A young couple beset by “an anxious ambivalence” about their future. The faux New England Connected Cape where they are temporarily housed. A dying blackbird. Stasis, paralysis, superstition, longing. “Just Passing Through,” winner of the Inaugural Commonweal Prize for Short Fiction, is a marvelously constructed tale, Escher-like in its emotional complexity as well as its disorienting realism. A story that wittily, and disturbingly, illustrates the moment even as it evokes a timeless sense of dread. What a pleasure to discover a writer who so relishes detail and voice, who can wield irony not to mock or condemn a character, but to pierce the reader’s heart. —Alice McDermott

I.

“I think there’s a bird in the house.”

Ryan looked up from dinner, flashed his eyes towards the window, and said, “What’s your evidence?”

“I heard something in the big house. Flapping?”

“Are you sure it’s not just outside? On the roof, maybe?”

Sophie knew they were surrounded by birds. Rather, they were surrounded by woods, and it was early spring, and the woods were full of birds.

The house was set in a clearing, nearly invisible from the road. Around it: birches, ashes, beeches, oaks. The odd maple. It was a dense, brown, poking, sticking forest that for most of the year was just bare branches. Apparently it used to snow here, plentifully; a painting in the dining room showed the house, white on a field of white, its lines figured in vague pale blue and its roof, new cedar shingles, a blaze of scarlet. From five feet back it was a red square on white. It could have been anything.

Now there was no snow, or none (at least) that stayed more than a day; and the shingles of the roof had weathered to gray, and the house, a bone-white bow-roofed cape, sat securely like an egg in the nest of the woods.

II.

Sophie and Ryan had been renting the house since November. It was the nicest house they’d ever lived in and also far nicer than anything they might one day purchase themselves. It was all downhill from here.

Sophie taught middle-school math. Ryan was a social worker. They had moved up from the city for jobs that offered loan relief and the joys of rural living. Now it was March, and the joys seemed hard-packed and dormant under frost.

Ryan was a dormant historian. In another life, he would have been working on a dissertation in some dry branch of the past, but we can’t always have what we want, can we? Ryan had thrown himself into architectural history after a free walking tour in the city a few years back, and described to Sophie how their house—the house, their current rental—was a New England Connected Cape, the kind where farmers could tend their families and livestock all winter long without stepping foot outside. A Connected Cape was all hallways and breezeways and doorways: big house, little house, back house, barn, no reason to venture out into the snow.

“What snow?” Sophie asked.

This house was a replica, in miniature, built in the early aughts, and its connected parts terminated in a spindly one-car garage instead of an echoing barn. And, thought Sophie, instead of a milk cow and a hitch of horses, and probably some barn cats and a flock of laying hens, and perhaps a goat or a herding dog, the only animal in all of these connected structures (other than her and Ryan) was a bird.

She was sure of it.

III.

Sophie and Ryan were technically house-sitting, which is how they could afford to rent the house. The owner, a widower, once a lawyer, was trying on another life in New Mexico for a year.

Every night, they went to sleep in the Early American four-poster where the widower’s wife had expired.

“This house is too new to be haunted,” Sophie had said drowsily on their first night in the house.

“Not with an attitude like that, it’s not.”

Ryan said this last with a yawn, unconcerned. He enjoyed the concept of superstition, without really believing.

IV.

Sophie and Ryan rarely left the small part of the house (the “ell,” Ryan insisted on calling it), a low rectangle consisting of: mudroom, kitchen, dining room, bathroom, and master bedroom. There was also a door down to the basement, where Ryan had optimistically built a workbench for woodworking projects over Christmas. He had not been down there since, so it seemed like the bench was the woodworking project. A snake, eating its tail, its own reward.

The rest of the house, kept closed off to save on the heating bill, lived under the tall two-story bow roof (had been red, now was gray, looked like an egg in the nest of the woods). It consisted of: hallway, parlor, living room, stairwell, two upstairs bedrooms, and one upstairs bathroom.

Sophie enjoyed making a good list. That one was for cleaning. She cleaned the ell weekly and the rest rarely.

A robust hearth dominated the living room. The only time Ryan and Sophie had mustered the gumption to source, cut, kindle, and burn wood in it was when a wet nor’easter took out the power for a few days, and they had to heat their meals in the ashes, wrapped in tinfoil, like camping.

