fiction

by Susan Mahlburg 

Marie-Claire Is Dead

Marie-Claire is dead. I mention this only because people tend to grow attached to animals, even other people’s. They hear “parakeet” and imagine a child’s pet, something delicate and helpless, something that says little phrases and chirps at cartoons. Marie-Claire was not that kind of bird. She had a foul temper and a judgmental stare and a spiteful little habit of shitting on my sunflowers. I loved her very much.

She died, I believe, from the fumes. That’s what the inspector said, though he also commented—uninvited—on the state of my apartment, which was unnecessary. It wasn't as if I had asked him to come. Someone reported the smell. Someone with no imagination. The jars were clearly labeled. Nothing was bubbling over. The odor, if anything, was clean. Bitter, maybe. Like celery root, or the steam from boiled coins.

I wasn’t always like this. I used to design clothing—real clothing, not the kind you see on girls who wear sneakers to cocktail bars and say it’s ironic. No. I worked in structure. Construction. My first collection was all angles, all raw silk and asymmetric draping, inspired by the architecture of stairwells. It made a girl look like she’d been folded twice before being released into the street.

Then came the incident.

It happened at university. I won’t bore you with the details—there was a window, and a balcony, and something about the stitching on a hem that made me lose a full day. They called it a psychotic break. I called it a necessary interruption. After that, the institutions had less patience for me. I finished my degree remotely. That was the end of runways.

But I never stopped working with my hands. I still dream in fabric. Still wake up with cuts on my thumbs from invisible shears. When I touch the edge of a crystal now, it feels like touching a garment that hasn’t been sewn yet. Full of potential. Full of danger.

People talk about recovery like it’s a staircase—something you climb. But I’ve always found it more like a spiral. You come around again and again, sometimes higher, sometimes not. I live on the top floor now. The windows are wide. I can see the backs of other buildings, the satellite dishes, the little terraces with their single plastic chairs. It’s not beautiful, but it’s mine. I’ve been told it’s good to have a view.

Marie-Claire used to perch on the curtain rod and scream at the pigeons. She was territorial. Unapologetic. That’s what I liked about her. She never pretended to be anything else.

It began in the usual way: with loneliness and a search engine. I had been thinking about beauty, which I do sometimes when the light outside turns grey too early and everything indoors starts to resemble an overused cutting board. The paint in my hallway had developed a kind of chalky peel, like it was trying to leave itself. The tiles near the kitchen sink clicked when I stepped on them. I started looking for something to make. Not something useful—everyone’s obsessed with utility these days—but something ornamental. Pointless. Honest about its own uselessness.

That’s how I came to crystals.

Not the store-bought kind, but grown ones. Homegrown. The kind you cultivate yourself, like bruises or mold. There are kits for children. The ones with neon dye and pop science instructions that compare the process to growing rock candy. I read the instructions. They bored me. The colors were garish, the shapes tame. I didn’t want rock candy. I wanted something jagged. Dangerous-looking. I wanted my windowsill to look like a place you could cut yourself just by thinking too hard.

That’s when I began to experiment. Arsenic was obvious, but unoriginal. I settled on a variation involving copper sulfate, nail polish remover, and a small supply of pesticides I already owned. (Don’t ask why. Everyone has something in their cabinet they wouldn’t want inspected.) I used clean jam jars, an old teapot, and a series of cloth filters I made from the hem of a nightgown I no longer wear.

Marie-Claire was suspicious from the beginning. She shifted on her perch constantly those first few days, as though the air had gained a weight she couldn’t see. She stopped singing. She watched the jars.

I suppose I should have taken that as a sign.

The first crystals appeared on day five. Thin, like frost on glass, clustered in the lip of the shallow dish I kept near the radiator. I touched one and it broke off in a perfect sliver, almost translucent. It looked like a fingernail that had never touched anything impure. I held it up to the light and it refracted just enough to make the room seem expensive.

