The Birds

Content warning: gore

I still dreamt of it: I still dreamt of birds with snapped necks left at my doorstep. The raw offering and its residue. Then, me and my sister crouching down, knees pressed to asphalt, picking apart the feathers from the bone. 

I watched my sister place the pulp to her mouth, a tedious effort. 

I devoured, simply. For once, I was feeling everything: the winter’s frost, the dewdrops in dirt, my hands. My hands, ragged and exposed. There was a brief glimpse of scales, translucent, glued with sticky membranous stuff, growing from, or within, my skin. 

I always woke up right then, at that testimony. 

As usual, I brushed my teeth, frothing mint. It was a furiously fast process, never two minutes. Afterwards, my gums always bled, the toothbrush bristles bent sideways. Then, I administered lotion to my hands, lingering over my knuckles, scrutinizing for a scale, for something. Lastly, I caught my reflection: it was a sad, uncertain act. 

I greeted my cat, Eros, who had unblinking green eyes and soft black tufts for ears. She was undeniably untamed, and I envied her. Sweet kisses along her spine. She meowed, a relentless, almost strangled, sound, as I snapped open a can, a chicken-carrot combo. 

“Today, I’m going to propose,” I announced, just to test the syllables out. 

Eros’s ears perked up.

“Today, it is my funeral,” I said with an exasperated and elongated sigh. 

Chicken-carrot combo was slathered over Eros’s whiskers. 

“Today, today, today,” I murmured, “is a day of desire.” I liked the texture of desire, how the ‘s’ flattened into a ‘z’ and how the tongue drew out the ‘i.’ With a blue-inked pen, I jotted down several sounds, cleave pinch unofficial actual salute divine. I carried a notebook with me everywhere, a habit inherited from my mother, who wrote on napkins, walls, paper, and mostly, hands, yesterday’s notes fading and replaced with the new. 

The notebook, I hadn’t shown to anyone, except to one person. 

To her. To Lilibet. 

It had been a rather awkward encounter, but maybe my most earnest one. We flipped the worn pages together in the front seats of the car, encroaching night. In the ugly light, we looked bruised. I wanted to speak softly, to whisper, even, inhabiting language the way I did in church, with a quiet and entire reverence. How foolish to want that softness, so I spoke loudly, quickly, and fiercely, almost to the point of tears. 

Lilibet accepted it all. 

She even turned her face away from me and repeated the words to herself. At that precise moment, something split in me, something vague and yawning, but something wholly mine. At the tenderness in her imitation, I gritted my teeth. I’d been wanting, oh, how I’d felt that desolation, and now, she was sitting beside me in her car, our elbows knocked against each other. She had her grease-soaked hair wrenched back in a ponytail, only a couple of disobedient strands. A turtleneck hiked up to the dimple in her chin, her only nakedness her hands, adorned in rusting rings. 

It was urgent, truly, to memorize the jutting of her knuckles, the remnants of her cat’s claws, the bitten-up nailbeds. 

I showed her my notebook, divulged myself as incomplete, fragmented, not even human. 

And it mattered to her. And she was wanting, too, curious, questioning, gentle. What did you mean by this? How did you feel when writing this sentence, when purging yourself upon this page?

Oh, how did I feel?

I answered, all jumbled, all obsessive. I was thoughtless, all body whenever I wrote. Everything distilled down to the ink, to the crinkles of the paper, to the thin red line of the margin. I was so joyous that it physically hurt. Akin to the euphoria of delight, but not as pleasurable. Or I was grieving, naked and inarticulable, all the smudges, blots, crossed-out letters, the asymmetrical spaces. 

But mostly, I confessed to her, I was afraid. I was afraid of swimming, for one, for being submerged, and being untethered, nothing to grasp onto except the emptiness of salt. I was afraid of bridges, of how meticulously and effortfully they’d been crafted, these symbols of union so tentative. I was afraid of graveyards, at all their lit candles and plastic flowers and raked grounds. I was afraid of organs and wept whenever I thought of my caged heart, my writhing cells, my squeezed-together intestines – I’d never touch, know, understand them, but they kept on beating and existing unconsciously, regardless. I was afraid of the moment before death, the moment when I knew it was going to happen, that startling certainty and inevitability. I was afraid of my grandmother’s dreams: once upon a time, when my sister and I were children, she’d call us over in the bleary-eyed and dimly-lit morning and she’d recite her sleeping life to us, parsing for the names of the people and places she’d possessed. 

