Rare Birds: Stories

Rare Birds, 1959-4

But she didn’t need to worry about that anymore.

Love is now the stardust of yesterday

The music of the years gone by

As she went to hang up her things in the bedroom she paused before the dresser mirror, staring at herself. Her face was mottled with bumps like she was a teenager again, but even more frightening were her eyes: they were veined with black, as if a pen were bleeding into the whites. Her eyesight was fine—better than fine lately, the world had taken on a purplish tint that seemed to yield a new sharpness. Now as she gazed at herself she realized that she could actually see it, she could see the black feathering outwards, it was filling her eyes—

She clapped her hands over her face like a child and when she looked again it was still there, though now her reflection swam from her tears.

But that was long ago

Now my consolation

Is in the stardust of a song

Elsa stood in the little bedroom and cried, her coat and hat slipping to the floor. She cried for herself, for Mary; she cried for her son and the lies she had told him to ease their parting; she cried for her empty room and her empty arms and her body that was leaving her, for her own fear and loneliness, for all the women who had ever been hurt so, for all the women made birds.

3.

The knocking, loud and sudden, made Elsa squawk with fright. It took a moment to calm her fluttering heart and turn down the television, a complicated process of hooking the dial with her fingernail and nudging it. She had always been proud of her hands, how small and shapely they were, but they were nearly gone now. Her fingers had first become painfully stiff, then fused into three clawlike digits. Now calluses were growing over what had been her finger joints, just before the first line of feathers.

She waddled to the door, trembling with both nerves and hope. It was the wrong day for her grocery delivery, and rent wasn’t due for a week yet. She had told herself she was staying in the apartment because it was familiar and she did not want to burden her few, distant relatives; but in truth it was because leaving felt too final to bear. What if Robert decided to come back, or Bobby came looking for her? What if Mary, with all her money, was able to find a cure, only couldn’t find Elsa to share it with her?

But when Elsa looked through the peephole, there was nothing.

She turned off the overhead light, then seized the chain with her beak and tested it, making sure it was securely fastened; only then did she open the door a crack.

Before her, on the ratty welcome mat, was a paper grocery bag with a note clipped to one side. Elsa couldn’t see inside the bag, but she could smell it: meat and spices and something that she had only recently learned to identify.

Seeds.

Crouching low, she eased one clawed hand through the gap, hooking the bag and pulling it to the door. The note wasn’t a note but a postcard, a picture topped with fancy calligraphy: Philomela and Procne. The light in the hallway was dim, but in the last few weeks Elsa’s eyesight had become nothing short of remarkable, the world taking on a purple-tinted sharpness that let her see even the gnats that made their way through her window screens. Now she tilted the postcard to see the whole image, only to cry out.

Two women with the heads of birds, their spread arms sprouting wings.

“My Nana was like you,” a voice said from the left.

Elsa jerked backwards, terrified; she tried to shove the door closed but it caught on the bag.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m Doreen, I live downstairs.” A housedress and apron suddenly appeared, filling the gap between door and frame. “I—I saw you the other night,” she continued, dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Taking out your trash. My Nana went the same way, and I just thought …”

She trailed off; Elsa could see her hands wringing atop her apron. Slowly she rose to standing, taking in Doreen’s wide-eyed face, the flush in her cheeks.

“My momma used to make that meatloaf for Nana, she always liked it.” Her blush deepened. “And I thought … my husband’s away for a few days, and you don’t seem to have anyone who can do for you.”

Still Elsa just looked at her, her breath coming in whistling gasps through her beak. As frightened as she was, she could not stop staring at Doreen: there was a strange mottling on her arm and jawline, some kind of discoloration.

Elsa could think of very few things that would mark a woman in just those places.

“Well,” Doreen said, ducking her head. “I’m, ah, I’m downstairs in 2B, if you ever need—”

“Wait,” Elsa said quickly.

That is, she meant to say wait, but it came out as another squawk; still Doreen paused as Elsa worked the chain off and opened the door completely. Only then did she realize she was letting this woman see her, really see her, when she could barely look at herself and dared not go out save in the dead of night.

But Doreen just smiled. “You look like her,” she said. She reached out and stroked Elsa’s shoulder, and the sensation made Elsa’s eyes well, made the purple world shimmer for a moment.

“Coffee?” Elsa asked, and this time she didn’t wince at the sound of her own voice.

“Really?” Doreen’s smile grew warm, open. “I’d like that.”

She bent over, picking up the bag, and Elsa saw it then: how she flinched at some pain in her arm, how for a moment her skin rippled with the first hint of a rash that just as quickly faded. For now, but what might happen when next he struck her, or abused her in some other way?

There could not be so much hurt in the world, Elsa could not believe it; yet she could see it in this woman, like something sleeping.

But if she could see it, maybe she could stop it.

She stepped aside and let Doreen in.