The town of Tome is remembered in two different lights depending on its source, ask Francesca Meadows and it’s the land of her adolescent 4-story summer home—privy to fond memories of “harmless” pranks, tan lines, teenage secrets, and her previously owned, newly revamped Manor. Ask Bella and it’s a town that has not escaped her psyche ever since she was 16 years old. It is a cesspool of guilt, shame, and fear that has been festering deeply into her life—seeping rot that has long ruined her ability to look at herself in the mirror. Though accountability is a route often not taken, Francesca Meadows has never heard of it—both teenage and adult. Funneled through a summer journal written by a teenage Bella fifteen years prior, layered glimpses of the teenage Lady Macbeth Meadows are given. Plucked from the caravan park, Bella spent her summer in the Meadows Manor with a newly blossomed, albeit faux, summer friendship riddled in double meanings, and back-handed compliments. One that met its punctuated demise on the night of the first Midnight Feast. It is through the fragmented narration between modern day perspectives and predated summer journal that the moral divide is not only embodied within these two women, but emphasized and dealt with in varying forms. While the two experienced the summer fifteen-years prior together, both women have become reinvented versions of who they once were. Francesca, and all her plastic self-righteousness, has only boldened to a hotel owner fueled by charged crystals, “authentic” journaling, and blissful denial of the lives she’s ruined. Bella—really named Alison—has reimagined her adult self wholeheartedly, in name especially, in order to summon the courage needed to return to Tome; to set things right. Foley examines the two antitheses through developed themes of guilt, accountability—and its evasion—self-reflection and if either have truly repented, or if The Birds need to show them how.

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            Underneath the guise of a smalltown myth, The Birds manage to heal the town of Tome by ridding those who have not atoned for their sins. They are not enforcers in the open, but phantoms in the periphery—unsettling their targets with whispers, shadows, literal birds, and inexplicable disturbances until the guilty begin to question their own sanity. In a visitation to her Grandfa, Francesca notes, “[Grandfa] had one particular obsession. ‘You must keep the birds happy,’ he kept saying. ‘Don’t upset the birds.’ Over and over like that. Such a shame: he once had such a great mind. ‘Yes, Granfa,’ I told him. Poor old thing. Clearly he’d gone a bit gaga, started believing in local nonsense. But then he sat up in bed and grabbed hold of my wrist so hard it hurt. ‘You must not upset the birds. Do you understand?’” (Foley 34). The Birds sightings themselves are rare enough for annual summer guests to label them “local nonsense” while locals themselves are aware enough to know they are anything but. Jake, a local farmboy/Bella’s summer love, countered young Francesca’s understanding of The Birds: “[Francesca]’s wrong about the Birds though, he said then. They’re real. They just act on the big stuff. You don’t get big crimes happening round here that often. Last time was maybe five years ago? Local guy sneaking up on girls at night, flashing them. People knew who it was but the police never caught him doing it. Don’t know what the Birds did to him but they fucked him up proper cos he left town one morning, never came back. His house is still empty. But your mate wouldn’t know any of that … [Francesca]’s not a proper local. There’s things you can’t understand if you’re not from round here. It’s not some fairytale. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of them.” (Foley 189) It is easier to dub The Birds as a feeble small-town folktale when it's you they begin to target—and just when denial can no longer dissipate the everlasting state of uneasiness, The Birds close in, delivering a reckoning that is as precise as it is inescapable.

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            As much as The Birds operate in shadow, their influence is clearest in the contrast between Francesca and Bella—one immune to remorse, the other defined by it. The same reckoning that silence predators living in the woods now hovers over these women, testing whether accountability will be taken willingly or forced upon them. The contrasts of guilt felt between the two is evident in their fragmented narratives throughout the story. The modern-day Lady Macbeth states, “I don’t actually apologise, because someone once told me that to do so is an admission of guilt and putting yourself in that position is dangerous. I feel shaky, drained.” (Foley 204). The nuanced motif behind the drained feeling she endures while contemplating the very notion of accountability or owning up to one’s mistake, is one patterned throughout the fragmented narration.  Often, adult Francesca will remind herself to repeat an inner mantra for remaining calm, reignite her crystals worn on her person, and neutralize any situation that might not be in her favor. “Being in [Bella’s] space has drained me. I need to nourish my soul with the warmth of another body, to join my essence with another. To lose myself in physicality, in carnality.” (Foley 173). Francesca embodies a woman immune to accountability simply because she has never had to face it on her own—ever. She manages to cushion her saccharine understanding for why flaws never seem to face her—it is all thanks to her selfishness manifested, rather masquerading, as self-love. She says it best herself, “After all, self-protection is a manifestation of self-love. And self-love is so important. You have to love yourself before others.” (Foley 173). While Bella, her counterpart, has appeared to harbor enough guilt and shame for the both of them. “I’ve been living with the guilt of it ever since. It has been the thing that has defined my life…It’s not an exaggeration to say what happened ruined my life. And yet I’m not sure it was even a stumbling block in [Francesca’s]. It took every ounce of courage I had to come back here. But I am back…I’m not going to let her forget.” (Foley 178). Foley uses their opposing responses to guilt—Bella’s immersion in it and Francesca’s lifelong aversion—not only to reveal how deeply the first Midnight Feast scarred them into adulthood, but also to expose the way each woman confronts her own reflection.