Eating hot pockets out of tinfoil before the fire, listening to the wind sough through the naked branches, backs propped against the big modern sectional couch (linen; a linen sectional couch, who had that?), felt like something one might do in one’s own home. They were flouting the unspoken straight-backed conscientious care of mere sitters in this house.

V.

Upon moving in, Sophie had found herself exploring the two upstairs bedrooms. Maybe bedroom wasn’t the correct label; unfinished crawlspaces under the eaves were neatly blocked off with plywood in each room, and the white carpet bore the footprints of boxes and nothing else. The walls were pristine, no puncture wounds—twenty years and no pictures hung. Nobody had ever gone to bed in these rooms, except maybe the dead wife’s ghost.

Like the widower and his family, Sophie and Ryan used the upstairs rooms for storage only: bikes leaning up against the wall for the winter, empty suitcases, boxes of detritus and old blue-book exams from undergrad, kept for the comments in the margins. “Relics of a bygone era,” Ryan said lovingly. By the time they’d finished their graduate degrees, everything had become digital.

One of the upstairs rooms had a window that was turned ninety degrees, parallel to the steep roofline; Ryan explained that this was a witch window, so turned to keep hypothetical witches from flying into one’s house. Or at least that’s what the legends said. More likely they were just repurposed from other parts of the house as structures grew, and the witch story was tacked on sometime in the 1970s when the bicentennial mania for colonial things inspired architects to start including them again.

“Which is a bit silly, to cut a special hole on the diagonal just to fit in a regular rectangular window, at an angle. It’s wrong,” Ryan frowned.

“It’s a rhombus,” said Sophie, tilting her head this way and that to take in the witch window’s asymmetry, its proportions. This window was, against all statistical odds, built for witches; it would have gaped and overflowed in a standard frame.

VI.

New England Connected Capes fell out of favor, went the way of the witch window, so to speak, because of two factors. Firstly, fire; as early as the seventeenth century (Ryan delivered, stentorian, pacing in the kitchen, absorbed in the dimension wherein he was a sexy professor), towns placed prohibitions on connecting buildings thusly. The hallways and ells and breezeways caused fire to spread rapidly, wiping out whole families as they slept. The hayloft shared an airspace with the cookstove with the fireplace with the lanterns with the sleeping people, many old and many young. Families were bigger, and more intergenerational, then.

The modern family doesn’t need as many rooms. People today put their parents in nursing homes, not spare rooms. They didn’t have eleventy children named things like Flee-Fornication and Jemima and Cotton. If you farmed anymore you needed a feedlot and industrial milking parlors, not a barn attached to your house (Ryan said, as if he knew any farmers). Between the fire danger and the dissolution of the extended family unit, the Connected Cape was obsolete. A relic. He said this lovingly.

Sophie pointed out (as had become her habit) that there was no snow to need shelter from, either.

This house, then, was the Barbie dreamhouse version of a Connected Cape, smaller and tighter and smelling of paint rather than manure. It had thermostats and dimmable lights in every room.

VII.

Sophie sometimes felt guilty that they never used the big house under the bow roof. It was just an empty shell next door, full of all that clean, light space, those immaculate upstairs rooms, and no one to enjoy it. They hadn’t had any guests, yet.

Once, unpacking a box upstairs, Sophie thought about the number of children this house might accommodate. The widower had an undisclosed number of sons who had long since flown the nest by the time he’d constructed his cape-in-miniature, but theoretically there was space for two, maybe three.

Sophie and Ryan felt an anxious ambivalence towards the concept of children. They liked the idea, in theory, but lacked the requisite imagination to believe in a world where they could afford to house them. This house would be perfect for children, but in eight months they would leave and who knew where they would live thereafter.

The precarity of their present situation precluded even getting a pet. This was a recurring topic of debate, but they both knew it was rhetorical only.

Sophie wondered if feral birds that got into your house could be tamed, could be coaxed to eat out of your hand or perch on your shoulder.

VIII.