I began to catalog them. Not scientifically—God no. I gave them names. That one was Clementine, because it formed while I was peeling an orange and because it had a kind of citrus shimmer to it. The next was Tallulah, and after that came Bel, Margo, No. 7, and Accident. I arranged them in old pill bottles and tiny boxes from the jewelry store on Varka Street, the one where the clerk calls me Madame and pretends not to recognize me each time I return a necklace I cannot afford.

Marie-Claire took to flinging seed everywhere, as if in protest. She had never liked my projects, but this one made her particularly restless. She paced the length of her swing and stared at the window, even when it was dark. One morning, I found her lying on her back at the bottom of the cage, perfectly still. I thought she was dead then. I touched her beak and she blinked at me slowly, like a drunk being told last call.

That was when I began ventilating. I cracked the window. I moved the cage farther from the sill. I added a sprig of mint to her water. But still, she looked thinner. Not in the body, but in the eyes. Like her shape was there, but her outline had faded.

I told myself she was molting. I told myself she was moody. I told myself she was adjusting to the seasons, or the altitude, or the energy of the apartment, which had become brighter, sharper, more electric with the presence of all that growth. The crystals had begun to layer, climbing the sides of the jars like ivy. They weren’t polite little specimens anymore. They had teeth. They grew fast and glassy and clacked when I moved them. I found one with a hook in the center, like it was trying to catch something. It made me laugh.

The day Marie-Claire died, I had just completed a batch of twelve. I lined them up like trophies and took a photograph, which I texted to no one. She wasn’t in the cage when I glanced over. For a moment, I thought she’d escaped. I looked around the room, checked the curtains, the bookcase. Then I saw her beneath the radiator, tucked in neatly, wings close to her sides like pressed linen. Her feet were curled, her eyes open, her beak slightly parted in what could have been astonishment—or offense.

She looked very small. Smaller than I remembered. As if death had made her retreat into her most compact version, all bones and feathers, no attitude.

I picked her up with a paper towel and set her on the windowsill, beside the tallest cluster.

I sat with her for a long time. The sun came in hard through the glass, caught the facets, lit up the rim of her feathers with the same halo I’d seen once on an antique brooch I didn’t buy. I wondered if I could preserve her. Not taxidermy—too tacky. I considered laquer. Resin. Salt. I Googled “crystallize small bird.”

There were no helpful results.

I didn’t bury her. That would have been dishonest. She was not a creature of soil. She hated the park. Once, I brought her there in a travel cage for “fresh air” and she screamed the entire time. A man eating chips on a bench called her demonic. I agreed.

Instead, I placed her inside an old glass cloche I used to keep over persimmons. The fruit never lasted. But Marie-Claire did. I set her on a folded bit of velvet—deep blue, from a dress I once wore to the opera before I was uninvited from things like that. I arranged small crystals around her in a halo: Bel, Tallulah, Accident. It was beautiful. Not sentimental. Monumental.

For a while, I didn’t leave the apartment. Not out of grief. There was just too much to do. The batches had to be monitored. The windows adjusted for humidity. I had begun experimenting with dyes—beet juice, iodine, a powered blush I no longer used. Some results were unfortunate. Others were astonishing. One cluster, steeped in merlot for a single hour, grew in the shape of a forked tongue. I named it Marie-Claire II. It did not speak.

Neighbors started asking questions. Not directly. The woman from 3B knocked and said she’d heard a loud crash—had I fallen? I said no. I’d dropped a vase. She said she hadn't heard it break. I said it was a thick vase. I closed the door before she could smell anything.

There were smells. I’ll admit that. Not from the bird. She was preserved perfectly, hermetically, lovingly. But the solution I’d made for the latest batch had gone slightly off. A film developed. One jar hissed when I opened it. I stopped using that mix.

Then came the inspector. He said someone had filed a complaint. Not a health violation, exactly, but something about “anomalous odors.” He had a clipboard and sensible shoes. He looked like the type who does crossword puzzles with a pen. I invited him in.

He didn’t take notes at first. He stood in the center of the room, blinking like he’d walked into a greenhouse on Mars. I gestured toward the windowsill, explained the process. I used words like evaporation, crystallization, reclamation. I said I was working on an installation. Possibly for a gallery. Possibly private. He nodded without understanding.

