The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  “Breakfast of champions,” Lily yelled over the sound of the vacuum, nodding at the almost empty magnum of wine on the table.

  “I’m glad you found the Vonnegut I left out for you, honey.” She flashed her daughter an exaggerated thumbs-up before returning to vacuuming the wall. “These damn ladybugs hatched in the walls. They were everywhere this morning. Literally covering the table.”

  “Can’t hardly blame the ladybugs, now can you?” Lily said, quieter than before.

  “Whaaat?”

  “Nothing.”

  Alice turned off the vacuum and the last few ladybugs left in the long black tube clacked against the plastic, two flying out from the end of the hose and circling her head like a halo. She swatted at the bugs, knocking herself off balance for a moment before removing the vacuum bag. The bag pulsed, alive with the hundreds of bugs ticking inside. She placed it on top of the garbage under the sink and changed to a new bag, taking the opportunity to refill her wine jar and address her daughter before she could slink out the back door.

  “So, I have some news for you,” she sighed dramatically. “Randy and I broke up.”

  “Shocker,” Lily said as she cracked two duck eggs into a hot pan.

  “That damn wolf-mutt Party Dog attacked Donnie Jr.”

  “What?!” Lily looked up, wrested from complacency by concern for her pet duck. “Is she okay?”

  “She’ll be fine. It’s just a little scratch on her neck. We pulled the dog off in time and I dressed the scratch and put the cone the vet gave us on her to prevent her picking at it with her bill. So, anyhow, just thought you should know. She might not be laying for a while if she’s too stressed out. We’ll have to trade for eggs with the Wilkes or something.”

  “I always hated that dog.”

  Randy owned a bar in town called the Re-Bar that filled nightly with farmhands and construction workers. When he started dating Alice, he let her start a monthly poetry reading that baffled many members of the community and delighted a handful of others. He even bought a little beret for Party Dog and everything. Back when Party Dog was just a puppy, he taught her to shotgun a beer as a sort of perverse parlor trick. The stunt was a big hit with customers until Party Dog developed a problem and started turning surly, nipping more than one customer’s heels when they wouldn’t share their libation. Randy stopped letting her drink and kept her behind the bar to limit his liability as a business owner, but really she just turned into a dry drunk—nasty and without an ounce of humor to her disposition. She would sulk behind the bar looking daggers at anyone who addressed her by name. Party Dog, as it turned out, was not such a party after all.

  “Dogs are a direct reflection their owners, you know,” Alice said.

  “True story,” Lily sighed.

  “So anyhow, after that mutt went after Donnie Jr., all hell broke loose and Randy and I started going at it, too. But it wasn’t just the dog, of course. It was a looong time coming.”

  “No kidding.” Lily returned to her egg frying, feeling herself about as social as Party Dog.

  “That’s one particular mistake I won’t be making again,” Alice said, her voice rising louder and higher as she flipped on the switch to the vacuum and continued to suck the little red, freshly hatched ladybugs from their brand-new world to an even newer and blacker one.

  “Déjà vu,” Lily said quietly to the egg pan. She pulled some toast and buttered it, put one of the eggs on the table, and nodded at her mother.

  “Eat. Join me, honey.” Alice wasn’t asking.

  “Can’t. I’m meeting Sarah.”

  And with that, Lily grabbed her own egg sandwich and left the kitchen with its lingering aroma of alcohol and eggs mixed with the pungent funk of thousands of newly hatched ladybugs. If Lily were to bottle the scent and name it, like they do in fancy department stores, she would call it “Despair” and use the torso of a thin, hairy, naked woman as its vessel.

  “Be home by dinner!” Alice yelled, but her daughter had already slipped through the door and off the back porch.

