The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  “Hi, Alice.” Max sat up and looked amused.

  “What’s so funny? I heard screaming. Or yowling, to be more exact.” Her breath smelled strongly of whiskey.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just telling Lily how gay I am.” He rubbed Lily’s back in a slow circle, saying this in a way that made Lily want to implode with embarrassment.

  Alice sat there on her knees, eyes locked once again in a stare with Max, sussing him out. She let out a deep whiskeyed sigh and placed her hands on both of theirs. She was out of breath but still managed a look of calm.

  “I could have told you that, honey. But it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t try it out one time with a girl, just to make sure. It doesn’t mean you wouldn’t knock my daughter up.”

  “Not to worry,” he said. “Our girl’s chastity is intact.”

  Max started humming Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” like a slow and baleful dirge, and Alice threw her head back and laughed in a loud, uninhibited way Lily hadn’t heard from her in weeks, maybe months. It occurred to Lily that Alice might be way drunker than they were. Her embarrassment softened to pity. Her mother—the withholding, secretive woman she loved, but whom she was learning to resent—was revealing herself to be a hot mess.

  “Hey. Look up, you guys,” Lily said.

  She wanted everything to stop. She wanted them to stop talking and she wanted to shrink away into the dark of the woods, to denature and unfurl and disappear. She felt herself recoiling from her affections for both Max and her mother. They both sat there, oblivious to how much they hurt her. Her mother in particular seemed oblivious to the daily pain and suffering she dragged her daughter through. A deep rage settled heavy in Lily’s middle as she thought about her mother’s withholding of the truth about her father. They sat there, all three of them in a circle, looking up at the moon with necks craned and prone. The globe Lily thought she knew appeared to be dying in the sky. The color bled a slow orange pool through the facade and it looked like the man in the moon was changing into a costume, perhaps to play a role as a blood orange in some overacted space drama about fruit murder. Then she thought that maybe their dear moon just needed a change, to feel like someone else for one night. She smoothed out her dress over knobby knees, reached into the basket for the binoculars, and took a closer look. Through the glasses, all the craters on the surface looked deeper and darker in the changed light of the earth’s shadow. He was so beautiful she longed to pluck him from the sky and put him in her basket. Feeling decidedly unwanted by the two humans lying next to her, Lily decided someday, if all else failed, she would marry the moon.

  Siren Song

  Farallon Islands, California, 1874

  After a month at the job, Olive found herself relegated to the kitchen in the lighthouse keeper’s shared quarters more often than she felt comfortable with. In addition to her confinement to the kitchen, there was the disturbing fact that Richardson began using terms like “tender” and “intuitive” to describe her cooking, which led her to believe that she was in grave danger of being found out, or perhaps already had been. “You have an uncanny, intuitive way around a stew,” he would say. Or, “These blackened rabbit haunches are simply the most tender I’ve ever tasted.” Despite the fact that it meant she was perhaps revealed, she took some pride in the compliments, as her culinary skills were part of the small, intangible parcel she had left of her mother.

  She began plotting her escape plan, should she be officially discovered. And whenever a whiff of fairer-sexed terminology made its way off Richardson’s tongue, she quickly changed the subject.

  “A fine sort of cook you are, dear boy,” he began, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.”

  “Richardson,” she diverted. “You mentioned you might show me to the abalone caves soon.”

  “I did indeed and I have not kept my word. I do apologize, but I’ve been kept busy with those rapscallion eggers trying to work out some sort of deal so they don’t make me ‘pay’ for eggs that are my god-given right to collect.” Every time Richardson began to talk about the Pacific Egg Company men, he grew red in the face and poured himself whiskey. “Liars and thieves, the lot of them. They have tried every means in their power to effect my removal. But I’ve started my own plea with the inspector, did I mention?” He poured another two fingers of brown liquid, “And have made headway by sending documentation of their untoward activities on this island to Washington. I expect these men will soon know who, in fact, is the true keeper of the Farallone Light.”

