The Cuckoo’s Brood

1. Prelude

The ducks on Orion’s pond learnt to wear feathers aplomb that were stained black and white, their emerald heads bobbing high against the viridescent currents that carried it from shore to shore. They were innocent, in the same way that children so often were, usually right before being forced to grow up too soon. 

As many things tend to do, it started in a home.

It was a sprawling estate that ate up much of the land, eternally locked in a one-sided spar with the forests that threatened to creep up and devour on either side. The house itself at the smack-dab of the centre of that silent, swaying fields of yellow grass climbed tall at four stories, with a groaning wooden attic resting atop its crooked crown. The rust crawled, the spiderwebs spun, and the corrosion gorged itself in the places where the sunlight could never quite reach.

Gracie Evan’s father still stapled pages together.

She was ten when it got worse. When she first rounded the corner into the study and saw an inkling. Pages with burnt edges fluttered like the torn wings off a butterfly, the words mashed together with glue, and the edges aligned precisely just so as he took a paper shredder to the whole mess. He had his back hunched to the antique pair of casement windows, his eyes far off into the distance like he was watching some mathematical equation play out that no one else could see. 

“My god.” He noticed her eventually. His tone was drenched in bewilderment. “What are you doing here, sweetheart?”

“It’s Saturday.” She reminded him. “Mommy dropped me off yesterday.”

He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. His head cocked as if listening for that same unseen voice. “That’s right.” He said to himself. The tension eased and he smiled back, looking more like himself that he had been for weeks. “I’m sorry, darling. It must have slipped my mind. Do you want your lunch now?”

If he had looked, he would have noticed it was dark out.

But he didn’t.

“Yeah.” Gracie said, and smiled back. “I’m hungry. Can we eat together?”

He chuckled and picked her up with a swing. She rested her head against the crook of his neck, felt drowsy with the warmth that emanated from there, and tried to pretend that everything was okay and that Mommy was wrong about her father. He still braided her hair in the morning, still told the same silly jokes and made pancakes with a smiley face and poured orange juice into a wine glass so that she could play grown-up. The sun could stop rising, cats and dogs could start to fly, Sammy at school could even start being nice to her, but there was one thing that would always be the constant – her father. Her own North star in the sailor’s skies.

Later, she’ll count his mental decline in every Billy Joel song. 

She’ll learn to despise the radio that played incessantly in his study. 

And she’ll know the futility of quietly throwing out the boxes of incoherently filled notebooks as if that very act would be sufficient enough to ward away the monsters that were very real and lived inside his head. 

It’s the unfairness that sticks to her the keenest. His eyes dilute, no longer the same shade as hers, as he trades his words for someone else’s. He’ll repeat stanzas of poetry like prayer and scream profanities like the heartbreak of every Greek tragedy into a world that has stopped hearing him. Stories can be reused, but when he parrots the narrative – line for line, word for word from the original text – to the pharmacist while stopping by for his meds, it earns him an overnight stay in a holding cell down at the local police station for a minor infraction of the plagiarism laws.

Her mother stopped sending her over after that, despite the custodial agreement. 

She’ll grow older, eventually, but she would never stop waltzing with the ghost of her childhood memory.

Perhaps that’s exactly why things turned out the way they did in the end.

—

2. Cadenza

Aaron Gray had once sat at the sidelines of his foster brother’s birthday party, leaning against the rickety wall where the garden shed sloped into a rough curve of old paint and turpentine tins hidden beneath a tarp. He simply watched moodily as the party happened in a space entirely apart from where he existed. He remembered the scorch of the sun as it beat down mercilessly from above. The melted ice in his paper cup of gatorade. And the restless twitch of his fingers drumming against his achy sides. 

He was beginning to learn the difference in the way that people said ‘I love you’.

It was in the tone, he decided. His mother spoke it gently, like the breathy whisper of the wind as it told the most wonderful secret into his ear. His father said it like a simple fact of life, direct and steady like calm, even water out on a lake. He now had a brother for three years, two months and sixteen days counting, and Sean had never once spoken those words to him.

Instead, it was everything in what he did instead.

Sean was four years younger and a hundred times more cockier, and yet the way he looked at Aaron sometimes made his heart clench strangely. It was jealousy at first, before it thawed to yearning. And then came that incident at the park. He hadn’t really thought much of it at that time – Sean had fallen off the swing and had scraped his knee bloody against the ground. Aaron always carried out extra band-aids. So he did what anybody else would have done. He’d crouched down, and started to tell a story as Sean’s sniffles had slowed to a halt, entranced, all the while applying the band-aid. When he stood back up, Sean had unexpectedly reached for his hand and Aaron let him hold all the way back. It was uncharted territory for them both.

Before home, they’d stopped by the ice-cream shop and bought two chocolate ice-cream cones with the same story Aaron told his brother.

The same reasoning applied now too. Sean came bounding up with a piece of crushed birthday cake on a paper plate and presented it to him with a hopeful look. And Aaron didn’t understand why he smiled back rather than maintain that surliness. 

