Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(12)
BP: Speaking for all the readers who adore “Something About Birds,” let me say that we’d kill for a short story cycle built around it.
WW: Oh, I’ve given up on writing. “Something About Birds” is a fitting conclusion to my little writing career as that story continues to do its job, Benjamin.
Mr. Wheatley says, “That went well, didn’t it?”
Wheatley is shorter than Ben but not short, broad in the chest and shoulders, a wrestler’s build. His skin is pallid and his dark brown eyes focused, attentive, and determined. His hair has thinned but he still has most of it, and most of it is dark, almost black. He wears a tweed sports coat, gray wool pants, a plum-colored sweater vest, a white shirt, a slate bow tie that presses against his throat tightly as though it were gauze being applied to a wound. He smiled throughout the interview. He is smiling now.
“You were great, Mr. Wheatley. I cannot thank you enough for the opportunity to talk to you about my favorite story.”
“You are too kind.” Wheatley drums his fingers on the dining room table at which they are sitting and narrows his eyes at Ben, as though trying to bring him into better focus. “Before you leave, Benjamin, I have something for you.”
Ben swirls the last of his room-temperature Earl Grey tea around the bottom of his cup and decides against finishing it. Ben stands as Wheatley stands, and he checks his pocket for his phone and his recorder. “Oh, please, Mr. Wheatley, you’ve been more than gracious—”
“Nonsense. You are doing me a great service with the interview. It won’t be but a moment. I will not take no for an answer.” Wheatley continues to talk as he disappears into one of the three other rooms with closed doors that spoke out from the wheel of the impeccable and brightly lit living/dining room. The oval dining room table is the centerpiece of the space and is made of a darkly stained wood and has a single post as thick as a telephone pole. The wall adjacent to the kitchen houses a built-in bookcase, the shelves filled to capacity, the tops perched with vases and brass candelabras. On the far wall rectangular, monolithic windows, their blue drapes pulled wide open, vault toward the height of the cathedral ceiling, their advance halted by the crown molding. The third-floor view overlooks Dunham Street, and when Ben stands in front of a window he can see the red awning of Wheatley’s antiques shop below. The room is beautiful, smartly decorated, surely full of antiques that Ben is unable to identify; his furniture and décor experience doesn’t extend beyond IKEA and his almost pathological inability to put anything together more complex than a nightstand.
Wheatley reemerges from behind a closed door. He has an envelope in one hand and something small and strikingly red cupped in the palm of the other.
“I hope you’re willing to indulge an old man’s eccentricity.” He pauses and looks around the room. “I thought I brought up a stash of small white paper bags. I guess I didn’t. Benjamin, forgive the Swiss-cheese memory. We can get a bag on our way out if you prefer. Anyway, I’d like you to have this. Hold out your hands, please.”
“What is it?”
Wheatley gently places a bird head into Ben’s hands. The head is small; the size of a half-dollar coin. Its shock of red feathers is so bright, a red he’s never seen, only something living could be that vivid, and for a moment Ben is not sure if he should pat the bird head and coo soothingly or spastically flip the thing out of his hands before it nips him. The head has a prominent, brown-yellow beak, proportionally thick, and as long as the length of the head from the top to its base. The beak is outlined in shorter black feathers that curl around the eyes as well. The bird’s pitch-black pupils float in a sea of a more subdued red.
“Thank you, Mr. Wheatley. I don’t know what to say. Is it? Is it real?”
“This is a red-headed barbet from northern South America. Lovely creature. Its bill is described as horn-colored. It looks like a horn, doesn’t it? It feeds on fruit but it also eats insects as well. Fierce little bird, one befitting your personality, I think, Benjamin.”
“Wow. Thank you. I can’t accept this. This is too much—”
“Nonsense. I insist.” He then gives Ben an envelope. “An invitation to an all-too-infrequent social gathering I host here. There will be six of us, you and I included. It’s in—oh my—three days. Short notice, I know. The date, time, and instructions are inside the envelope. You must bring the red-headed barbet with you, Benjamin, it is your ticket to admittance, or you will not be allowed entrance.” Wheatley chuckles softly and Ben does not know whether or not he is serious.
BP: There’s so much wonderful ambiguity and potential for different meanings. Let’s start in the beginning, with the strange funeral procession of “Something About Birds.” An adult, Mr. H______ is presumably the father of one of the children, who slips up and calls him “Dad.”
WW: Yes, of course. “It’s too hot for costumes, Dad.”
BP: That line is buried in a pages-long stream-of-consciousness paragraph with the children excitedly describing the beautiful day and the desiccated, insect-ridden body of the dead bird they take turns carrying. It’s an effective juxtaposition and wonderfully disorienting use of omniscient POV, and I have to admit, when I first read the story, I didn’t see the word “Dad” there. I was surprised to find it on the second read. Many readers report having had the same experience. Did you anticipate that happening?