When he noticed Marie-Claire beneath the cloche, he startled slightly. “She’s mine,” I said. “She died. It was unfortunate.”

He leaned in to look closer. I did not appreciate that. Marie-Claire didn’t either.

He asked if the materials I was using were toxic. I said “define toxic.” He asked if I lived alone. I said “define alone.” He said he might need to return. I said that wouldn’t be necessary.

He didn’t leave right away. He lingered, eyes roaming the edges of the room like he expected something to scurry. I offered him tea. He declined. I offered again. He asked what exactly I was doing with “all of this.”

“All of what?” I said.

He gestured broadly. I hated him for that. The gesture was too big, too clumsy. Like waving at a museum and saying, nice pictures.

I said I was experimenting with form. Preservation. Transmutation. He asked what substances I was using.

“Household materials,” I said. “Mostly safe.”

“Mostly?” he repeated.

“I’m not boiling lead.”

He jotted something. I watched his pen move and imagined it slipping. Cutting the page, his skin. Ink blooming. He noticed me watching and cleared his throat.

“Is this . . . installation available for public viewing?”

“Not yet.”

“Is it for sale?”

"Not to you.”

He didn’t laugh. He took a photo on his phone—quick, without asking. I stepped forward. “Please delete that.”

“Ma’am—”

“No photos without consent. I’m not an exhibit.”

He hesitated. I did not. I stepped closer and said it again, quieter. He blinked, then thumbed the screen. The phone made a sound that meant nothing. I didn’t believe him.

Then he said something I hadn’t prepared for: “One of the jars moved.” I froze.

“Over there.” He pointed to the edge of the sill, where the late batch sat—a dark mixture I hadn’t labeled. “It twitched.”

“Twitching is not a scientific term,” I said.

“Was there something alive in it?”

I looked him directly in the face. “No.”

We stood in the silence that followed. The jar did not move again. The room smelled faintly of varnish and cooked citrus. He wrote something else down and said someone might follow up. I said, “Of course.”

He turned to leave, then paused by the door. “You know,” he said, “you can’t just keep a dead bird in your living room.”

I tilted my head. “Why not?”

He looked tired. “Because you can’t.”

Two weeks passed. No one returned. I took it as a sign—not of approval, exactly, but of tolerance. I resumed my experiments with a new confidence. I upgraded my tools: a proper scale, a small burner, pipettes. I used gloves now, not because I feared contamination, but because I didn’t want fingerprints on the glass.

I made one last batch for Marie-Claire.

Not the replacement—Marie-Claire II had proven unstable and begun flaking apart—but a tribute. I used the last of my blush, a droplet of my own blood (from a shaving cut—don’t be dramatic), and water that had been sitting in her dish, untouched since the day before she died. I filtered it three times. I whispered to it. I set it in the sunlight and left it alone.

It grew slowly, but with intention. A tight core at first, then outward in a pattern I hadn’t seen before. Not spiky, but curved. Almost floral. It shimmered like wet ash. I called it Saint Marie.

I placed her beside the cloche, angled so that the sunset light passed through both at once.

When I sat across the room and squinted slightly, it looked like she was waking up.

That night, someone knocked again. Louder this time. Not the polite knock of a neighbor. The kind that assumes authority. I didn’t answer. I turned off the lights and sat on the floor, arms around my knees, and watched the glow from the sill stretch across the room like a spine.

They knocked again, then called out my name. Not rudely. Just as a fact.

I didn’t respond.

Instead, I reached toward the sill and picked up Saint Marie. It was warm from the sun, though the sun was long gone. I pressed it against my sternum. It left a faint line, like a kiss from something cold-blooded.

The knocking eventually stopped.

They’ll come back. Or they won’t. People lose interest. Bureaucracy fails. Or maybe someone will break the door down one day and see what I’ve made, and they’ll think: My god. It’s beautiful.

That would be nice.

That would be fair.

---

Susan Mahlburg left corporate life for a North Carolina classroom, a move often mistaken for virtue. She writes mostly poetry. This is her first story in print.