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            Bella has carried her guilt for fifteen years, returning to Tome only when the need to face it head-on outweighs her fear, driven by a desire to trust herself and like herself enough for her newborn daughter’s sake. Francesca, on the other hand, has perfected the art of sidestepping accountability, loving what she sees in the mirror only because she has cloaked herself in the false embrace of “self-protection”—a self-spun comfort that is, at its core, nothing more than swaddled selfishness. Paralleled with each other, Bella’s sight of herself: “I glance in the mirror and get a shock. I don’t recognize the person reflected there.” (Foley 29) and Francesca’s adoration for her own reflection, “I sit down at the little dressing table. Catch sight of myself in the mirror. I smile.” (Foley 173), the immersion and aversion responses reflect just as clearly outward as they do inward. The absence of guilt and the phantom of truly healing are themes meant to highlight the painstaking process of moving forward with yourself after being the pawn in a horrible mistake. While Bella is a gut-wrenching pawn in this motif, she is not the only character to fall through the peaks and valleys of walking through life a different person—a ghost of who you were. Jake was a local farmboy who attended the first Midnight Feast as Bella’s date. In order to keep this a spoiler-free zone, know that there are bodies present at that first Feast, and not all of them are breathing. Scared, and forever scarred, into silence, Bella and Jake returned from the Feast as ghosts of who they were when they walked in. Ghosts who eternally keep their family at a distance. Ghosts who turned to intravenous substances in order to forget. “[Jake] got hold of a load of drugs and tries to ride his bike over the cliffs. Suppose he changed his mind at the last second or something. The bike skidded off the edge, landed on the rocks at the bottom. At first I guess they thought the worst, like maybe his body had been washed out to sea or something, because he was AWOL for several days. When he finally turned up … even I could see something was different. Like the old Jake was gone. Like there was … a demon inside him or something. And it just got worse and worse.’” (Foley 250). Ghosts who walked their entire life alone. “Something broke in me on a summer’s night fifteen years ago. Maybe it can never be fully mended. It’s the burden I’ll carry with me for a lifetime. But I want to be able to look my own daughter in the eye. I want to be able to look in the mirror and know that in spite of my flaws, I am a good person. That I’m someone who does the right thing.” (Foley 262). Ghosts who went through hell together and didn’t come back the same.

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            Watching these characters navigate the wreckage of that night makes Foley’s point unshakable: you can’t outrun the mirror, whether it's the one hanging in your room, or the one held up by those you’ve wronged. The Midnight Feast is less about the mystery of what happened—although that part was done wonderfully and includes outstanding twists I didn’t even mention—but more about the lingering question of who we become when we carry the weight of what we have done—or failed to do. The Birds are simply the embodiment of that truth, a reminder that avoidance, may delay reckoning, but never erase it. This point is most starkly recognized when you realize that The Birds could have come for either Bella or Jake. They don’t only because Bella and Jake had been washed away with guilt already to the point of no return. Coming back from such a traumatic event takes more will, ardor, and pain to simply remember what it felt like to feel anything outside the realm of shame. The Birds, with their thirst for righting injustices, felt as if Bella and Jake had been shackled to the first Midnight Feast for so long, that it alone was punishment enough. Their development, burdened with their pain, littered with turmoil, and required fifteen years to finally reach the feeling of satisfaction when looking in the mirror. Foley’s symbolic understanding of karmic retribution as well as the importance of self-reflection is detailed thoroughly throughout the narrative. With the final Midnight Feast, The Birds make their return, bodies uncover, promises are broken, disguises are removed, and what remains is the fateful question: if the time comes, will you face yourself—or wait for The Birds to do it for you?

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