Mel Kassel

Mel Kassel

Birdhouse

We moved into the murderer’s house in early spring. No help, we didn’t bring much. The most cumbersome part was June’s long sewing table, which wouldn’t fit anywhere. Eventually, we put it against the livingroom wall that opens into the kitchen; its short edge still sticks out a good six inches into the entryway.

“I’m gonna bust a hip on that,” June said. “No way that’ll work.”

“We’ll adapt,” I said. “Muscle memory. Soon we’ll be going through every door like this.” I swung my butt to the side and knocked into her. We laughed, but it sounded high and panicked.

I remember the urgency. We wanted to transplant everything fast, get it all into the new space. We could organize it later. It felt like if we didn’t fill the house swiftly and cleanly, the change wouldn’t take.

June opened a closet and made a boot imprint in the dust on the floor. It hadn’t been cleaned.

“They probably thought he killed them in the house and made it haunted. So they got in and out fast,” I said.

She shook her head. “Cleaners see death all the time. No excuse.”

“Geeze, June.”

“I’m kidding.” She pinched my arm, trying to calm us both down.

We swept, leaving everything in the boxes for now, the better to deal with the floors. June did open one box, the one with all of our tableware, to find a bowl. She put her phone inside it and played one of the podcasts about the murderer. We’d heard all of them before, but we were listening again for mentions of the house.

We had a hard time deciding which podcast about the murderer we liked best. There were the overproduced ones, with hosts whose voices were languid and sly, oiled by long media careers. Then there were the self-righteous ones, the ones we called “truth porn,” their recordings threaded with tasteful music and candid murmurs, the sounds caught before an interview actually started. There was a third category—comedians discussing the events and laughing at themselves—but we didn’t listen to those as often. We thought it was very possible that a podcast would contact us after the move. We’d decided that we would talk to them if they were legitimate, but we would be prim and academically patient in the face of sensationalism.

I remember June finding a spoon in one of the kitchen drawers. She stuck it in her mouth, her tongue pressing into the curve where grit and maybe dried particles from the murderer pressed back, dissolved.

The backyard seemed huge in the dark of that first night. But really, it’s a small stretch of dirt, dotted with clumps of grass that look as though they’ve been stomped down. He didn’t bury anyone there and we had no plans for it. When it rained, which was often that spring, the whole expanse turned to a brown slurry that could ruin your shoes.

“Birdhouse,” June said, the morning after the move. We were eating breakfast, and she pointed at the yard with her fork.

“Yeah, homemade, I think.”

“By him or his wife? They weren’t crafty.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was a gift.” I had noticed it while unpacking the rest of the kitchen boxes earlier. The glass doors next to the stove look out on the yard, and the birdhouse is in the back right corner, taller than the fence slats behind it.

“Maybe he worried about the little birdies out in the cold.” “Just a bleeding heart, you know.”

We grinned at each other. The riskiest part, the are-we-actually-doing-this part, was over. Our commitments were refreshed, and we were giddy. I made a joke about the cilantro in her teeth matching her eyes. She yanked my plate away from me when I was done, playing at anger.

No dishwasher, but that was fine. We soaked everything in the deep porcelain sink before scrubbing. I watched her arms disappear past their wrists into the soapy water, watched them come up with clots of egg caught in the fine hairs. She didn’t wipe them until she was finished. She never objected to tagalong grime like that. She’d sit in the sand without a towel under her, she’d dry spills with tissues plucked from the trash, she’d transfer worms from the sidewalk back to the grass and be wiping her mouth minutes later. I read this as a casual earthiness—something that couldn’t be ruffled. I was so sure that she was braver than me.

The birdhouse stood vacant for weeks. Once, I ventured out and stuck my nose into the hole, smelled wet wood and a tingle of feather dander. Its paint—orange for the hinged roof, white for the walls—was losing the war against the rain. It reminded me of the murderer’s house: squat and worn, but solid, a patient place. I didn’t know if you were supposed to clean out a birdhouse. I decided not to, figuring that birdhouses were best left to nature.

We left other things the way they had been, too. We didn’t paint or patch. We arranged our furniture according to the few photos we had seen of the house’s layout. He had kept a wicker chair in the bathroom, for example, facing the tub. I sat in the one we bought and chatted with June when she took her baths at night. We thought the murderer might have done this with his wife, or maybe even with some of the bodies. That was wishful thinking, of course, but the positioning of the chair in the photo had seemed very purposeful.

