A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: T. Kingfishe
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Genre: Sisters Fiction
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
- Publish Date: March 28, 2023
There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother’s house.
As omens go, it doesn’t get much more obvious than that. This was a
black vulture, not a turkey vulture, but that’s about as much as I could tell
you. I have a biology degree, but it’s in bugs, not birds. The only reason that
I knew that much was because the identification key for vultures in North
America is extremely straightforward. Does it have a black head? It’s a
black vulture. Does it have a red head? It’s a turkey vulture. This works
unless you’re in the Southwest, where you have to add: Is it the size of a
small fighter jet? It’s a California condor.
We have very few condors in North Carolina.
“I bet you have some amazing feather mites,” I told the vulture, opening
the car door. The vulture tilted its head and considered this, or me, or my
aging Subaru.
I took out my phone and got several glamour shots of the bird. When I
tried to upload one to the internet, however, my phone informed me that it
had one-tenth of a bar and my GPS conked out completely.
Ah yes. That, at least, hadn’t changed.
My mother lived on Lammergeier Lane, which made the vulture even
more appropriate, although we don’t have Lammergeiers—“bearded
vultures”—in North Carolina either. They’re a large species of vulture from
Africa and Eurasia that eats bones. Why would you name a private road
after a bone-eating vulture from a different continent? I looked it up one
day when I was bored, and discovered that the developer of the subdivision
had been obsessed with birds. His first project had been Accipiter Lane,
then Brambling Court, then Cardinal Street, and so on through the alphabet
until Whip-poor-will Way, whereupon he died, presumably so that he would
not have to come up with a bird for X. (The correct answer is Xantus’s
murrelet, but I admit it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)
Lammergeier Lane was a type of subdivision that we have all over the
South, although I don’t know if they’ve migrated out to other areas. You’ll
be driving along a rural road, surrounded by trees, cow pastures, and the
occasional business that sells firewood, propane, and hydraulic repairs.
Then you’ll see a dilapidated trailer and a sign for a private drive. You turn
onto the drive and suddenly there are a dozen cookie-cutter houses lining
the street, all with neat lawns. The road either terminates in a cul-de-sac or
links up to another, even more rural road.
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