Frank Miller woke up on a Tuesday with a headache that felt like someone was driving a nail into his temple. He lay on the mattress on the floor of his trailer and stared at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like Florida and wondered why he had named it Florida. He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember most things anymore.

The trailer was in Canton, Ohio, a town that used to make steel and now made nothing. The factory had closed in 2005, and Frank had been laid off the same day. Twenty years later, he was still waiting for a call back that would never come.

He got up, made coffee on the hot plate, and drank it black. The coffee was burnt. Everything was burnt in Canton.

At eleven, he put on his coat and went outside. The sky was grey, the kind of grey that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the sky giving up. Frank walked down the cracked sidewalk past trailers that had been trailers for thirty years and were now just places where people lived until they died.

He found the bird in the parking lot of the abandoned factory.

It was white--completely white, every feather the colour of fresh snow, which was impossible in Canton where everything was the colour of rust and ash. The bird was lying on its side, one wing bent, its black eyes half-open. Frank knelt down and examined it. It was a hawk, or something like a hawk, too big to be a juvenile and too small to be an adult. It might have been injured in a collision with one of the factory's broken windows.

Frank didn't have anything to give it. He had coffee and a half-eaten sandwich and a pack of cigarettes. He broke off a piece of the sandwich and held it out. The bird didn't move. Frank put the bread on the ground and stood back. The bird ate it.

That was how it started.

Frank named it Shadow because it was white but it followed him everywhere, and white things don't follow people. They fly away. But Shadow didn't fly away. It sat on the bumper of Frank's truck and watched him with those black eyes and waited for him to come back from wherever he was going.

Frank went to the factory every day. He tore out copper wire and sold it to the scrap yard for two dollars a pound. Shadow came with him, perched on the truck's roof, watching the broken windows and the collapsed roof and the rusted machinery that had once made steel and now made nothing.

After a week, Shadow started following Frank around the factory like a dog. It would fly ahead of him, land on a piece of machinery, wait for him to catch up, then fly ahead again. Frank talked to it sometimes. He talked to it about the factory, about the steel, about the men who had worked here for thirty years and ended up like him, sitting in trailers with water stains on the ceiling.

Shadow never answered. It just listened.

By the second week, Shadow had recovered. It was flying again, short distances at first, circling the truck, landing on Frank's shoulder. Frank liked the weight of it on his arm, the sharp talons gripping his sleeve, the intelligence in those black eyes. Shadow was the first thing in ten years that had looked at Frank like he was someone.

The third week, Shadow started hunting.

It was small prey--mice, sparrows, the occasional rat. But Frank watched it dive from the factory's broken roof, wings tucked, body a white arrow aimed at the ground, and he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. Pride. This bird was his. It chose him. It followed him. In a town where nothing mattered and nobody cared, Shadow mattered and Shadow cared and Shadow chose Frank Miller.

He should have been more careful.

The fight at the bar cost him forty dollars. Two broken ribs on his left hand. A cut above his right eye that needed three stitches. Maria Santos, his neighbour, drove him home in her Honda and held an ice pack to his face while he swore in Spanish that he would never go back to that bar.

"Frank," she said. "You don't have to go."

"I have to," he said. "It's all I got."

She didn't answer. She just held the ice pack and looked at him with eyes that were too kind for her own good.

When she left, Frank sat on the edge of his mattress and looked at Shadow. The bird was on the windowsill, watching him. Frank picked up a bottle from the floor and threw it at the window. It shattered against the glass, and Shadow flew to the corner of the room and didn't come back.

Frank sat on the floor and cried. He didn't know why he was crying. He just was.

The next morning, Shadow was gone.

Frank looked for it everywhere. The factory, the scrap yard, the bar, the trailer park. Nothing. No white feathers, no shadow on the sky, no black eyes watching him from the broken windows. He told himself he didn't care. He told himself it was just a bird. He told himself a lot of things that morning.

He went to the factory and tore out copper wire and sold it for two dollars a pound. He came home and drank coffee and watched the grey sky and waited for tomorrow.

Three days later, he found Shadow's feathers on his windowsill.

One feather, then two, then three. White feathers, scattered across the cracked glass like something out of a dream. Frank picked them up and held them in his palm. They were soft and warm and real. He put them in his pocket and went to the factory.

He came home that night and found more feathers. On the mattress. On the floor. On the hot plate where he kept his coffee. They were everywhere, white against the grey, and Frank understood that Shadow was trying to tell him something. He just didn't know what.

He drank that night. And the next night. And the night after that. The bottles lined up on the floor of the trailer like soldiers, and Frank drank them in the order he had bought them, which was the order he had stopped caring about.

Shadow came back on the seventh night.

It landed on the windowsill and looked at Frank, and Frank looked at Shadow, and they both knew what had happened. Frank didn't deny it. He didn't have to. Shadow knew, and that was enough.

What Frank did that night, he never explained to anyone. The official story, if there had been an official story, would have been an accident. A drunk man, a broken bottle, a dog that got in the way. But there was no official story. There was only Frank, and Shadow, and the sound of a dog dying in a trailer in Canton, Ohio.

In the morning, Frank buried Old Yellow in the patch of dirt behind the trailer. It wasn't much of a grave. He marked it with a piece of rebar and wrote OLD YELLOW on it in marker. He stood there for a while, looking at the grave, and then he went inside and made coffee.

The coffee was burnt.

After that, things got worse.

Frank started seeing things. Not hallucinations--he would not have called them that. He called them reminders. Old Yellow's eyes, watching him from the corner of the room. The sound of claws on the floor at night. The smell of wet dog in a trailer that had never smelled of anything.

He stopped going to the factory. He stopped going to the bar. He sat in the trailer and drank and waited and watched the feathers accumulate on the windowsill until they formed a white carpet that covered every inch of glass.

Maria came to check on him on the tenth day. She found the door unlocked and the trailer filled with white feathers and Frank sitting on the floor, surrounded by empty bottles, his eyes wide and unblinking.

"Frank," she said. "What happened?"

He looked at her and she saw Old Yellow's eyes in his face, and she understood why the village children whispered, and why the gamekeepers shook their heads, and why the moors remember.

"I didn't mean to," he said. And that was the truth of it, wasn't it? He hadn't meant to. He had just been drunk, and angry, and tired, and Old Yellow had been in the way.

That was always the way.

He died three days later. Alcohol poisoning, the coroner said. His body was found on the mattress, surrounded by white feathers, his face frozen in an expression that the coroner described as "surprised."

Maria cleaned out the trailer. She found a small pile of ashes in the abandoned factory's furnace--a bird, white and small, burned beyond recognition. She took the ashes to the Ohio River and scattered them in the current, and they disappeared into the brown water like everything else in Canton.

The town kept making nothing. The factory kept being broken. The sky kept being grey. And on certain nights, when the wind blew from the west, people in the trailer park swore they could hear a dog barking, calling out a name that no one dared to speak.

--- OTMES Code: OTMES-v2-BSE-03-C117E1-E8.5-M4-T270-455C Literary Potential E: 8.5 | Dominant Mode: M4 (Hatred/Despair) | Direction: 270° (Zero Redemption)