Back in the city, Sophie and Ryan had had friends, young couples like themselves, who adopted shelter dogs and gave birth despite the distressing things happening all around them. Perhaps this was to spite the things happening around them, Sophie sometimes thought. In the city there were babies and small, furry quadrupeds in rental basements and off-grid urban tiny homes who were cuddled and nurtured just fine. This did not change her deep-seated preemptive stress at the thought of bringing a child (or even a cat) into a world where she was just passing through.

She and Ryan rarely spoke of marriage. It wasn’t the cost so much as the feeling that married people ought to have a foothold already carved, and both of them were still scrabbling.

Sophie often found herself thinking, at an inappropriate volume for thoughts, WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR? Were they going to let the rest of their lives go by, watching braver souls walk the dogs they might have had?

It had been one day since Sophie had heard the flapping in the big house, and she had assiduously resisted the temptation to open the connecting door, see what the truth was. It had been silent all night, all morning. Now she was home from work, drinking tea and waiting for Ryan to pull in and not going into the big house. She was standing in the hall, watching the door to the big house.

There was a world, thought Sophie, where it was all okay. Where she and Ryan lived in this house for good, and could plant garden beds for herbs and vegetables between the house and the woods. In this world there would be snow and a soft creature to run in it. They might have different conversations about children and marriage, long ethical ones rather than short practical ones. In this world there was no bird in the house; it had been free all along, merely alighting on the ridge of the roof to rest before continuing its preordained travels.

IX.

That night Sophie brought up the bird again.

“Did you go look for it?” Ryan wanted to know.

“What would I do if there was a bird, hmm?” Sophie countered, defiantly. “I don’t want to scare it. But I wouldn’t know what to do with it, if I found it. We need a plan.”

“I don’t think there’s a bird.” Who’s this “we”?

“What’s your evidence?” Sophie bit down a smug little smile. She was feeling unaccountably peevish.

“Well, in many cultures, a bird in your house is a bad omen. Death in the family, I think. Do you want a death in the family?” He was teasing her.

“That’s not evidence.”

“‘Only those things the heart believes are true,’” he quoted, without explanation, and went back to his book.

X.

The next morning in the predawn blackness, Sophie grabbed Ryan’s down jacket off the hook in the mudroom on her way out the door by mistake. Ryan was still eating breakfast inside; his day started a full two hours after hers. She shrugged into the coat and it took her a moment to register—indeed, she was halfway zipped up—that this coat was Ryan’s spring-weight Patagonia, not hers. The shoulders were slightly too wide, the chest slightly too tight, but otherwise she’d never have known.

Sophie felt a shocking shudder (revulsion?) that passed as soon as it entered, but its taste lingered long after she had parked in the staff lot. She watched her breath mist in the cold—her commute too short for the car to heat—and thought that maybe she feared turning into Ryan, becoming more like him and less herself with each passing day.

They were other halves, each but one side of an argument over Schrödinger’s bird, and neither had done a thing about it, so who was she to judge?

XI.

The afternoon of the jacket incident, Sophie arrived home at her customary time. It was still light outside. Casually, lightly, she figured it was time to do something about it. She marched through the ell, through the door into the big house, into a gust of cold; or, relative cold, a comfortable fifty with no human intervention, thanks to the oil burner.

It was silent.

The cathedral ceiling above the entryway—anachronistic, but nice—was lit with watery late-afternoon sun. Not a bird to be seen, not a shadow. She felt a tension leaving her shoulders, by degrees. Her heart slowed its fluttering, which she hadn’t noticed before now.

Sophie looked down. Snow.

Flecks of white dotted the wide pine floors. First she followed them with her eyes. They speckled the hall into the parlor. They spotted the stairs, leading up into brightness. Snow was impossible; Sophie wondered if she had spilled bleach last time she cleaned in the big house (before Christmas, she remembered) but she and Ryan didn’t even own bleach.

It wasn’t snow. It didn’t snow here anymore, not enough to stay more than a day. The snow was bird shit, and a panic seized Sophie. She flew back into the ell, slamming the door with a force that she didn’t know she had in her. Sophie was a math teacher. She liked a good list. She wasn’t prone to flights of imagination, to hyperventilating on her kitchen floor over the thought of a bird in the house, but we can’t always be who we are, can we?

