The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

you pay for that,” I said.
“You better hope whatever poison’s pasted on that beak doesn’t do for more than rats,” he said.
I’d have called him suspicious, but on another island Grief had turned resurrection into something that had smacked of murder. Not directly, but I’d felt the danger all down my spine, felt the little hairs raised, and known insanity had come with teeth embedded in flesh. I’d like to say it had turned me paranoid, but we’d been lied to, here, the both of us, and birds had been used as bait.
George had been used as bait, I realized. He was never meant to go to Tasmania, and his invitation to this particular exhibit was worded to include his wife. “You should give it to me and go home,” I said, meaning back to a country that wasn’t his, and reached for the thermos. “Whatever this is, it doesn’t have to involve you.”
“Yeah, nah,” said George, definitive, sliding the thermos back into his pack. “You’re the scientist. Tell me, who would we see about a poison?”
“You could see me,” said Darren, behind us.

4
Darren was nervous but not sorry. A certain clarity in his eyes passed for sanity, but there must have been an awareness that it wasn’t a sanity we shared, because he kept himself carefully beyond arm’s length. Untouchable. For the bird to enchant a king, there had to be a king to enchant, and clearly Darren thought he fit the bill. It was the monstrous obsession of Grief, taking yet another form. “It makes me see things more clearly than other people,” he said. “I know you don’t feel the same. Not yet.”
The implication was that I would. That Grief could be induced, somehow, through outside influence, and that with it would come advocacy, or at least compliance. “I want you to understand,” he said, but it wasn’t understanding that I felt with extinct marsupials chewing on my fingers, and I didn’t feel it here either. Recognition, perhaps, but recognizing that imbalance exists is not the same as feeling imbalance as stability.
“I just wanted to bring them back,” he said.
“You haven’t brought anything back,” I said. “These birds … these things you’ve created, they’re not real. They’re not alive. You know that, don’t you?”
“They’re beautiful,” he said. As if that by itself was enough. But then, under influence of Grief, dead things often were.
“They’re killing the rats,” I said, and he nodded. “Can they kill anything else?”
“Just rats,” he said. I didn’t believe him.
“So if I were to empty the thermos and take that wren in my hands and stab you with that little beak, you’d be all right with that?”
A minor twitch, quickly covered. “Of course.”
“Ruby,” George interrupted, and his voice was warning-low. I waved him off.
“What if I were to stab myself?” Another twitch, this time more pronounced. “I wonder what the Sea Witch would have said about that?” It was a shot in the dark, but if what was happening in these mountains was connected to what was happening in Tasmania, then the inciting factor might have been the same. Saner than any of us. It was the most terrible lie.
“You’re not a rat,” said Darren. The words burst out of him. “Rats are … they are …”
“They’re evil,” I finished for him. “Monstrous.” Some people said that about the jellies, disturbed by how the deterioration of the ecosystem was for them opportunity and blooming. And I could see — in this country of birds, where all the birds flirted with extinction, their clawed feet invitations on the path of Grief — what devouring and predators had done. “They kill everything. Indiscriminate destruction. They can’t be trusted.”
Monstrous. Some people said that about colonization. The coming of people like me, and what we’d done in Tasmania, the rest of Australia, and what we’d done in New Zealand … the same devouring, the same indifference to the pre-existence of other life. The same conversation, over and over, with different settings and different subjects.
“It’s so hard to stop them,” he said, shoulders easing. “There are so many, and they don’t care. Nothing makes them care. And when they’re done they leave and go elsewhere, off the sinking ship.”
“You won’t get an argument from me,” I said, hands spread wide to show commiseration and lack of threat. “They’re better off dead.”
“Yes.” His expression cleared, and he was once again the man I’d met at the museum. Sane, and good-humored. It was a shock to me, having always considered Grief as linear and recognizable, how easy it was for him to cover it up. I wanted to know how far that cover went.
“Tell me something,” I said, leaning forward, my voice lowering. “Is George a rat?”
I could feel George stiffen behind me – the quality of his silence was one that I had come to know well over the years. It was silence from a man profoundly uninterested in devouring, who had crossed an ocean to avoid it, but if he was being used for bait I had to know.
“I don’t know,” said Darren, cocking his head to one side as if he too were a wren, suspicious of interlopers. “Shall we test him?”
I didn’t know what the test was supposed to be, what it was Darren thought would sway my judgment either way. There were two of us and only one of him, but insanity was not always rational, and he had poison, potentially, on his side. He also had a prior relationship with George, one that might have made him harder to hurt, but I wasn’t willing to gamble my husband’s safety on the remnants of friendship.
“Sounds like a waste of resources to me,” I said. “If you don’t remember what he was like at the museum, I do. He was as fascinated with your wrens as you are.” Which was exaggeration, but it was exaggeration for purpose. What would affect Darren more than anything, I believed, was the delight George had shown at the