“Do you think she knew?” June asked. She was in the bath, a week after move-in, her eyelashes dripping, her hair slicked into a dark point behind her head. “The wife?”

I leaned down and whispered, “Do you think you’d know?” before sucking her ear lobe between my teeth. She splashed her legs and gasped.

“No! Opal! Not you!”

No neighbors dropped by to welcome us or introduce themselves. We hadn’t expected them to. We weren’t even sure whether we technically had neighbors at all—the nearest homes were a half-mile away on either side of us. But June wooed them anyway. She baked cakes and walked over on the highway shoulder. She brought it up mid-handshake: “Hi! We just moved into the murder house.”

It was the same with people in town. They were so grateful, the employees who sold us yards of cloth, boxes of pushpins, groceries, gutter guards. After the obligatory sympathies for the victims (who had been from the city where he worked, not here) came the questions:

“Do you feel, like, strange? At night?” “Have you found any blood stains?”

“Is it true that you don’t mind talking about it?”

It wasn’t long before our fellow shoppers were asking too. We’d always answer earnestly: “No, nothing weird. At least, not so far.”

When we considered ourselves settled and the questions had tapered off, we wrote to the murderer and told him we had moved into the house. We were very careful about our tone—warm but not explicitly supportive—and our sign-off: Yours in respectful correspondence, Opal and June. He never replied.

* * *

The weather slowly became warm enough for walking outside. On the day I saw the sparrows, I was tracing the perimeter of the yard, listening to a podcast to blot out the sound of June’s sewing machine. She had been commissioned to make a mermaid-style wedding dress that flared at the base in an explosion of gauze. “Awful,” she kept saying to herself as she worked.

The yard was treacherous, all puddles. I had to move carefully. I wondered if he or his wife had ever considered doing something with this space, like laying down concrete for a patio or putting out a few chairs. The podcast was telling me about a cold case in a different state. I was only half-listening while I concentrated on keeping my balance.

I had started my second or third circle when I saw a sparrow perched in the birdhouse’s hole. I stopped walking to stare at it. It flicked its tail up and down in a way that seemed somehow significant, communicative. Then it flew off into the woods. That’s where he left them: northeast from the house and two miles in, buried a few feet deep. We’d hiked and looked but couldn’t discern any signs.

I walked to the birdhouse and put my eye up to the hole.

The nest inside looked like a horrible crown. Twigs stuck out of it at violent angles, sharp and glistening, wet from the rain. They seemed ready to impale any creature unlucky enough to get close. And yet there were eggs, four of them, posed in watchfulness around a severed finger.

“June!” I called.

She couldn’t hear me. I didn’t want to leave the finger, in case I had imagined it. I teetered, one leg tensed toward the glass doors and the kitchen, the other rooted by the birdhouse.

“June!” I shouted again. I pressed my eye back to the hole of the birdhouse. The finger was crooked, gray-skinned, knuckles facing me. The nail had chipped green polish on it.

It would be cowardly to say that we didn’t know what we were doing. Of course we did. There’s more honor in copping to your fascinations than in dressing them up to be noble. We were, like so many others, just interested. What could one person do to another? What had people done?

Yes, we were in social media groups, we scrolled through newspaper archives, we traded stories and delighted in finding obscure ones. But we weren’t loud about it—we floated above the discourse and watched its topography shift. We knew about the importance of centering the victim and about the pseudo-feminism people claimed as an excuse for their fears and fixations. We knew about police ineptitude, the fallibility of forensics, the ways in which a narrative could be built and twisted. We knew where to find leaked crime scene photos and we knew where to report leaked crime scene photos. We knew all of this. We kept to ourselves, and we hurt no one.

When I imagine June now, her hair is shorter. She’s more sympathetic to her clients, the brittle brides-to-be. She’s thinking of me in ways I deem unfair, and I’m doing the same, because she turned out to be a coward after all.

I retrieved the finger without disturbing the eggs. The skin had too much give, it could be pushed around like clay. To keep it safe, we put it inside a small terrarium on a strip of green felt. We drove out to the hobby shop in town and bought tiny plastic trees, which we planted around the finger on drops of glue. “It looks like the finger itself died. Like it keeled over after centuries of inching across the earth,” said June. She was creative like that; she loved to assign and edit histories.

“It was someone’s, though,” I said. I was uneasy. I could not fully believe in the finger, yet. I didn’t think we deserved such a clear reward for our faith in strangeness.

