This Week’s Story: “The Promise,” by Rachel Yoder
Birdie is eight years old. Her parents are away in another state, visiting some old friends, fellow-Mennonites they volunteered with in Africa, and Birdie has been left with her aunts and her grandmother. She moves from room to room, exploring or watching her aunts cook or work in the garden, trying to make sense of the world around her. She wants to be an astronaut or a ballerina, wants to live in a city and go to art museums every day. Instead of putting down roots, the way the rest of the family has, Birdie, true to her name, hopes to grow wings and soar. One night, her aunt Miriam tells her a story about the Devil and a typewriter, and, ultimately, about the potential price of trying to choose one’s own destiny. Birdie wakes up the next morning feverish and changed. It is, as Yoder, the author of the novel “Nightbitch,” says in the accompanying Q. & A., the end of an era for Birdie, and perhaps the beginning of a new one.
— Deborah Treisman, fiction editor
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