Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(65)
It got so bad that I stopped asking.
In ensuing years, Neha and many of my other sisters were married off. Sorted out, arranged, and packed away. Bus stops with their tang of sweat and diesel on your tongue. Train stations odorous with dust and cheap perfume and the ashy smell of sparks from rail tracks. Young girls appeared and replaced my sisters—a ceaseless commotion of laughs and shouts and dopattas flying in the courtyard wind. I loved them all, but, bless my memory, I remember few. Sometimes when I peered at their faces, it seemed as if their features blurred and ran together and one familiar mask emerged, winter breath rising from its lips like smoke. When that happened, I would get up and walk to the entrance of the orphanage. I would stand there and watch the world beyond those walls, an unfettered landscape stretching away beyond the limits of my vision. Somewhere out there, I thought, you didn’t need to be wedded to resignation or despair. There was stuff in between. Hearths instead of stoves. If you got too warm, you could step away. You could leave. You didn’t have to leave. You didn’t have to fear leaving, or falling, or ceaselessly circling and not ever coming to rest.
You could travel to the ends of the earth. You didn’t have to fear remembering.
By then I was busy helping Bibi run the orphanage. I had to put such thoughts out of my head. Still, I sometimes dreamed. Of discomfiting things that became grainy, wispy echoes in the morning. Crossroads with signs askew pointing this way and that; graveyards planted next to wedding halls; windows that shuttered open and closed; doorways that seemed to lead to more doorways, their gaping mouths atremble with flickering light; and in the distance, always, the flutter of dark wings. I would wake from these dreams with my fists darkened by sweat and dust, the taste of smoke already fading from my tongue.
The bird man still visited. He crouched on his shawl and twittered and chirped and spread the gilded envelopes, waiting for his parakeets to tell his admirers’ fortunes. Maybe I was getting older or he, but his bird music seemed duller to me, as if his voice had aged. Once he came inside the orphanage to talk to Bibi Soraiya about something and my sisters gathered around him. I sat and watched him play to the girls. He turned his head from side to side. His turban fell off. I picked it up and handed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said, dusting it with his large earthy hand. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s time to take this off for good.”
“Why?”
“Vanity be damned, it’s just an old turban, you know.” He laughed, a loud, booming sound that startled me. “One can dream, but that won’t change it to a crown.” His eyes looked a little feverish. He said, “You know sparrows are a delicacy in Gujranwala. They trap dozens in nets and roast them slow on large stoves. My father used to go eat with friends once in a while, but my mother would get angry. She said the poor things had no meat on them at all and it was a sin to take so many tiny lives for nothing.”
I must have frowned or my face lost color, for he changed the subject. Shortly after, he left.
The oddest thing I remember after Apa’s departure?
Exactly forty days after Bibi took her to the train station, all the birds, the silent birds, the soaring, splendid birds that came to us from every corner of Lahore, stopped visiting. The courtyard trees grew heavy with unpecked fruit, the electric poles became forlorn. Long after they vanished, the courtyard remained filled with the rich, old smell of bird. (These days, the odor makes me break out in a sweat.)
And in our rooms the mirrors rippled and moonlight changed and people from the past walked restlessly back and forth between places of someone else’s making.
Pigeon from Hell
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
I would have done CPR if there’d have been any chance of CPR working. I’m certified, I mean. You don’t get to put your name up on the babysitting board at church unless you’re certified.
For the whole month after what happened, that’s what I kept wanting to tell Tad and Kim Rogers. That, if there would have been even the slightest chance, even the whisper of one, even the ghost of the ghost of a hope, then I would have straddled Ben’s small body in the street, never mind my new skirt, or the toes of my new shoes, or getting blood all over me, never mind any of that. I would have sat right there on him in the middle of traffic and everything, and I would have breathed all the life I could into him, and then pressed on his sternum with the heel of my right hand, my left hand on top of it, heavy but not too heavy. What I wanted to tell them, to show them, was that I would have done that until the ambulance screeched up, and then the medics would have had to pull me off. But I would have been clawing at the asphalt, trying to get back, to pump his heart just one more time. To get one last breath into his chest.
Promise.
Really.
Kara could have done it too, if she’d been there, instead of crying into the phone about she didn’t know where he was, that’s why she was calling, goddamnit.
Who she was calling at that point, it was the cops.
Thing was, it could have been me on my knees by Tad and Kim Rogers’s breakfast bar at six thirty on a Friday, their phone dragged down with me. Except it wasn’t my turn.
We were trading babysitting jobs, Kara and me. She’d get one, then I’d get one. The idea was that, if we traded like that, our money would save at the same rate, so when we went shopping together right before our senior year, we’d have the same amount, could get the same halter tops and skirts we were planning to own the school with.