  Olive let Richardson snort and harrumph his way through the end of his tall pour of whiskey without interrupting, satisfied that at least he was off the subject of her fine and tender anything. He rubbed his eyes and ranted, shifting in his chair or laying a hand flat on the table when he wanted to punctuate. As she scrubbed the dishes clean, she tried again.

  “Perhaps, Richardson, you might just oblige me with directions to the abalone cave so that I may visit it on my own tomorrow. I do believe it’s my afternoon off.”

  “Of course, boy. I’ll draw you a map and leave it on the table tomorrow morn. And if you wouldn’t mind bringing some abalone home tomorrow, I know you can manage some delicious and tempting cioppino for tomorrow’s dinner. That’s Italian for seafood stew, if you don’t know. My grandmother was Italian.”

  Olive craned her head back a little to release the little cricks in her neck as she finished up the dishes.

  “Of course, Richardson. Despite my mother being Irish, I know it well. She was a fine cook and not choosy over the origin of a good recipe. I’ll come up with something.” Talking about her mom made Olive feel that she was close at hand, in one form or another.

  The next morning the map was there, as promised, drawn in the crude hand of what appeared to be a seven-year-old. There was a dotted line indicating the trail that traveled past the eggers’ camp and past a little shed she knew was called the egg house by the eggers. After that, the line curved around seal rock and up and over a steep series of pinnacles with steep inclines, and finally all the way on the far side of the island an X marked, “Jewel Cave.”

  The air felt particularly cold and close that morning, like it was trying to spirit its way up her sleeves and into her bones as she started out on the trail with her collecting basket and knife, her warm pocketed sweater on with a small leather pouch of salt and a small silver spoon she had kept from her mother’s silver set. It was the only relic of the set still in her possession. She decided to bring her blue rabbit with her and extracted him from the secret makeshift cage she’d constructed for him behind the barracks. He moved around in the basket, jostling and startling, poking his eyes up above the edge of the basket in the inch allowance if she lost her footing or jumped from rock to rock.

  “I’ll have to figure out a name for you,” she whispered to him as they neared the bend where the trail passed above the eggers’ camp. “You deserve a name after that stunt you pulled the other day.”

  She was tumbling monikers over like a stone in the water—Velvet, Salt, Skipper, Blueberry—trying each one out loud when a booming voice startled her.

  “Hey, you! Lighthouse boy.”

  She turned on her heel to find Warren, the tall egger who had shot the gun into the air to stop the others from their inquiry into her pants last time they met. His canvas vest was full to bulging with speckled murre eggs. The effect on his gruff countenance was more than a little ridiculous.

  “Yes?”

  “Heading somewhere in particular?”

  “And what business is it of yours, yolk beard?”

  “Yolk beard? That’s a first,” he laughed. “I just wouldn’t want a repeat of the other day.”

  “I should thank you for that, I suppose,” she said.

  “I suppose you should, but there’s no need. That’s just what good men do for each other, right?” He was still smirking a little from the yolk beard com
ment and patted her hard on the back.

  “Well. I was headed over to the abalone cave Richardson is always on about.” She took the map tentatively from her pocket. Warren leaned in and looked at the childish scrawls, his smirk widening into a full-blown laugh.

  “That Richardson is a card.” He shook his thick black curls in the breeze and looked up into the salty sky as if looking for what to say next. “I’ll take you there. This map will leave you stranded on the edge of a cliff like those seal pups that climbed up and got stuck last year. They died there, poor souls, yelping for days for their moms to get them down.”

  “Sounds like a tall tale, or a fable, if I’ve ever heard one,” Olive said, folding the map back up and into her pocket.

  “But it’s all true.” Warren gingerly removed his egg vest and stashed it in a divot in the rocks, covering the openings with a cloth from his back pocket so no gulls would recognize the contents and seize the opportunity to plunder. “You mentioned fables. A fan of literature, are you?” Warren asked as they started down the trail together.