  As Lily crossed the field toward the small housing development, she saw the blind harrier skimming low over the grass. The raptor kited for a moment, then landed hard into the grass, rising with empty talons before flying off into the distance. To Lily, the bird looked fatigued. She wondered how long a blind bird that size could possibly live. At the fence dividing their property from the new development, she rustled at the base of the fence post and retrieved an old rusty tin from under a patch of loose, wild grass. From it, she took out a packet of cigarettes from a ziplock and slipped one from the package, pocketing the rest. Alice would kill her if she knew. Crossing into the taupe wasteland, she ducked under some construction tape to enter the largest of the unfinished pressboard palaces, a cigarette dangling from her lips like Gloria in The Lost Weekend, Lily and Sarah’s favorite movie.

  “Don’t be ridic,” Lily said seductively into the dark room of their usual meeting place, the cigarette stuck to her lip.

  “Don’t be ridic,” Sarah squealed from a dark interior corner of the house, jumping out to greet her friend.

  “I mean, for cereal.” Lily hugged Sarah and sighed. “Mom’s on a total bender again.”

  “Dang. What happened?” Sarah accepted a cigarette from her friend and lit it with a pink, unicorn-stickered lighter. She blotted her matching black lipstick on the filter.

  “Randy happened, I guess. But how many times can she freak out on different dudes before she notices, maybe, some sort of pattern?”

  “Yeah, for real. Adults are so asinine sometimes. My parents totally hate each other but pretend they don’t for our sake. As if we can’t tell as they stab, stab, stab that salad that they’d rather be stabbing each another.”

  From the shadows, a figure stepped out into the light.

  “Fuck! You scared the shit out of me,” Lily said to the figure as Sarah giggled.

  “That’s some ugly talk for a pretty lady,” the figure said, moving closer.

  “You know Max,” Sarah said. “You chicken shit.”

  At the realization that it was their classmate, Max, who had called her a pretty lady, who moved his being closer to her being, Lily’s neck reddened, waves of pink moving up her translucent skin. She felt like an octopus standing there, emoting waves and colors for all the world to see. Thankfully the light in the bare-beamed construction site was dim.

  “Well, if it isn’t the entirety of the Philomath High science club in one place,” Max said with mock surprise. “Meeting in secret to plan our world domination through the fabulous world of fusion?”

  Max was the most handsome nerd Lily had ever met. Half Siletz Indian with a long, perfect nose and dark hazel eyes, he understood molecular science like it was Disney. Lily was more into ecology, and Sarah was smart but mostly just kind of a punk. Sarah, at sixteen, already had five tattoos she said she’d sweet-talked her way into receiving for free from various admirers in Eugene. Lily suspected she had done more than sweet-talk to get them. While science didn’t really get Sarah going as much as standard forms of teenage deviancy, Lily was her best friend, and she thought Max was hot, so she attended science club on Wednesdays after school to be with them.

  Max had always been kind of a nobody until one of the football jocks called him a “Redskin Redneck” early in the school year. After saying nothing to the jock in the moment, that afternoon Max donned full native regalia with an eagle-feather-and-fur headpiece, a brightly colored beaded shawl, and little moccasins. As the team prepared for an important homecoming game, they laughed at him as they did drills and called him an “asshole,” an “injun,” and a “half-breed.” They flung whatever insults they could get their dirty hands on as they paused between running lines. Max ignored them as he padded in the dry fall grass around the football field doing a rain dance, singing low and looking up at the skies. That night in th
e fourth quarter, with the game tied, the sky threaded gray, then black, and poured down on the field in sheets of rain. Lightning struck one of the goal posts and a cheerleader who had been high-kicking a little too close to the pole got knocked unconscious. The game ended early, a draw. After that, no one made fun of Max—in fact, there was a whiff of fear among those in the student body. Jocks offered him seats and patted him on the back for no real reason. Lily suspected that Max’s revenge was sweetest not because he had called on ancient gods to do his bidding but because he had secretly called to check the weather graphs at NOAA. Max was an ardent believer in the power of science and achingly clever.

  As the trio walked around the half-built houses, they speculated on what would go where.

  “This is where they’ll keep their Jet Skis and other superfluous shit,” Max offered.

  “That’s where the Jacuzzi bath will go,” Lily said.

