Hummingbird Salamander(3)
Nine through eleven followed one through three. Had I missed a passageway? It was a warren, with several crossroads. Perhaps the storage units went on forever, the space wandering beneath the mountains in some terrifyingly infinite way. A moment of panic, at the thought of getting lost, as I kept walking and didn’t find number seven.
But I found the right door.
Or the wrong door, depending on your point of view.
[3]
“It was all meant to be” is a powerful drug. Crossing that threshold into Unit 7, I couldn’t have told you what was preordained and what was chance. Or how long it might take to separate the two.
All I saw at first was the emptiness of some square stripped-bare cliché of an interrogation room. A modest wooden chair stood near the back, under flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling. A medium-sized cardboard box sat on the chair.
I stood in the doorway and stared at the box on the chair for a long time. Left the door open behind me, an instinct about doors slamming shut that wasn’t paranoid. The trap could be anywhere. It was so still, so antiseptic, inside. Except for one moldy panel of the back wall. I don’t recall dust motes even. Like a crime scene wiped clean.
But I checked the far, dark corner, the ceiling, before walking up to the chair. I did that much.
Just an ordinary cardboard box. The top flaps had been folded shut. Lightweight, when I gave it an experimental nudge. No sound coming out of it, either. No airholes. Nothing like a puppy or kitten, then. Immense relief in that.
I put down my purse, pulled back first one flap and then the other.
I think I laughed, nervously.
But there was no moment of misunderstanding, of recoiling in horror. A small object lay in the bottom of the box. A curio? Like the horse figurines my mother used to collect. Which is when it struck me this might all be an elaborate joke.
A tiny bird perched down there. Sitting dead. Taxidermy.
A hummingbird in midflight, attached by thick wire from below to a small pedestal. Frozen wings. Frozen eyes. Iridescent feathers.
Beside the hummingbird, I found a single piece of paper, with two words written on it and a signature.
* * *
Hummingbird
.. .. ..
Salamander
—Silvina
* * *
Oh, Silvina, thank you for not scrawling “Find me” across the bottom of your note.
Thank you for knowing that wasn’t necessary.
[4]
A man who could’ve been the brother of the first driver took me home, at the wheel of a car more anonymous and darker than the first. The landscape seemed compressed, moved past more quickly, so we were back in the city sooner. Or I just wasn’t paying attention.
Hummingbird. Salamander. One there, one not, and the one not there the creature I knew so well from childhood. The overturning of rocks. The swirl of the river and the sway of the tiny river plants. The deep-green moss. All those expeditions so long ago.
I sat silent in the backseat with the box guarded by my knees, arms engulfing it gently. So I wouldn’t crush it. Dead, but somehow alive, able to be wounded. I didn’t dare open the flaps to stare at it for fear the driver would see. I had no thought. Nothing at all. Or maybe I was held by the outline of memories I’d left behind. The look of rage on my grandfather’s face. The slack, pale form of my brother by the river.
No therapist ever told me I should forget my childhood, because I hated therapists and had never seen one. But I knew that forgetting was best. Let the dead stay dead. Make dead what was still alive. Move forward.
It wasn’t the box or the storage unit. I don’t know exactly what tried to pin me back there, trap me, except the sense of not being in control.
[5]
Early afternoon. No one would be home. I had already taken care of my boss and texted in sick. I set the box on the kitchen counter, next to my purse. Tossed my coat on the living room couch, came back to the counter, hesitated … then opened the box and removed the hummingbird.
I regarded it from a precarious kitchen island stool, on the edge of that expanse of wood and marble. Spotless stainless steel, double sinks, a cutting station on wheels, a sparkling black-and-white stove, a smart refrigerator I’d deliberately fucked up so it couldn’t report back.
Somehow, the hummingbird dominated that space beyond its size. Beyond even what I could’ve thought it meant at the time.
The hummingbird had a fierce aspect, jet-black feathers, smoothed out and yet bristling. Even the beak, long and slen der, made me think of a blade or a needle meant to draw blood. I imagined a dozen of its kind circling someone’s head like guardians or a crown of thorns. Hard to imagine this species sipping delicate from a flower, but I didn’t know much about hummingbirds. Our neighborhood didn’t have them, nor any school I attended, and they’d been rare on the farm. We didn’t plant a lot of flowers.
The thick wire attached to the dead bird had the look of dull silver. The stand had a glossy look, almost a deep red. On the bottom I found the letters “R.S.” Plain, crudely carved. By the maker or by Silvina?
Taxidermy registered strange to me. The language of taxidermy made no sense. I didn’t like bars or restaurants where they signaled “macho” through deer or bear trophies on the wall. Macabre. Pathological. But this—this came from a different impulse. Secretive and elusive. The bird’s body caused a disconnect. The stillness, and then the way the eyes weren’t blank but staring at me.