  “In so much as I enjoy a good tale as much as the next…kiiiid.” She said the word “kid” carefully and slowly, as her mind had almost not sent the message to her mouth and she had been very close to saying “girl.”

  “Well, I’m a great appreciator of Greek mythology myself. Spent some time on a Greek fishing boat,” he adjusted his Greek fishermen’s cap in punctuation, “and those men could sure spin a yarn, I tell you. On the boat’s where I first heard of sirens. You familiar with their story?”

  “Afraid not,” she said.

  “Well,the sirens are beautiful creatures that were thought to be the daughters of the river god Achelous, who the Greeks say was the son of Gaia and Oceanus, but that’s a whole other story for another time.”

  “So they were beautiful women,” Olive prodded him back onto the story of the sirens, glancing in her peripheral vision at this strange man, sizing up his hulking presence. Nineteen years old, Richardson had said. Hard to believe. No one had told her a good story since her mother had died and she was like a parched and eager wanderer at a well. “Then what?”

  “So the sirens were the most lovely of all women.” He made the sign of an hourglass with his hands. “There were two or three, and their names were very hard to pronounce, so you’ll have to forgive me, but these beautiful creatures had something of the sinister in them.”

  “Go on.” Olive’s mouth was getting dry with anticipation.

  “They sang a mellifluous song, always at midday, when the winds would calm. Their long flowing hair glided on the wind, turning circles in the air as if to compel the sailors toward the rocky shores like hypnotists. The song was sad and seductive and called the men closer, even when their sailor sense heralded them to steer clear of the rocks. The siren song would possess the men so completely they couldn’t help but dash their boats to splinters on the sharp cliffs, their bodies littered at the feet of the lovely, serene, yet evil, ladies.” He drew his hands in the air like a magician and made the sign of crashing boats on the rocks.

  “Oh. I love it,” Olive said, lost in the world of the story.

  “Well, as a young man you are supposed to heed the warning, not revel in the carnage of tempting women, or something like that. But maybe I’m telling the story wrong.”

  “No, I think you told it just right.” Olive smiled to herself.

  “The oldest fisherman on my ship, Alexio, always told the story with a horrifying ending where the sirens devoured the flesh of the sailors and their earthly blood spilled down their beautiful bodies as they sang and ate, sang and ate to the bodies of the foolish men.” He shook his head in memory. “The way Alexio spun it, this final scene could go on for a long time. Made me wonder about that man’s head a bit.”

  “The storyteller lingers where they choose to dwell, right?”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He snuck a glance at Olive, admiring her fine neck and chin. “Well, I think we’re almost at Jewel Cave.”

  Olive had been so caught up in the story she’d forgotten to look out for the landmarks. They had passed the egg house completely unbeknownst to her. The blue rabbit rearranged himself in the basket. Warren had not yet seemed to notice the third member of their party.

  “Over there.” Warren pointed to a narrowing in the trail that disappeared over a ledge. “We’re in luck that the tide is negative today.”

  As the pair approached the edge of the island, the water roared and raked against the rocks. A line of enormous elephant seals with their broad faces and long flubbery noses heaved great bodies into the water with what looked like enormous effort. Once in the ocean, however, they sailed out of view as if on wings. There was a sense, to Olive, that on this edge, the continual pounding of the rock by the surf served the purpose of informing humans that this was a place of great change, the liminal space between land and sea. It was a site where the burden of flesh translated into flight.

  Warren descended first down the rock face and after finding footing reached up to help Olive down to his level. He held her hand and she saw his eyes linger on her long, thin fingers and small wrist. Their shape betrayed her secret. He looked back up at her with a sort of detective’s eye and held her gaze for a long second. A panic struck her. Perhaps the day had finally come where she would be revealed, as she could not hide the delicate, womanly bones of her hands. She felt in that moment, with the sound of the surf filling her ears, her biology exposed. The thought of it made sweat break out on her tightly bound breast. She wondered if she were to heave herself into the sea like a seal, might she transform and escape the danger of the situation. Her mother had often told her of selkies, the women who turned into seals and escaped the world of men by flying into the unknown salted sea.