  “For the wild orgies,” Sarah added. Sarah was always full of life lessons.

  After half a pack of cigarettes and a few hours of aimless wandering, Sarah announced she had to go.

  “Sunday dinner,” she said with a fake smile. “Everybody sit around looking miserable together now.”

  “See you at school,” Max said. “Stay strong.” Sarah gave him a lingering peck on the cheek and Lily felt something like bile, or jealousy, rise in her throat. When she and Max were alone, they sat on the front steps of the house looking out over the sea of tan pressboard. The effect was that of a giant, poorly placed, wrinkled Band-Aid laid out over an otherwise wild field.

  “You ever wonder why we, I mean man, generally feel the need to dominate the landscape instead of just live with it?” Max asked after a moment.

  “Yeah. I get you. Other species seem to have it all figured out. I mean, look at foxholes, beaver dams, bird’s nests,” Lily said.

  “Exactly. They say it has something to do with thumbs, but I reckon it’s more about hair.”

  “How’s that now?” Lily did her best Randy impression in a deep backwoods accent.

  “Like, because we don’t have hair on most of our bodies, we’re always trying to find ways to cover up. Our outfits have just gotten more and more elaborate until they look like factories and train tracks and skyscrapers.”

  “How very scientific of you, friend.” Lily squinted her eyes at him and wrinkled her brow into a farm of furrows.

  Max laughed and put his warm arm around Lily and she thought maybe she would like to wear him as an outfit, the blood rising again in her neck and down to her fingers and toes.

  “Hey,” he said, “I’m sorry to hear about your mom’s bender. She seems like a cool lady from what I can tell. She has that old aqua Chevy truck with the bumper sticker that says, A Woman Needs a Man Like…” he trailed off.

  “…a Fish Needs a Bicycle, yeah. Brilliant, isn’t it?”

  “Is she a lesbian or something?”

  “Nah. She’s kind of a slut, to be honest.”

  “Lesbians can be sluts,” Max offered. “Just not in Burning Woods.” They sat there for a moment to ponder this important idea.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow in physics, right?” Max asked, peeling himself off Lily’s arm, giving her a little pat on the shoulder.

  “You bet your quarks, buddy.”

  Did I really just say that? Lily wondered as she made her way home through the grass. You bet your quarks, buddy? She stopped to put the cigarettes back in their tin at the base of the fence and rubbed some rose essential oil on her wrists, fingers, and neck to cover the smell of cigarettes. It wasn’t even seven but it was already getting dark. She checked in on Donnie Jr., who looked miserable and ashamed of her little neck cone, sitting morosely in a corner of her pen by the kiddie pool, which was growing a significant layer of green slime on it. Lily reminded herself to clean the pool that week as she clicked her tongue gently at her bummed-out duck.

  Inside the house, she heard the ladybugs ticking away inside their vacuum bag prisons. She looked around for her mom before taking all three bags outside, slipping the deer-dressing knife lying on the table into her pocket. She hauled the bags out to the tree with the pockmarks of spreading fungus. She switched the knife open, drawing the flat end along her forearm to clean it first like she always did, then slit the bags lengthwise with the precision of a surgeon. The sleepy bugs emerged, lining the slit with their red, tentative bodies before the first one took flight. It was as if the moonlight reanimated their bodies. They followed the leader in a perfect line and trailed off like little soldiers of fortune into the sky, out into the unknown with carnal appetites for aphid blood. To Lily’s eyes they formed a perfect circle in the sky, like synchronized swimmers, then moved into a hypnotist’s swirl before finally dispersing. A truck rumbled out on the highway in an unusually loud way as the bugs disappeared to far corners of the orchard. After the last ladybug had disappeared into the night, everything was quiet. Lily put the knife away. She must have smoked too many cigarettes or something because her eyes were playing tricks on her. She felt pretty sure there was no such thing as a ladybug hoedown.