Her first thought, nonsensically, was the witch window. The bad-omen bird, bearing a curse of promised death, must have found a way in around whatever wards the witch window granted. To check if the witch window was open, though, she would have to go back into the big house.

“Overreacting,” she chastised herself, taking deep, regulating breaths the way she taught her students to when their emotions or the crushing state of the earth got the better of them.

What was she afraid of? What could a bird—a bird who shit snowflakes, something small that ate bugs—do to her? Did she fear it flying at her in a rage, pecking out her eyes? Or was the tense waiting alone, bracing for an explosion of sound and feathers and fear, enough to coil every tendon in her body?

When her pulse was nearly normal, Sophie armed herself with a broom and a bucket, having no other herding tools, and returned to the big house. She crept up the stairs, alert, mentally running through a list of entry points, the open windows to close.

The witch window was shut tight. The bathroom window was shut tight. The windows in the second spare bedroom were shut tight. The plywood panels, sealing off the crawlspaces under the eaves, were screwed down as tightly and as thoroughly as ever. The long panes lighting the landing could not be opened even if one tried.

Sophie felt somewhat better, having eliminated half of all available weaknesses.

Downstairs: the small parlor’s windows were both locked and shuttered from within. The front door was sealed between storm door and screen door, blocked off even to humans, never mind birds; everyone just used the back door, in the ell. Sophie felt the breath of the living room cool on the back of her neck.

But every window here, too—and there were many, south-facing—was dogged down tight.

The trail of shit had fallen all around this room, leaving no corner unspattered. Sophie felt foolish, standing in the middle of the room with her bucket and broom, seeking a quarry that possibly didn’t exist. The bird, except for its shit, was nothing but a ghost, a witch, a witch’s ghost.

Sophie sank onto the linen couch. If a bird got into your house, and then got itself out, did the bad omen still hold? Was the release of the bird, a reward for its cleverness and survival, instead a happy portent? The widower would decide to live out his days in New Mexico and give Ryan and Sophie first refusal on the house. They would repaint the walls and buy bookcases, and fill those bookcases with secondhand volumes on gardening and poetry. They would read them, looking south, a fire blazing behind them, as snow fell. A soft creature (she didn’t care what kind; maybe a child, even) would be snoring softly in its bed, and she would feel so very safe in this clean, bright place.

Sophie swept her eyes along the baseboards, reassuring herself that no bird could hide in here. The long-legged furniture left nothing to the imagination, no shadows to conceal any unknown species of terrors. She was safe, every stone overturned; every stone, that is, except for the linen couch.

XII.

Sophie shrank her feet up onto the couch, feeling her spine start to curve into a cower, knowing with full certainty that the bird was hidden underneath. She had eliminated every other possibility; this was not the kind of world where entrapped birds miraculously burst free to rejoin their flocks.

This was the kind of world where they died, starving and alone, under some person’s couch.

What was she afraid of?

Deliberately, Sophie rose, padded silently (why was she sneaking in her own home?) to an arm, and slid the couch out. Like a stage curtain, seen from the balcony, the scene opened on the body of a small blackbird, eyes mercifully shut, still and silent.

There really was nothing to fear. Sophie gazed at the bird, noticed how its wings were folded behind it in the approximation of a heart. Its beak narrowed to the tiniest point imaginable. Its feathers held every shade of an oil slick, with the gentlest rime of white at the edges. It was beautiful, and death was coming (she knew it).

XIII.

This time Sophie did not run. She walked, deliberately, the breath of the big house on the back of her neck again, back into the ell and shut the door, resigned. She heard the broom, leaned haphazardly against a wall, clatter to the ground in the empty shell. There was no sense in going back for it.

When Ryan got home she would ask him to help her. He would hold the bucket and she would gently sweep the little bird inside, and they would take it out to the sharp brown woods and lay it down for nature to take its time.

This reminded her that it was past time for Ryan to be home. The dark outside was falling and she should have started dinner already. A check of the clock confirmed her suspicion, and Sophie tried to quell the panic that was, once more, boiling just below the surface of her conscious mind.

She’d call him.

Sophie fetched her phone from her pocket and noticed, but only halfway, that her hand was trembling. She dialed Ryan’s number.

It rang. It rang. It rang.

And it rang.