It was a gleam. Just the faintest gleam. A soft shimmer in the chipped dish; the one with the row of rabbits on the rim; a relic, perhaps from a long-forgotten nursery.

Frida pressed through the screen door with her shoulder, hands still clasping her morning mug. The rabbit plate was a special place-setting for the ravens who marauded her feeders, clinging

madly, swinging wildly, even comically as they ate. So, she put out the plate, loaded with peanuts and oily black sunflower seeds, sometimes a small bit of sandwich or hunk of half-eaten fruit, growing brown around the edges.

She was still thinking of Dixon’s visit. It had unsettled her; made her uneasy in her well-known home, on the lookout for changes, and things out of place. Like the object in the plate.

The seeds were gone, the peanut shells in a heap on the deck, and in their place this tiny thing. She put her mug down and held it to the sun. It was a screw, steel maybe. A simple screw, softly shiny. She rubbed it in on her palm, and then slipped it into her apron pocket.

She had been at the cottage for almost five years. People stopped talking about her like she was a newcomer. Or, more accurately, people had stopped talking about her at all, which amounted to the same thing. She lived quietly. She paid her bills on time and bought dull things in the town’s one store – tins of soup, bags of rice, and big burlap sacks of chicken feed and bird seed. What she did for a living, how she paid her meager bills, no one was really sure. 

She wasn’t a bit lonely. There was the occasional anxious phone call, rarer now than in the beginning from people who seemed less and less real to her. Like characters on a movie poster, caught in time, frozen. The colors in her memory were too bright, too saturated. Faces with the smiles that were too bright and emphatic. High pitched voices or low angry ones. Like cartoon characters, a bit raucous and vulgar.

This quiet, here on the hill, here in the cottage; this lack of ugly, human, noise was like a companion itself.

Which is why Dixon’s visit had been so unwelcome. She rarely had visitors. Sometimes, the boy came with a truckload of firewood.

She didn’t trust herself with an ax, hadn’t gone that feral. Sometimes, the mailman, with a packet too thick for the box at the end of the drive.

She knew Dixon. Liked him even. He had come out a few years back to inspect the old camp she found in the woods. It was nothing, really. A heap of ashes, a pile of bedding, some chip bags, a few whiskey bottles. She hadn’t been worried but made the call anyway. It felt responsible, grownup. A thing that would make her real to Dixon, to the town, to the woods.

He had been sensible, reassuring, kind even, his expression neutral though she knew she looked wild. Her greying hair, curlier than when she was young, escaping from its knot. Her Xtratuffs patched with duct tape. She wore loose men’s corduroys and a thick brown barn coat. She still had a few nice clothes in her closet. Cardigans and blouses, stifling under plastic. But she rarely needed more than what she grabbed off the coat hook in the mudroom.

Rat tat tat.

It was cowardly, she knew, but she slipped into her bedroom and sat very still on her bed. She looked down at her hands, unfamiliar too her, suddenly. Or rather, didn’t look like her own. They were like her mother’s hands now, transparent with blue-green veins raised and angry looking. On her finger, a thin gold ring with small gems, a diamond flanked by two emeralds. It was loose on her finger. She would have to wrap a piece of tape on it.

The door rattled a few more times then things went quiet. She moved to the window and peered through the blind. Dixon was standing in the drive, hands on his belt, looking around. He called her name once, twice; walked behind the shed, and around the chicken coop. It was quiet except for the crunch of his boots on the gravel. Even the coop was silent.

He went back to the front door before driving away. He had left his card with a cramped note: “Hi Frida, just checking on you. Call me when you see this.”

Moments later, she held the card in hands that, she noticed with worry, were shaky. She put it on the refrigerator, next to the ratty copy of the town’s library schedule. The only other thing on the fridge was an old photo. Herself, young, smiling so broadly. She tried smiling as she looked at it, her lips feeling stretched. In the photo, she was holding a baby. A man’s hand was on her shoulder, a cat sprawled on the sofa arm. She let her face go slack.

