Richard’s heart sank.
A girl skipping class, in an abandoned house in the remotest corner of the campus, alone, doing something with a pair of tweezers...
Richard’s mind, almost instinctively, jumped to the worst-case scenario.
He circled around to the back wall of the small house. There was a ventilation window there, its oiled paper covering torn with several cracks.
Richard bent down and peered through the longest tear.
On a wooden table in the center of the room, a piece of linen cloth was spread out.
Several items were arranged neatly on the cloth:
A scalpel, a pair of tweezers, three glass bottles, a coil of copper wire, and a brush.
And a dead bird.
The creature lay in the very center of the linen, already taken apart until only a skeleton and a few scattered clumps of feathers remained.
The girl sat upright at the table, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows.
Her hair was pinned up, revealing the startlingly pale nape of her neck.
Her left hand pressed down on the bird’s sternum while her right, holding the tweezers, was carefully separating a delicate rib from the remaining scraps of flesh.
The tension coiled tightly inside Richard slowly began to unwind.
In this room, what Lillian was doing was the exact opposite of what he had imagined.
She was taking a shattered corpse and, bone by bone, reassembling it to reflect how it looked in life.
Richard stood outside the tear for a moment longer before circling back to the front door of the house.
He raised his hand and knocked once on the doorframe with his knuckles.
The sounds from inside stopped abruptly.
"...Who is it?"
The girl’s voice carried through the wooden door, trembling slightly.
"It’s me, Richard."
The door opened a crack.
Lillian stood behind it, her body blocking the view of the room’s interior.
She had hastily pulled her cuffs down, but her fingers were still stained with traces of some chemical solution.
"May I come in?"
Lillian’s lips moved.
"...It’s not a pleasant sight."
"I’ve already seen it," Richard admitted. "The oiled paper on the back window is torn."
The girl’s eyelashes fluttered.
She looked down, conflicted for a moment, but finally turned to the side, making just enough room for him to enter.
"Please, come in."
Richard entered the house, pulling the door closed behind him but not locking it.
It was warmer inside the little house than it was outside.
The lamplight clearly illuminated the linen cloth and the half-disassembled bird.
The girl said nothing, merely watched him.
Her gray-blue eyes held a dejected look, as if she were awaiting a verdict.
"A wren?" he asked.
"I’ve never seen wrens on the path outside. Their nearest habitat should be the woods to the west."
"...You know about birds?"
Lillian looked at Richard, a little incredulous.
She had mentally rehearsed scenes of being questioned and met with disgust countless times, but she’d never rehearsed someone actually talking to her about her work.
"I found it at the edge of the woods yesterday." Lillian’s voice was still quiet.
"It flew into something. The neck was broken, but the body was still mostly intact."
Richard walked to the table and noticed a small detail.
The table was beyond merely clean and tidy.
It had been organized with a strict, methodical precision. The scalpel and tweezers were laid side by side, the distance between their handles exactly two fingers’ width, not a millimeter off.
The glass bottles were arranged in an isosceles triangle, the threads on their caps all aligned, facing the side where Lillian was sitting.
Richard made a mental note of this, casually striking up a conversation.
"Did you mix this solution yourself?"
"Three parts naphtha, one part limewater," the girl answered quickly, a bit shyly.
"For oilier birds, you have to add distilled water to dilute it, otherwise the skin turns yellow."
"How long have you been doing this?" Richard continued.
"...A few years now. Since middle school."
He glanced around the small house.
In the corner was a large wooden crate. From his angle, he could see several neat rows of glass jars inside.
The top row was birds.
Sparrows, titmice, one that looked like a bullfinch, and a small bird he couldn’t name, whose wing bones were longer than its body.
The pose of every skeleton was different.
Some were posed with wings spread in flight, others curled up as if sleeping.
It wasn’t just birds; all sorts of small animals were there.
Richard crouched in front of the crate, examining them row by row.
A field mouse gnawing, a shrew climbing, a hedgehog curled, a frog leaping, a snake slithering, a mole digging...
Each animal was forever frozen in its most vibrant moment of life.
"You found all of these?" he asked.
"They were already dead," Lillian answered quickly, as if terrified he would get the wrong idea.
"I don’t kill them. I only collect the ones that are already dead.
The ones on the roadside, in the woods, washed up on the riverbank... I find the most in winter. Birds that freeze to death just fall out of the trees."
Richard offered no judgment.
He glanced at the crate again, his gaze stopping on the top row.
There was a titmouse there, whose pose was different from all the other small animals.
The other specimens were flying, leaping, gnawing, climbing.
But that titmouse was perched on a dead twig, its head tilted slightly to one side as if listening to something.
Lillian’s gaze followed his.
"...That was the first one. I found it on my windowsill the winter I was twelve. It had frozen to death."