No, Lilibet didn’t just accept, she understood. 

It wasn’t that I typically felt misunderstood, so to speak, but it was a new and inexact thing, to be understood down to the bone. 

I wasn’t sure how to express my gratitude, except through a murder. 

Eros had slaughtered two mice yesterday, dragged them through the kitchen dust. I prayed for their scurrying lives, and wished I’d had the chance to communicate, to forge some kind of contact with the mice who’d hunted and hid in the cracks of the walls. The funeral was somber, but also brimming with a shared, infectious joy, when I brought the bodies to Lilibet’s doorstep. 

I’d always idolized doorsteps. They were the site before entry, uncertain. 

Ah, all the people who had stood in front of someone, or something, and they were about to reach forward, but they were still waiting for the door to open, those little accumulated seconds of wait. 

So I dropped off the mice, and a note. The length of a letter, I didn’t know, I had much suffocating affection I had to send. 

Too excessive. It was devotional, even, and it unsettled her, Lilibet had said. It was too wrong, repulsive, actually, had been the term she’d lingered with. Repulsive. 

She said she loved me!

The mice were there, anyway.

I closed my notebook, paced back and forth, awaiting Lilibet’s response. In the meantime, I spoke to the fruit, the strawberries whose stems I sliced off, the rinsed-off blueberries, the undressed clementine. The strawberries were kindest, or at the least, the most sincere. Their advice: don’t spend your life waiting! The blueberries were somewhat chaotic listeners, since they all cut into each other’s sentences, and the speech itself was intelligible and coarse. The clementine, so moody. 

The clementine: did you have the dream again? 

I rose an eyebrow and shrugged. I hated being known so immediately. 

The clementine: This isn’t going to end well for you.

What? Loving Lilibet? I even loved the phrase, its gentle alliteration. 

The clementine: You aren’t as understood as you claim to be. 

Now, I frowned. But she whispered my words out-loud. She asked me questions, and she absorbed everything! Absorbed. We hadn’t been separate then, no, we had been merging, fusing, filling in the other’s vacancies, and I hadn’t been able to stop laughing, and I reached for Lilibet’s hand, and we had tumbled outside to the lampposts, mud squelching underneath our boots. Our teeth rattled in the chill. In the rain, I was present and awake, no doubt, firmly planted inside my self, and for a second or two, I nearly fell to my knees, undisguised. Unbearably, we kissed, and I’d assumed I’d already lived the moment before, or at least I was going to permanently residing within it.

I said, childishly, excitedly, nervously, We kissed. 

The clementine responded, You will be ruined. 

I waved the clementine off. Ruined, I repeated, liking how my mouth swept into the shape of an ‘o’ with the ‘ui.’ I welcome such a meager thing, I said, but truthfully, it was the same fear. Terror, really, that was never blunted. I had even grown to require, savor, sing to it. 

I wasn’t good at singing, but I’d stolen some tricks from my sister. 

She sang constantly, or more accurately, belted. Pure screams, sometimes. I observed how her chest heaved, how she shoved her palm to her heart, how she tapped her feet to the rhythm, smoothly and unbrokenly. She had wanted to be a performer, to dance, sing, be other people. On stage, she was acutely herself, though, never fully transformed. Still, I thrilled at the very effort in it, in the scribbled-over scripts and the sewn-up costumes. 

As the morning light wavered, I snatched my notebook and inspected my mailbox and doorstep for a response, and finding nothing, headed to my shift at the restaurant, where I cut the fat from the meat and salted vegetables. When I worked, everything distilled again: the boiling bubbles of soup, the lumps of marmalades, unevenly chopped French fries sizzling in the fryer, the bustling and clinking of pan against pan…

I needed those distillations, you see. 

Otherwise, I kept running my thumb over my knuckles. Waiting for the confirmation of scales. 

Otherwise, I would lose my memory again. Once, I was convinced my sister was still alive and she had been buried while still breathing and I swore, over and over, that when I touched my wrist, it was her heart, her pulse, not mine, so I dug up her body, just to make sure, slick with grime, dirt, blood, and sweat. The shovel, we’d once used to entomb humble family artifacts, photographs, long-lost passenger manifests, letters, all. The fossils of our father, even. 

Otherwise, I was losing my mind. I’d always reveled in that saying, that something of us could be missing and yet somehow still here.

My doorstep was barren, and I walked away from home.