“I don’t remember a victim whose fingers were cut off,” said June.

“Me neither.”

“So, what, there are more bodies that weren’t found?”

“Slow down,” I said. June and I had reached the same conclusions, but it was much too early to voice them. I closed my eyes. I wanted to ooze gratitude from my skin, to plan only when we could be appropriately awed. “Let me think,” I told her. “Let’s not speculate.”

June loved the finger, how it curled cutely in its tiny coffin. Of all the pieces fetched by the birds, she cherished that first one the most. She kept it on the mantle above the sewing table, and I would catch her glancing up at it, as if she was receiving something it broadcast, before she bent her head and pushed fabric at the machine again. When she left me, she took the finger with her.

We moved the nest out of the birdhouse. The sparrows had brought the finger while they were building, we reasoned. If we let another pair of birds build a nest inside the structure, would they bring us something else?

We carried a ladder through the yard and set it up at the edge of the woods.

With ceremonial slowness, June tipped the orange roof off of the birdhouse, let it hang against the side on its hinges and lifted out the nest.

It looked just as jagged and dangerous in her hands. I worried that it would wake from sleep as we transferred it, that it would clench suddenly, wringing blood from her palms, mixing red with yellow yolks and pink flecks of embryo. I worried that the parents would swoop down on us, get caught in our hair, inside our clothes, stab us with their beaks until they died.

I was uncomfortable in the grip of superstition. Before, neither of us had believed in the power of a murderer to infect a place. All of his darkness stayed within him, produced by the same factories that everyone else contained. June liked to say that murderers were as magic as her bifocals. We weren’t here for magic. We wanted to pluck at what was truly, undeniably dreadful.

The finger, though, had tilted me. It sat and announced something— something still at work we had not yet translated.

I flexed the ladder open near a tree with low branches. I expected June to pass the nest to me, but she balanced it in her right hand and climbed with her left, the skirt of her dress sliding against my arm, giving me goosebumps. I thought of being passed through by a ghost and held the ladder more tightly. I looked for tiny imperfections to make her real, to make her mine: stubble above her ankles, red skin peeking around the heel straps of her clogs.

A pair of nuthatches moved into the birdhouse over the next few days. At breakfast, we watched them fly off and return with nesting materials. We were too far away to tell twigs from fingers, so we waited, fidgeting pleasantly from the suspense.

After breakfast, June would work on her commission and I would stay in the kitchen, first to clean and then to make whatever I felt like making that day. This was, perhaps, the most questionable part of our moving to the murderer’s house: we monetized it. June’s orders dipped and then climbed as she revealed our new location, exchanging one client base for another, brides with more morbid quirks and, intriguingly, more money. I sold candles, soaps, passion-fruit-flavored marshmallows, scarves, leg warmers, crocheted bags for tarot cards, all online. These items were never flashy or even inscribed. Their descriptions included a single sentence about the house where they’d been made. Sometimes, I’d get a private message asking for special treatment. Could I take the finished scarf and leave it overnight in the woods before shipping it? Could I burn the candle for a minute over the spot where the murderer had slept? I would say yes, but I would never do these ridiculous things. I shipped the order like any other.

We found a human ear woven into the nuthatch nest. It had two gold rings in the cartilage that clicked against each other when I held the ear and shook it. “How many people can say that they’ve held an ear to their ear?” I said, jingling the rings by the side of my face.

“We’re going to hell,” June said, laughing. We were wearing oversized yellow rain boots that we’d bought in town. We looked far too whimsical for the situation, a fact we both found funny.

“Do you really think so?”

“No.”

“No, but?”

She shrugged. “It feels a little mean to be happy about this.”

Looking back on it now, I’m scouting for early signs of her squeamishness. It’s hard not to wonder how it wormed its way in. How could the finger charm her, but not the ear?

“I’m not happy,” I said. I stopped shaking the ear. “I’m just baffled.”

“Happily baffled.”

“Maybe a little excited. It feels huge. Doesn’t it feel huge to you?”

“It definitely does.”

I studied her face. She pulled her lower lip into her mouth and let it pop out again. Her cheeks were blotchy, sensitive from the cold. She spent more than half of every year shivering, her circulation was so poor.

“Do you want to go to the police?” I asked. The question had been rooming with us for a while. I tried to speak in a neutral tone, but I don’t know what she heard. An accusation? A plea? I wanted to reach out and run my hands over her arms, to feel what I could of her in case these seconds were the last ones before an obliterating newness.