She walked over, crouched down, and gently touched the glass of the jar, right where the titmouse was.
"Its head was already tilted like that when it died. I didn’t change it."
"But for the ones after, you changed their poses."
"Mhm."
"Why?"
"Because they don’t look good when they die."
Lillian looked down.
"Birds that freeze to death curl up, their claws clenched tight.
Hedgehogs hit by cars are flattened out. Drowned field mice are soaked through and look half the size they were when they were alive."
She looked up at Richard.
"So I put them back the way they were."
Richard crouched down across from her.
"And after you put them back?"
"Then they’re here to stay."
Lillian looked down at the neat rows of glass jars.
"They won’t rot, they won’t fall apart, they won’t be blown away by the wind."
She reached out and pushed the crate’s lid up a little more, letting in more light.
"I come by often to see them. I’ll sit for a while, just to make sure they’re still here."
"Why did you come here in the first place?" Lillian suddenly asked.
Richard had been about to make up some excuse.
But Lillian had already laid everything bare for him to see.
"I was looking for a place where no one would think to look for me," he said, the words surprising even himself.
Lillian raised her eyes.
"I have a room on the third floor of the library."
"But someone knows that room is mine."
Richard didn’t say who that "someone" was.
And Lillian didn’t ask.
She pulled the linen cloth on the table toward her, clearing a space on the right side of the tabletop.
"Then you can use this table. As long as you don’t mind having someone stripping bones on the other side."
Richard looked at the empty space she had cleared.
The tabletop wasn’t large. It would be a bit of a squeeze with both of their things, but it was enough.
"Of course I don’t mind."
He sat down across from Lillian.
Lillian picked up the tweezers again.
She hesitated, clearly debating whether to continue her work in front of Richard.
Finally, the tip of the tweezers reached into the wren’s chest cavity and clamped onto a rib that had yet to be cleaned.
Her movements were a little slower than before, likely because another pair of eyes was watching.
Richard took a sheet of scratch paper and a pencil from his bag and spread them out in the empty space on the table.
He lowered his head and began to write.
The room fell silent, the flame of the Oil Lamp flickering now and then.
The sound of the tweezers against bone was very faint, like someone striking a tiny bell.
About twenty minutes later, Lillian placed the wren’s last rib into a bottle of clean water.
She flexed her fingers, wiped the tweezers and scalpel clean one by one, and placed them back in a tin cookie box.
The position of each tool she put away was precise down to the millimeter.
"That’s all for today. I have to wait for the bones to soak long enough before I can continue."
Richard looked up from his paper.
"How many times a week do you come here?"
"It depends. When I’m working on a specimen, I come every day. If not, then two or three times a week."
She placed the glass bottle in a small, separate compartment next to the wooden crate.
"I come more often in the winter. More things die in the winter."
Richard stood up and pushed his chair back to the table.
"What about the key?"
Lillian pulled a small brass key from her shirt pocket and dangled it in the lamplight.
"You can lock the door from the inside, but you need this to lock it from the outside."
She thought for a moment.
"If you get here first, don’t lock the door. When I get here, if I see the door is unlocked, I’ll know you’re inside.
If I get here first, I’ll lock it from the inside. You can just knock."
"We should set a rhythm for the knock," she added. "So I don’t mistake you for someone else."
"Two short, one long," said Richard.
Lillian nodded and put the key back in her pocket.
"Okay."
Richard stood on his side of the table, looking at Lillian opposite him.
He raised his hand and pressed the silver ring on his chest through his shirt.
The dimmed beacon flared, its flame leaping just a little higher.
Lillian’s eyes widened.
’The light hadn’t gone out. It was just being blocked.’
Richard drew that wisp of energy back in.
He didn’t explain what the ring was, where it came from, or why he wore it.
He was simply letting the girl know that he was alright.
After they both finished packing up, they left the small house, one after the other.
The cold air from outside rushed in, and the Oil Lamp’s flame lurched sideways.
The sky was completely dark now. The boxwood hedges in the garden had become a swath of blurry shadows.
At the garden entrance, the path split in two.
The left path led to the main gate, the right to a side gate.
Lillian paused at the fork.
"Richard."
"Hm?"
She stood in the twilight, her gray-blue eyes looking pale and faint in the last dregs of daylight.
"Just now... thank you for letting me know you’re okay."
Richard stuck his hands in his jacket pockets.
"You didn’t ask what it was."
Lillian smiled, a smile as faint and pale as her eyes.
"I’m not stupid. I know what to ask and what not to ask."
"See you next week."
"See you next week."
The girl turned and walked down the path to the right.
Richard stood at the fork, watching her back for a moment.
After a dozen steps or so, her figure was completely swallowed by the shadows of the boxwood hedges.
Richard turned and walked to the left.

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