  Olive took a few deep breaths and scrambled the rest of the way down. At the bottom of the climb, there was an entrance to a cave that must have been completely hidden under the surface of the water during high tide. She pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her thin wrists and buried her hands in her pockets to try to conceal her dainty hands. Luckily, Warren seemed less concerned about her feminine hands and more concerned with the task at hand of entering the cave. He inspected the opening and looked out to sea with a faraway look. Olive secured her precious blue rabbit in his wicker cage into a divot in the rock by the entrance to the sea cave.

  The tide pools brimmed with anemones in all the colors of the rainbow—from large green tentacled things, to smaller orange ones, to teeny glowing red ones that looked like delicious wild berries. There were layers of pink and iridescent seaweed waving in the water as sea stars, chitins, and urchins mingled as though at a costume party. Bright yellow sea slugs dotted the rocks and made their glacial, merry way over to the dance floor. Olive was caught in her own reverie, swatting at the kelp flies as she combed the rocks, crouching and peering into each pool and imagining the party taking place. Suddenly Warren’s great paw lifted her by her collar and brought her away from the edge of the island just as a wave crashed up and over the rock she’d been squatting on.

  “Never turn your back to the sea,” he scolded. “Unless you wish to become part of it forever.”

  “Thank you,” she said, acutely aware that this was the second time he’d kept her from harm in as many weeks.

  “Let’s enter the cave on the left side. Always keep your eyes open and aware. I wouldn’t want you washed out to sea like a piece of flotsam.”

  The entrance was small enough only one person could fit through at a time, but once inside, the hollow rock opened up like a great hall. It took some time for their eyes to adjust to the dark once they’d passed the threshold. The air was instantly cooler by degrees and Olive was glad she had worn her wool sweater. The scent on the damp air was strong—fecund. They stood there for a moment before venturing farther and waited for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. On the ceili
ng of the cave, there was a small hole in the rock that let in just enough light for shapes to take form, the water reflecting back little stars of light catching on the wind rippling over the pool. As their eyes attuned to the dark, forms began to appear beneath the surface of the water. The delicate oblong curve of thousands of abalone shells began to appear. Each shell had a rippled pattern emanating from the apex and a line of small, evenly spaced holes along the outside near the opening.

  “You see that line of holes on the abalone?” Warren asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The fishermen once told me these sort of snails do everything through there. They breathe, excrete, and reproduce all through those tiny windows to the outside world. What a strange existence.”

  “Ensconced and protected from the world,” Olive said, reaching her finger into the water to trace the outline of one. She felt a kinship with the snail, veiled and protected by her secret.

  Warren peered down at her with a look of scrutiny as she traced a finger gently over an abalone that made her wriggle in her own scratchy wool shell as she stood back up. She felt suddenly exposed, and the idea of hiding like an abalone appealed more and more. Warren broke his gaze to pick up an empty shell and show her the dancing lines of pearlescent pink, white, and blue—colorful even in the low light of the cave. He found a small chink of light and held the shell up to it, letting the colors move and change with the deftness of a hypnotist’s wand.

  “Not a bad place to spend your days.” His eyes smiled as he watched the iridescent movement in the shell. “Dancing in the glittering ballroom of the self.”

  They watched the colors change in the shell and Olive felt the movement reflected in her own chest, the rise and fall of colors folding in on themselves. She could hear Warren’s breath next to her and she found it harder and harder to control her own. The anxiety over being discovered softened as the colors danced before her. She wondered, eyes fixed on the shell, if this were perhaps a cave-borne illness taking over her body. She might drop dead at any moment from asphyxiation. Or hypnotism. She wondered, then, as she gathered her breaths one by one enough to calm her heart, if perhaps she were simply falling for this gentle, observant man.