The ‘why’ was strange, he thought to himself. 

Later, this will be a lesson that he’ll learn – that, sometimes, nobody really understands why they do the things they do.

Because it came from the heart, good or bad… sometimes, it just was.

—

3. Interlude

As she’d suspected, Mom was not happy with her choice.

“A major in business literature?” The woman repeated over the phone, her voice dismayed even through the tinny quality. The hundreds of miles between them never felt so comforting before. “Darling, are you sure? You know exactly how limited your potential job scope will be with that-”

Gracie’s fingers itched to cut the call and hang up. She kept the phone plastered across her right ear, pinned in place by her shoulder, as she continued to unpack her belongings from the suitcase. Her roommate flashed her a sympathetic wince, apparently getting the gist of the situation even with only her side of the conversation. She glared back, but it lacked any real heat. She berated herself about how utterly pitiful it came out.

“Don’t be like that, Mom.” Gracie insisted. “Look, I did my research and I’m old enough to know what I want to do. And there are companies. That’s why the university is offering the course in the first place! Because there is demand out there.” 

“Gracie-”

“Would you rather I switch solely to a degree in literature?” She threatened. “Because if you push this, I will.”

A silence.

“Don’t do that.” The reply was painfully soft. “Don’t you dare bring him into this.”

This, at least, was familiar territory. Steady ground beneath her feet even as resentment blistered inside, so dangerously easy to bring back out to have its turn. “Dad?” She said caustically. “For god’s sake, he was my father. Nobody can erase that, even you. No matter how hard you try.”

“That’s not fair. I loved him too. But you know why he couldn’t stay.”

“Yeah. I know.” She allowed. “But I also know that I am not him. So stop treating me like a useless child who doesn’t know any better.” 

Time was a wound, she decided as she ended the call without another word. It festered, black and ugly and painful, and she could no more stop digging into that scab any more than she could ever stop it from hurting white-hot and sharp. Words were a temporary balm though – that night, she texted a quick ‘sorry.’ to her mother’s number. The distance between them stayed a curtain. Her mother didn’t have to know the depths of unforgiveness that seethed in her eyes, and Gracie could take ease in playing at civility and a peace of mind without being hounded. It was a win-win. 

Her mother texted back in the duration of that same minute, ‘it’s alright. I love you.’ 

She wondered, do you?

Then she put the entire incident out of her mind.

The very next day, it took her close to thirty minutes to find the lecture hall. It was small, tucked away in one of the side buildings. But with a lengthy head-start, it turned out that she was one of the first ones there. It gave her ample picking of the seats in the classroom. There was a strange buzz in her veins, as she opted for the old-fashioned approach and set out a notebook and a pen. The lecturer arrived six minutes before the start – a slightly frazzled older woman with dark eyes and even darker curls that tumbled past the shoulders.

The introductory course was unusual. “Philosopher Burke Anderson once hypothesised the more that one gives of themself, the more is lost.” Dr Blake started. “This is untrue because it is also in human nature to take. In other words, the glass is never truly emptied.”

She turned her attention to the first student in the third row. “You. Is there any particular piece of poetry that comes to mind when I ask?”

“The Raven?” Came the hesitant answer. “Uh, Edgar Allen Poe.”

“Very good.” She said. “But the question that not many people think to ask is this – are you the haunted man, or are you that raven? How many of us actually think to peer beyond the narrator’s lens and exist in a way that is not limited by first instincts? I want all of you to think of a poem, a prose, or any narrative. And I want you to expand on the other side of that story.”

This was easy. Gracie knew in a heartbeat.

It had been one of her father’s promises. His favourite. Frost’s poem about stopping by the woods on a snowy evening. The words etched a labyrinth in her mind, unravelling threads like a well-loved and worn blanket cocooning around her head. Reused stories have never lost their worth, not if there was meaning behind the spoken intent. He had been the traveller trying to come home, and Gracie-

Gracie was that lost home, the same way her mother had once been.

She had never been that traveller.

I love the bare bones of you, he’d once promised, eyes bright and fevered, whilst in the midst of an episode, the same way I love the ashes of you. From dust to dust.

“Hold that role in your heart.” Dr Blake continued, easing her from her thoughts. “And I want you to ask – how easily can you shed it again once it’s been worn? To be a liaison between the business and the literary world, you will have to deal with all manners of people, and you will have to feel. If you gorge, you lose yourself. If you withdraw, you starve.”

Her dark eyes stared unerringly into the hall. “So I’ll ask again – are you willing to take as much as you are willing to give?”

—

“A lawyer?”

“Uh-huh.” Aaron said, straightening his tie on his high school graduation night. “I’m going to be a lawyer.”

It seemed simpler on paper. There was a streak of righteous indignation inside of him that had been sown from his youth. Growing up in one of the downtown areas of the city, he was unfortunately no stranger to the unending list of injustices that had gone unpunished. The school had organised a talk with one of the city’s leading prosecutors once, and from that moment onwards, he had been enraptured. The promise of wielding his words as expertly as a weapon fascinated him.