  Back inside, Lily found her mother passed out drunk in a fetal ball on the living room couch. She found the patchwork blanket her grandma made when she was born, the one with various animals and plants and patterns living in harmony. “Your own little Eden,” Grandma liked to say when Lily was little, “where the lions lie next to the lambs.” Alice would pull her aside after such comments and whisper, “You know that in real life the lion would eat the lamb, right? No denying that fact.” It all left a young Lily a tad confused as to what was fact and what was fiction.

  Lily pulled the blanket over her mother and briefly inspected the paisley skies above a giraffe and bluebird duo before sitting in the chair facing the fireplace that once upon a time had belonged to her grandfather. The only light on in the room was the accent light her mother had installed to highlight her most prized possession: an antique wrought silver box engraved with vines and flowers, with thick beveled glass and sun-bleached pink velvet inside, the threadbare velvet holding up an almost full collection of emptied bird eggs. The antique was over a hundred years old, and as Lily stood in the dark, fixed on the glowing speckled orbs, she wondered how a thing so fragile could last as long as it had. Glancing at her sotted mom shifting under the blanket of Eden, she wondered how anyone or anything could stand the pressure of merely existing any longer than fifteen years.

  Devil’s Teeth

  Farallone Islands, California, 1874

  Clouds of seabirds rose and fell back to the steep barren rock cliffs, disturbed as Olive set out on the narrow footpath from Beacon Rock, the highest point on the island where the lighthouse stood, to the rabbit traps a half mile away. As she passed by the birds, they squawked and clung to the rocky ledge, settling dark pear-shaped bodies back into the smooth granite divots that housed their green-and-brown speckled eggs. They reminded her of miniature penguins, these birds, with their slick black backs, white bellies, and long black beaks. They stretched themselves up on two feet and extended their long necks to check for potential predators before returning to their eggs, nudging the light green mottled shells deeper into their down to keep them warm. Gulls screamed above, waiting to plunder the smaller birds’ nests next time they should be roused. The ruffling of black feathers and careful bird parenting were peaceful enough on the outside, but as Olive eyed the circling gulls, she was reminded that life was difficult to create and all too easy to erase.

  The wicker basket, with its thick canvas strap slung low on Olive’s hip, dug into her small shoulder. She held a brisk pace walking along in her boys’ trousers, her legs skimming the short halophytic weeds growing along the path and gathering salted dew at the ankles. She had purchased the thick woolen trousers in San Francisco after arriving by train a month ago and couldn’t quite get over the freedom of movement she felt wearing them. She did a
little skip and skidded to a stop on the narrow path, surveying the land around her. The tallest plant she noted growing on the island was only a couple feet high or so. Mostly the islands loomed brown and rocky, with crags dotted by short succulents, weeds, and birds. Olive had never experienced a place so wet and treeless in her life. The whole island was laved in seawater and seemed to her as salted as a pile of mutton on holy day. She saw some small rabbits nibbling the weeds and took a breath in anticipation of what she would find in the traps around the bend. Death, that scythe-bearing barbarian, was ever present of late.

  A month earlier, Olive had become an orphan at sixteen when her mother passed. After the modest funeral, she had gathered up her small bag of belongings, and, in accordance with her mother’s final wishes, traveled west from Colorado to live with her aunt in San Francisco. But the aunt never appeared at the train station, nor could she be reached by telegraph or post. There was, in fact, no one to be found who had so much as heard of a Persephone Ellis. So, after two weeks of sleeping abreast three women in a cheap boarding house and roaming the streets entreating authorities to locate her aunt to no avail, Olive spent the last of her small inheritance money on fine boys’ clothing and sought employment as a male.

  What brought Olive to this decision was a convergence of events involving a daylong stroll around San Francisco’s Market District. There were fishmongers, produce sellers with piles of mysterious fruits, the jingling trappings of horses, superb carriages thronging the streets, and hardworking people with an air of perseverance and success. They seemed a fast folk, these San Franciscans, most everyone walking, talking, and doing business with greater haste than back on the planked sidewalks of Boulder. As Olive stood on a corner taking it all in, a tall, thin woman with bright makeup approached her.