I did not want to go to the police. The trust that the birds had shown us felt precarious. We were capable of seeing their secrets or choosing to turn away. But influencing them or stopping them? That would have been insolent. Like trying to force ourselves into a natural cycle we knew nothing about.

“Maybe it’s not a new victim,” she said. “Or maybe it’s more than one. The skin tone looks different from the finger.”

“I’m not sure it’s something we can explain,” I said. I hugged her with one arm and held the ear away from her in the other. I saw it reflected in a puddle, hovering.

“They could be parts from an older victim that they just didn’t find. Or, I don’t know,” she said.

“He’s in jail. They got him. He didn’t cut off ears. This is probably just . . .”

But I didn’t know, either. I couldn’t make up histories like she did. I held the ear flat in my palm so the rings wouldn’t make any more noise.

I moved the nests out of the birdhouse by myself after that. I put each one in a different tree, thinking that they might be discovered and reused. If there were eggs, I left them where they were. There were systems of balance, I was certain, that would either absorb or reject them.

June’s reactions to the body parts became unpredictable. Sometimes she seemed to be humoring me, smirking and nodding, asking me where I thought that one should go. Other times, she winced and flapped her hands at me, warding me away. She hated when the piece was untidy, a mix of flesh and indeterminate meat instead of a discrete, small object. When I brought in what I thought was a stretch of tendon, she refused to touch it. I joked about her using it in her sewing and she told me to keep it far from her workstation, her voice icy, as though I’d made a threat.

But then, occasionally, her excitement at a new find surpassed my own. When the second pair of sparrows left behind an assortment of teeth, she organized them by size in a drawer from her jewelry box. She doted on the long coil of hair that the chickadees brought us, draping it over her thighs and stroking it all the way up to its ragged piece of scalp. She mounted it in a bell jar so that the hair hung from the skin and it looked like a delicate auburn jellyfish. It’s on my desk instead of hers, now.

It soothed me to see her fussing over the pieces she liked. In those moments we were finding our footing again, sharing in the same kind of sharp-edged delight that had us laughing across tables at each other, back when we first traded details about the murderer and murderers like him.

Honestly, there was nothing that special about him, other than the fact that his house was for sale. His methods were unimaginative. His mind, as easily split and examined as a cantaloupe, was striated with the familiar veins of rage. When we wrote to him, it wasn’t to fish for answers, but to share something between the two of us—a seedy, private thing, something to take out of a locked drawer and marvel at.

Early on, when we first started dating, we scoffed performatively at each other, saying that perhaps we were gross, fucked up, deranged for researching all this stuff. But the truth was that we knew ourselves, and we knew what was remarkable and what was dull. We were drawn to what most people wanted to disown.

Or we used to be, anyway. June had become uncertain. She wondered what exactly the birds were doing, and when I couldn’t parse it to her satisfaction, she’d have trouble sleeping and act distant during the day. Most of all, she was afraid that the birds were following a progression. She didn’t know what the end would be.

“What are they trying to tell us?” she’d ask. “What if we aren’t getting the message? What if things get worse?”

“You think they’re going to try and stuff a head in there?” I asked her. I was washing her hair, sitting in the wicker seat by the tub.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What would you do if you found a whole head?”

“A head wouldn’t fit in there.”

“Okay, what would you do if you found a head next to it?”

“Seriously? I’d try to identify it.” I was determined not to shrink from her hypotheticals. She wouldn’t trap me that way.

“Would you tell someone? Like the police?”

“I don’t want a head!”

“But then we’d have to hide all the other stuff. The stuff that’s somehow different from a head.”

I was surprised that she could be this angry while naked. She must have known how silly she looked, blinking away droplets, hunched and pouting.

“A head is like, indicative of a whole, undiscovered body,” I said.

“Of a person, you mean. And the other things aren’t?”

“They don’t feel like that.”

“What do they feel like?”

I paused, appreciative of the question even though we were arguing. “They feel like . . . a view that most people don’t get,” I said.

She sighed, looking down at the bathwater. I scooped some into the cup I was holding and poured it down her back, watching it race down the pale slope of her, trying again to hold the image in my memory, knowing we were on a precipice.

“Look, these things might not belong to anybody, you know?” I said. “They might exist outside of people. I feel like it’s maybe all charged up now, the ground, the ecosystem. I don’t even think he started this. Maybe it was here the whole time, and he got caught up in it?”

