the same time, through the open window, Polly heard Edmund begin to howl. May had given him the head.

Merle roared through the morning. “That fucking cat. That old bag is going to knock at the door, looking for some bird named Alfie or Sailor. Or she’ll poison the dog.”

At first, no one listened to Polly and Edmund explain that the neighbor’s bird was green, with a little gold on his head. The dead bird with more than a parrot’s worth of blood had been a rainbow. When the green bird reappeared on the grapevine later, alive and warning of storms, they finally heard the old lady calling a name: Dwight.

Dee collected the feathers and hung some from each of their windows, to warn the bird away from May, who spent most of her time now on their windowsills.

Rita returned the next night, as if she’d been summoned. Polly was sitting in the bathtub; Dee’s hands, washing her hair, were the strongest things she’d ever felt. Edmund, first up, was now wrapped in a towel, sitting on the floor of the hall just outside of the bathroom door so that he could hear the rest of the story Dee told, about six brothers who were turned into swans (Dee did not want May to kill another parrot). Vivaldi was playing again, because Edmund liked it now, and Dee said it made a perfect soundtrack—storms, rack, and ruin.