The Present

The old woman lay awake in bed, staring at dawn’s first light dancing across the ceiling. She had spent most of the night trapped somewhere between reality and a dream, between a cold bed and her dead husband’s warm embrace.

She blinked, expecting tears at the thought of him. There were none. Her husband died suddenly the previous day. Heart attack, on Christmas Eve. For the first time in 58 years, she was alone in their bed.

           She turned her head to where her husband would normally lay. Unexpectedly, all she found was a stiff pillow and empty sheets. Maybe if she closed her eyes, she could find her way back to that dream, the one where he was holding her and humming one of his silly tunes. She smiled and let her eyelids drop over her eyes, hoping for one last Christmas with him.

           That was when she heard the bird. Its first squawk jerked her back to her frigid reality. An empty bed. A Christmas alone. The second squawk was louder than the first, and seemed to pierce through her skull. She swore. Why had her husband ever bought that bird?

           The third squawk drove her to action. She slowly turned onto her side, then lowered her legs to the floor. With great effort, she managed to push herself up using her elbows. The woman slid her feet into a pair of worn slippers on the ground, then – with a creaking of bones that could rival a rusty bicycle wheel – she managed to stand.

           Lacking the alacrity of her youth, she slowly shuffled out the door and down the hall towards the kitchen and the bird’s cage. The bird seemed to sense her movements, because it hadn’t made a sound since she rose from the bed.

           Finally turning the corner into the kitchen, the woman came face to face with her tormenter. The bird was a white cockatoo, with a splash of yellow along its crest. It was inside a metal cage hanging about five feet above the floor, and looked right at the woman with its dark little eyes. It let out a questioning squawk, as if to ask, where’s my food?

           The woman never wanted her husband to have a pet bird. They’re loud, smelly, and useless, she remembered saying to him in this very room. Why would he ever want a bird? She thought back on that argument, trying to picture every detail of her husband’s wrinkled face. Even the bad times were worth remembering for her.

           The bird clicked its beak, breaking the woman’s daydream. She groaned, and decided then and there that she would give the bird to a local shelter as soon as the holidays were over. For the next few days, though, she was stuck with it. Which meant feeding it.

           With great effort, the woman bent down to a nearby cupboard where she knew her husband kept the bird seed. The maneuver was not so easy as it had been even a few years ago: she needed to carefully balance her weight as she went down, mentally monitoring her body for sudden muscle failures or flashes of pain. A fall at her age could be fatal.

           Opening the cupboard was even more torturous for the woman. The arthritis in her hands was particularly bad this morning, so much so that even attempting to grip the cupboard door handle felt like squeezing a pile of needles. Eventually, she managed to get her straightened fingers into the handle and pull her whole arm to bring the door open, but there was no way she would be able to open that bag of bird seed. Instead, she delicately stood herself up, grabbed a knife between her palms, sliced the bag of bird seed open, and unlatched the cockatoo’s cage by wedging the knife into the handle and twisting her whole body. Let it eat to its heart’s content, she thought of the bird. It is Christmas, after all. And maybe, with any luck, it’ll gorge itself to death.

           The woman didn’t get her way. The bird didn’t sprint towards its food, nor did it immediately fly out of its cage. All it did was tilt its head and look at the woman. The woman grudgingly stared back at the bird for a few moments, then rolled her eyes and turned to begin her slow shuffle back to her room. Maybe then she’d be able to find a way back to the dream with her husband so they could have another Christmas together, even if only in her mind.

           A flutter of wings and a swoosh of air startled her as the bird flew past her head, causing her to emit a yelp. Bloody bird, she thought as she calmed her nerves looked to see where the creature went.

           She found it perched atop a wrapped gift below the Christmas tree in the adjacent living room. Her husband had put up that tree just last week, bless his heart. The woman smiled at the memory. She had managed to place a few ornaments before her arthritis got the better of her. If she closed her eyes, she could see him there, stringing lights around the tree with “Deck the Halls” playing in the background, then coming over to warm her hands in his own. She reached her hands out to him as he came over, hopeful for his touch…

           As if on command, the bird squawked, seemingly determined to keep the woman unhappy. Her eyes opened and quickly narrowed in frustration at the cockatoo. That was when she noticed the gift it stood upon was foreign to her. It was medium-sized and rectangular, and wrapped in a gold and white paper. Due to her arthritis, all the gifts she prepared were in bags. Curious, she made her way to the wrapped gift, passing several presents intended for her husband. In her mind, she recognized each of his gifts through the thick bags and tissue paper: that small red and white bag held a watch, while the large one in the corner was a sweater.

Her arrival at the unknown gold and white present caused the bird to fly off it to the nearby couch. The old woman bent over to pick up the gift, and managed to grasp it between her two hands. Focused on the gift, she sat on the couch without realizing the bird was next to her. She read the label to find it was to her, from her husband.

She slowly smiled. So, she would get to spend one last Christmas with him, in a way. The woman made to open the gift, but couldn’t undo the ribbon with her immobile fingers. Try as she might, her poor fingers wouldn’t – no, they couldn’t – bend to grab the ribbon.

For minutes she struggled to undo the wrapping, more and more frantically as time wore on. She needed to open this gift. She couldn’t live a second longer without his love.

The bird was not blind to all of this. It flitted up on to the woman’s lap, who at this point was frantically pawing at the ribbon. The bird’s weight on her leg caused her to pause and consider the bird. Gently, carefully, the brave cockatoo closed its beak around one of the tied pieces of ribbon. It twisted its head, and suddenly the ribbon was cut. The woman gave a shout of joy, and without thinking pet the bird along its back. The cockatoo cooed lovingly.

Next, to work through the wrapping paper, the bird fit its beak inside one of the paper’s seams and pulled while the woman held the box on her lap. With some amount of rotation, this method eventually led to the two of them opening the gift.

Inside was a photo album, and on the front cover it read: “Our Adventure Together” below a black-and-white picture of the woman and her husband smiling next to each other on their first date a long, long time ago.

Tears welled up in the old woman’s eyes, the first since his passing. Her husband was there, right in front of her, as handsome as ever. She rubbed her fingers over his face, knowing it wouldn’t bring him back but hoping all the same.

The bird nuzzled against her hand, and then used his beak to pull the cover open. Images of family and friends spread across the better part of a century greeted her, laughing and smiling. And there beside her, always, was her loving husband, holding her, kissing her, celebrating with her. She wiped more tears from her eyes. What a way to spend a life.

In that way, cockatoo turning pages and woman reliving her past, the two of them spent this Christmas beside each other, brought together by one man’s last gift to those he loved most.

THE END