Sean saw it a little differently. He crinkled his nose. “That’s so boring, Aaron!”

“Says the future restaurant chef.” Aaron shot back. 

“Yeah, so?”

“Boys, behave.” Their mother admonished.

Later, he’ll think about this conversation and the frankly embarrassing naivete of his past self.

Aaron started off more than a little optimistic. The knot in his tie wasn’t quite as tight, and he was eager-eyed and determined to learn as much as he could from the start. It was largely theoretical at the beginning, and he skimmed and learnt the laws and regulations from heart, stored away for future reference. There was a fair bit of travel involved, something that he took to like a duck to water. He was eased into his first case. Then the next. And then the next. He blinked, and the next thing he knew, close to six years had gone by. The smile was a little less quick to appear, the frown more natural now.

Eventually, he started to wonder how he could still smile, especially when certain aspects of memory lingered. 

The reminder of what people were capable of was as grim as the reality of what transpired all too often. He’d been involved in a big criminal case last year, made notorious by the media for the horror of the tale. Anna Kepling, Sam Ritters, James Julden. The names of the living victims etched into his beating heart, an irrevocable scar. 

The greatest crime had always been to silence another. 

He had nightmares, occasionally. Of serrated knife wounds drawn across pale necks, black threads stitching up bloodless lips and the way the light caught on the jagged stumps of tongues severed at the root.

Tear your walls down, Aaron. 

That had been the advice given to him by his own little brother, when he had hardened himself too far.

Yet empathy was dangerous. It was a fine line walking from resolution to desperation, and from day to day he walked, balanced on that tightrope and a little less sure with each passing hour. Brick by brick, he repeated, and wondered if that meant he was still building or pulling down the pieces. He traced the contours in the lines of his palms, felt the flutter of life in his veins against the feathery touch of his fingers, and marvelled how heartbreakingly contradictory life could be.

—

4. Rubato

The man in charge of the team at the office is a man so desperate to be remembered that he is practically dilute with how much he has fictionalised himself. Gracie, especially, sees it. She kept her head down at work. Her pen would fly over the empty, sprawling pages and fill up the company-issued notebooks with words – all plucked from the unnamed wellspring inside of her. She worked to fine-tune the rhyme and rhythm of each one according to the specified theme and quota for the day, perpetually trying to spin reality into fiction and vice versa.

Her father lost himself to words.

Now she toed the line of that same thing, and dared the abyss to take her too.

—

For Sean’s birthday, they end up in a family restaurant for dinner. Mom and Dad brought the birthday cake – frosted with chocolate and silver candles, and Sean’s new girlfriend brought the monstrosity of a felted joke hat that the birthday boy wore for the rest of the late evening with a mock groan. Aaron paid for the bill. He stood at the cash register, cleared his throat and began, “The universe whispered, infinitesimal as it spoke, and commanded the stars to live even as all blinked out, one by one…”

—

5. Coda

Gracie Evans and Aaron Gray met exactly once in life.

It was a rainy day. The skies dampened grey and gloomy far above, a swathe of rolling silvery and slick pouring rain, illuminating the winking lights in the reflection of the glistening drops and pooling surfaces. It splashed beneath the rolling wheels of vehicles out on the road, causing a fine mist spray on the disgruntled passer-bys on either side. The bus was precisely seven minutes late. They both got on at the same stop.

Unsurprisingly, it was a little crowded.

Both Gracie and Aaron ended up plastered together in the second-to-last seats next to the window by the time the bus rumbled, eager to head to the next destination. They’ll be quiet for the first ten minutes, one staring out the foggy window and the other staring resolutely straight ahead. She’ll sit with her posture straight and legs crossed primly, and he’ll be practically boneless against the side of the bus, too exhausted to care for appearance-sake.

“Long day?” She might say, suddenly.

“Work.” He would reply, with a grimace. “And my car just broke down, and will be out of commission for the foreseeable future.”

She nods sagely. “I think I understand how the car feels.”

He barks out a laugh, startled. 

“What one more lit match in a house already set on fire?” He agrees in resignation.

She blinks innocently back, and suggests, “More fire?” Then she grows serious. “But I get it. Sometimes it feels like there’s no end in sight and life does nothing but make everything worse. The last time I remember being happy, like the sort where it’s utterly carefree, is before my father had his schizophrenic break.” She pauses. “I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t actually know why I said that.”

“No, it’s okay. Scientifically, proximity does trigger a sense of intimacy.” He reassures.

She’ll say jokingly, “Intimacy, huh? Have we reached the exchanging numbers stage?” 

He will laugh back, all lopsided.

(They’ll both think-

Perhaps in another life, if life was kinder, if I am kinder, yes)  

But in this one, they never do, and instead remain strangers passing in that same night.

Written By: Trishta
Edited By: Zhen Li