Perhaps she should have answered the last time the phone rang; should written a response to the last letter. Did she have stamps? She wasn’t sure. She would have to get some.

The whole notion of missing people seemed strange to Frida. That people would be noticed if they failed to be somewhere. You noticed people who were there, not people who weren’t, she thought abstractly.

She put her hand in her pocket. It was just an old screw. But she made a treasure of it.

She wrote a letter. Inadequate, she felt, but true as far as it went. “I’m sorry I worried you. I’m happy. It’s quiet. I like the quiet. Love, Frida” Once folded and sealed, the cheap, white number 10 envelope depressed her for some reason. She considered the trip to town for stamps, looking at the old Jeep doubtfully. Would it even start after sitting idle for so long? 

The letter was still on the kitchen table as she went to bed that night. She awoke early the next morning and puttered, as her mother would have called it. Make the tea, toast the bread, collect the eggs, fill the feeders. She turned the key in the Jeep which, predictably, wouldn’t start. She would have to charge the battery. The letter could wait.

She finished her breakfast and brought the crust and a handful of peanuts to the rabbit plate. And there it was. Softly gleaming. What was it? A pebble? A piece of dark glass? She picked it up then dropped it quickly with a clatter. Was it... a tooth?

Her tongue ran over her top row of teeth unconsciously. Her mouth was full of indifferent dentistry; enamel fillings when she could afford it, metal when she couldn’t. There was one darkly metal tooth a bit too far forward in her mouth. She never smiled as broadly after that dentist visit.

She picked it up again. Not a tooth but a filling. She didn’t drop it in her pocket but carried it, held between thumb and forefinger, back to the house. She dropped into a small mason jar with the screw, a few pennies, and two or three plastic buttons.

It was a gift. Either way, it was a gift from the birds.

That night she dreamed of teeth falling out of her mouth. She was biting into peanuts, shell and all, her teeth loosening with each bite. And when she awoke, her mouth tasted strange. Like metal, or dirt, or a rusty can. Not an original dream, she knew.

Dixon returned that afternoon. And again, she hid in her bedroom.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Frida” she hissed at herself as she squatted by the foot of the bed. But she couldn’t move. Her legs felt like lead. Her arms, wrapped around her knees felt like vises. “Get up, get up, get up,” she pleaded with her own stubborn limbs.

Rat tat tat.

“Frida? It’s Dixon. Are you in there? This is a welfare check. I’m coming in.”

She coiled tighter in on herself staring at the closed door. She imagined him breaking the door down with his shoulder but of course that was ridiculous. The door swung open with a gentle creak. It wasn’t locked, of course. Why should it be locked?

She heard his quiet footsteps in the other room. Quiet but deliberate. The sound of paper being unfolded. And then the footsteps, gentle still, coming closer. The bedroom door swung open. Slowly. Excruciatingly slowly. She stared at him. In his hand was the letter, opened and unfolded in his hand. He glanced around the room. Paused. And then he closed the door. Had he… not seen her? Had he looked above her, past her, through her?

She waited until, a few minutes later, she heard his car pull out of the driveway.

She could move now. Easily. Her legs were strong, her arms free and loose. She got up and stood. She took a few deep breaths. She felt the blood leave her ear drums, her heart slow down. She went to the kitchen. The letter was gone. She put on the kettle.

As she sipped her tea, she looked out onto the deck. A few peanuts were gone. A few were scattered onto the railing. In the plate, something gleamed. Not a faint gleam this time but bright. A glint of sunlight catching a sparkly, glittery point.

She put her tea down. Went slowly to the plate, a sense of quiet, complicated dread filling her ears. Her legs shook beneath her.

In the plate was a ring. A small band of gold. In the center, a diamond flanked by two emeralds.

                                                                  
CLOTILDE SEVERIN was a high school senior attending UAA through Alaska Middle College School.Clotilde Severin grew up in Anchorage, Alaska where she learned to love reading, writing, and dancing. Next year she will attend New York University's Tisch School of the Arts as a Dramatic Writing major.