i. THE BRAMBLES
“Someday, someone is going to knock all of the wildness out of you,” her grandmother had once snarled at her, lifting a cup of tea to her lips and leaving a plasticky red stain on the rim. She was young then, sixteen or seventeen, confident enough to wear ripped jean shorts and not believe in sunscreen.
As an adult, she found herself unable to wear lipstick, unwilling to ever grow up enough to smear glassware. Eye makeup became her only concession to vanity, and even that she found she liked best after a night’s careless sleep. Still, with age she traded the denim shorts for long black slacks. She wore button down shirts. By day, she walked purposefully down hallways in sensible heels, taking well-mannered meeting notes and making phone calls. At night, she drank wine and occasionally slept with inappropriate men.
It was in these moments that she was the most careful. She woke up some mornings with strong hairy arms wrapped around her midsection, and she worked with painstaking focus to quietly extricate herself from the grip of those limbs. The last of these men was the softest of them all. His legs fell over her like a blanket and she found them too warm to escape from. She married him because he asked, and because he said nothing when she arrived at their wedding with a bare face and disheveled hair.
Their friends made jokes about the man who finally tamed her, but at night he watched her sleep and wondered when she would leave him. Her body grew tenser as his grip grew tighter, and he waited patiently for her to discover a secret key that would unlock his hold and let her slip away forever.
When it finally came, the cancer worked quickly, as though the years of sun had bored a direct line into her lungs. She became impossible to touch at night; he became equally impossible to console. He felt her spirit wither, as her voice grew stronger with cries of pain. She complained most about her heart, demanding they rip it out of her and get it over with. The doctors told him that of all the things in her chest, her heart was in fact the strongest, and they would be grateful to donate it when the rest of her had completed its fail.
The day that he sat sobbing in a hospital nursing room, the doctors cut open her chest to retrieve the parts that were left. They stood in silence for a very long moment, and later they would conveniently forget to file the medical reports that described what they saw. The first to speak would say it best: “There is a garden around her heart.”
“It is,” said the second, “very well cultivated,” and they never mentioned it again.
ii. HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN
You wake to the sound of birds chirping above you and for a precious few minutes, you don’t remember. You lay completely still with your eyes closed, feeling the light flicker over the dark patches of your eyelids. It is morning. It takes minutes, possibly years, for you to force your eyes open. Daylight greets you when you do. Deep pockets of blue peek at you through the fiery crackle of dying tree leaves. You watch for a moment as the branches dip and bend, directing the streams of light like silent conductors. You blink.
There is a reason that you wake up on the ground, in the middle of the woods, on an autumn morning. It takes you some time to remember that, and when you do you wish that you hadn’t. With that remembering you are afraid to move even a tiny bit, and so the leaves fall lazily from the trees and begin to pile up on your body. It’s a slow, slow burial, and finally when one lands with a scratchy whoosh on your neck, you know it is time. First, your fingers: you wiggle them one by one. They seem intact. Next, you lift your left arm slowly, gingerly. This is when the pain sets in. It burns deep through your elbow and you wince as you brush the leaf off, let out a sharp breath, and bring your hand to rest on the ground once more.
You cough involuntarily and wince again; your breath is thick with a rumble that comes from deep within your chest. There’s a forest in there, too, and you cough hard again, this time to free the brambles. With each cough, a knife slices through your rib cage. It is true that there is bourbon on your breath, and it is true that you are here because this is simply where you fell, and it is probably true that you have cracked a rib or two. This is not the first time.
There is a place you have been running from, and another that you need to get to, and until you stand up and start walking, it is just going to continue to hurt. You take a deep breath and begin, again, by wiggling your fingers.
iii. LITTLE BIRDS
His house had quite a few glass windows. It seemed inevitable that it would happen one of these days, but when it did, he felt shocked and heartbroken almost instantly. A bird had flown directly into the glass. He heard the thump, knew it for what it was, assumed he would need to clean up the mess and say a few nice words.
The bird was still alive. The bird, in fact, was hopping around cheerfully though not yet flying away. It seemed to favor its left wing slightly as it looked up at him. It cocked its head quizzically and the man swore softly to himself. This bird was real. It was a live, breathing creature that the man was responsible for as long as it remained in his courtyard. It flapped a feeble wing. It was not flying away.
He thought first to call Andrea: she was always good in a crisis, and she spoke soothingly to injured nieces and nephews when the situation was too serious for him to simply offer up a joke. It took a moment for him to remember why her number was no longer in his speed dial. It was his fault, really. He was the one who had left her, but right now he felt she had abandoned him and his newfound bird in their time of need.
He’d left because it felt like a lot of responsibility and there were so many other girls. Now he had this bird. He decided, first, that he would wait a day to see if the bird flew away on his own. He decided, second, that the bird’s name was Harold.
He left Harold that night before bed with a small dish full of sunflower seeds and corn kernels, and he made sure the window near the courtyard was opened wide enough for Harold to fly away. When he woke up and padded into his living room the next morning, Harold was hopping around on the floor not far from where he’d left him. A smaller, rounder, browner bird sat perched on his large, cushy, less-brown couch, watching Harold hop-dance in the morning sunlight. It was a bit difficult at that moment not to imagine that he was going crazy. It was also hard not to picture the headlines: “Man Dies Alone in House Surrounded By Little Birds.”
This terrified him. He thought to call Andrea again, this time to apologize for not wanting the responsibility. Clearly he needed her. Clearly he had not thought this through, had never realized there might be a time in his life when he would die alone surrounded by little birds, had never even considered that he might grow old in this house with these two tiny birds and one day take a tumble down the stairs feeling his frail ankles weaken and turn beneath him, and at the bottom find himself unable to move and nowhere near a telephone. And who would he call then, anyway? Who would be in his speed dial? The birds would be kind to him, then. They would fly over him and gently cover him in a blanket or a sheet or whatever kind of shroud they could lift in their tiny, tiny bird beaks. Then they might fly away for good.
Now, they just stood there on his floor and on his couch and flapped their little wings and chirped a bit. It seemed they were conversing. Abruptly, the second little bird took a few hops, flapped its wings, and flew out the open window from whence it came. Harold looked as jealous as a tiny bird could look, and at that moment the man knew he needed to just call the vet and get it over with.
Harold would not be flying away on his own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Flynn's writing spans everything from music writing (The L Magazine, Impose, Crawdaddy) to marketing copy (for bands, books, and even lamps) to philosophy critiques. She will make a story out of anything if you let her, and in turn she will let you buy her bourbon. She lives in Brooklyn and can usually be found composing the bulk of her work on her iPhone while walking across various NYC bridges.
LF #013 © Sarah Flynn. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, May 2012.