I willed her to look at me. I was holding the cup above her neck, waiting.

All I wanted was something said without doubt. “I don’t know,” she said, without glancing up.

“If you don’t know, then why are you touching them with me? Why are you helping me put them around the house?” I dropped the cup between her legs and stood up, turning my back to the tub. I heard water sloshing as she repositioned.

“I thought they were beautiful, sometimes. But this many of them, from different people . . . ”

“What do you want to do?” I asked her. “We can’t get rid of them. I don’t want to.” I sounded childish. But I was being abandoned, and I wanted her to acknowledge that, if nothing else.

“I don’t know,” she said again.

She wasn’t completely different from her old self. A lot of people say that when they’re explaining a breakup: I didn’t recognize her anymore. But I could still see her, the part of her that had texted me the listing for the murderer’s house, three years after the same part had kissed me even though I had just vomited from too much wine on our first date. She had circled her tongue around mine, holding my face so I couldn’t pull away.

“Tasting notes of chocolate and bile,” she said. “Award-winning.”

That part had weakened, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when. It wasn’t and isn’t dead—she still has the finger, she couldn’t give that up—but I don’t know how to reinvigorate it. I don’t know why it bled out in the first place. Had filling so many bridal orders made her hungry for something more traditional? Was it a matter of location, a restlessness that came with the rural setting? Was she aware of the change in herself, but frightened to talk to me about it? Had she been talking to someone else, instead?

Sometimes I think that her bravery must have been siphoned away from the outside, that a podcast or a client or someone online had gotten to her. It hurts to think of her being duped this way, but the alternative—that she drifted off on her own, that she chose shame without being pushed—feels worse. Whatever it was, I would have listened. I would have worked on it with her.

She moved out two days after the robins brought the tongue. In the weeks beforehand, she weathered three more fingers, a small vertebra, more hair, a toe, three unidentifiable swatches of flesh, and an eye, which we stored in a corked bottle of grapeseed oil. It’s gotten bigger since then, saturated and filmy. It stares at me from the bottom of the bottle in commiseration.

She hated the tongue, how crass and large it was. “Oh my god, no,” she said when I brought it inside. “No one’s asking you to look at it,” I said.

“I don’t want it in the house.”

“Why is this the last straw?” I waved it at her; I’m not proud of that.

“They’re just around us, sitting. They’re not doing anything.”

“What do you want them to do?”

“I don’t know, something! Otherwise, they’re just disgusting!”

I tried one more time to articulate my feelings but came off sounding crazed. I told her I couldn’t believe her; I couldn’t believe that once something had actually started happening around us, she wanted to back away. I missed sharing wonder with her. This wasn’t our puzzle to solve, I said. It doesn’t have an answer, but it’s still proof of something much bigger than us, something we’re so privileged to witness, something we should be honoring. Why couldn’t she do that? What was getting in the way?

She told me she didn’t want to share it. She said she was scared of it. She wished it hadn’t shown itself.

I could hear envy in her voice, too. She wanted my conviction, had tried to match it and failed. I felt a rush of compassion for her, but it vented out of me as pity, diluted and tired.

“I’m sorry you’re scared,” I said.

She emailed me an article a few weeks ago, the subject line a series of exclamation points. It was about the record rains that spring. The water had sunk into cheaply made, cheaply buried coffins in the nearby cemetery. It made some of them rise up and shed their lids. People were fighting over how to cover repeat burials—taxes, donations?

She called me minutes after she sent it. “Don’t you think the birds could have gotten the parts from those bodies?”

“That doesn’t explain anything,” I said. “If you’re embalmed, they take your tongue out before you’re buried. You know that.”

“Not everyone gets embalmed!”

“Come on, June.”

It was painful to hear her voice. I pictured her teeth, her forearms, her ankles, her back, the parts of her I could most easily summon. What happened to you? I wanted to ask. But I’ve learned that you can’t control what happens to anyone.

“Have there been a lot more?” she asked.

“No. They stopped nesting in the summer.”

“Good.”

“Did you tell people?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that.”

Thinking I had tapped a reservoir of tenderness, I pressed her. “Do you still have the finger? Where is it?”

She wouldn’t tell me. She wouldn’t even acknowledge it. She talked about renting a truck and picking up her sewing table. I listened as I walked through the house, gently touching what the birds had left, looking through the windows at the ladder in the yard, waiting at the tree line for next spring.