What the Dead Birds Taught Me, by Laura Blackwell
Read it here in about 20 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
The story begins in medias res, immediately drawing the reader into a strange textworld where the narrator has the power to reanimate the dead using her own blood and words written in a book. The reader also learns three significant expositional details in the first paragraph: the narrator’s parents have just died in a car crash, she has a sister, and she has just encountered the story’s antagonist for the first time (‘him’). I love how this is done so casually and economically, and how it all creates intrigue.
When the narrator encounters the antagonist for the third time, there are some subtle clues as to the fairytale direction the story’s about to go in, as the narrator talks about her art work – looking back to the start of the story, you can also see this fairytale element in the way she is able to talk to animals. Then, at the antagonist’s cabin in the woods, the story turns into a retelling of Bluebeard, with a locked room, red key, and six dead wives. I’m a sucker for a fairytale retelling, and I think combining this with the magical realism/horror of a character being able to raise the dead is genius.
I’m no longer able to consider fairytales without seeing them through the lens of feminism, and this story is a good example of how this can work: fairytale Bluebeard murdered six of his wives, and it’s all too believable that a real murdered girl or woman might want to say to a psychic “Tell everyone it wasn’t my fault”, that they would be blamed for their own deaths at their murderer’s trial because of what they wore or how they behaved, or, with safety in numbers, that they would want to seek bloody revenge from beyond the grave if they could. There’s so much to love in this story!
