Say Anarcha by J. C. Hallman

Author:J. C. Hallman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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Dr. Brown-Séquard disappeared. He did not say goodbye, did not even wave. For a time, it seemed that everyone forgot Anarcha and Delia and the animals in the Egyptian Building basement. Dr. Charles Bell Gibson, the janitor and the janitor’s wife, and the nurses in the wards had long since stopped visiting the basement due to the smell and the noise and the rumors. Anarcha and Delia might have slipped out into the city, might have run away, though of course Anarcha wouldn’t have been running at all but limping with her cane. But she did not run away, because how far could a crippled woman get, with a girl to slow her down, and rewards printed in the paper, and dogs trained to track them? Anyway, she couldn’t leave the animals trapped in their cages, to die. After a few days, when it was clear that Dr. Brown-Séquard was not going to return and there would be no more money for food for the animals or for Anarcha and Delia, she decided to release the animals—not the chickens, as they could eat the chickens, and not the rabbits or the raccoon for the same reason, and though she’d eaten many strange dead animals in the woods she wouldn’t eat a cat or a dog, the kind of animal that would lick your hand.

She would release the animals slowly, otherwise it might be noticed. After a week, she carried the ravens’ cage outside and opened its latch, and one raven hopped up on top of the wooden lattice and waited for the other to hop up as well, and then they took to the air and flew off together south, toward the James River, just as if they hadn’t been locked in a cage in a basement for five months.

Next, she released the magpies, and the single jay that remained, and what was left of the pigeons, and she and Delia watched the birds ascend to freedom in bursts of feathers and sometimes a squawk or a coo. For the remainder of the animals, she waited until nighttime. She started with the cats—there were many cats—and she released them not outside but near the open door, and the cats were hesitant and weak and hissed when she picked up their cages, and when the latch was released and the door of the cage was open it took them a while to sniff the free air and tiptoe with careful, silent steps to the doorway, and then suddenly they slipped out into the night as though they had effected their own escape. She released one dog, which ran off abruptly toward the baying of other dogs far off in the city, and she planned to release the other dog the following night.

That day, however, a man in a crisp uniform entered the basement.

He was clean-shaven, like Dr. Sims, not shaggy on the neck like Dr. Gibson and Dr. Brown-Séquard. He had a limp and a cane, as Anarcha did.

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