Fiction Friday: About a Bird

About a Bird

The hum of the airplane engine vibrates the floor beneath my feet. The fog of white noise from the same fills my ears. I strain over the passenger sitting next to me, trying to look out the window and am able to catch only a glimpse of the green land below. From this height, the landmass is an alligator head submerged in the blue-blue sea. The large man in the window seat shifts and his massive body blocks the tiny portlike window of the plane.

The bird’s face came to me in a dream, although I didn’t tell anyone that when I booked my trip.

The first time I dreamed its face, that’s all I saw. The head of this blue bird with this fancy crown of feathers pluming out. Almost like a peacock’s fan but smaller and sticking out in every direction, like electrical wires, or a crown. Like wiry roots on a plant that’s been pulled from its dirt. The bird’s face had this yellow beak that pointed at me in the dream, and those red eyes, with pupils like arrowheads, shining like pomegranate seeds in its silky blue face. When I awoke, I rolled over to ask Roger what kind of bird it was. It had felt so real. But of course, Roger wasn’t there anymore.

The pilot’s voice crackles over the speakers, I hear something about making our final decent, but his words are too garbled to understand the rest. I settle into my seat, pressing my head into the vinyl and close my eyes. The bird’s face is there. Staring at me with those ruby eyes. The first time the dream came I didn’t think much of it. The second time, I wondered. The third, fourth, fifth times it came, I told my shrink, Helen, about the dream as I spread pictures of tropical birds on her coffee table.

The plane jerks and the bird is gone from my mind for a blessed instant, but pops right back into place after an moment.

At first it was just the face I saw, like now. But after weeks of that bird showing up in every dream, I started to see other things too. The feathers grew into long sleek palm trees, their roots creeping down over the bird’s eyes. The great palms would sway and then bend and whip in a circle as a storm brewed up. A few weeks later, in another dream, the feathers spread out and extended into fleshy fingers reaching out and up, reaching, reaching until clasped by another hand. The fingers intertwined so intimately, that I’d awakened with tears pooling in my ears and a cry blocking my breath.

I glance out the window and can see green rushing toward us. The plane pounds hard once against the runway and then pops back into the air before settling down on the hard-packed dirt runway.

When I told Helen about the bird bringing the beetle, she decided something must be done. She wrote out a prescription to help me get some sleep, as I described the great black beetle. Its head deep inside the bird’s mouth, long streaking entrails leaking from between its back legs. One wing, a web of iridescence slipping out from between the crack in the thick black shell.

                  The air nearly swallows me whole like gaping jaws dripping with moisture when I step from the plane onto the red packed dirt runway. The travel brochure said it was a tropical climate, said it would be humid, but I wasn’t prepared and I have to pause and take a few deep breaths before I can get my bearings. The man holding the ‘The Great Bird Tour’ leans against a small white bus that his chipped and rusting.

 “New Guinea?” My mother had said as we sat in her smoke-tinged apartment a week before my trip. My sister Connie was there too. Sitting in the overstuffed recliner, the yellow light of the rusted floor lamp turning the chair’s dark green into an indeterminable color. Connie picked dried split hairs out of the end of her bleached braid and let them fall on the brown vest she wore still, from working her shift gas station down on Jersey avenue. The vest hung open showing her round baby belly. The bellybutton ring that had no doubt played a part in enticing her current expectant state poked out at me, the skin stretching the pink-tinged holes tight as though she was making room for a gage. Sometimes seeing Connie like this, my own scar tingles down in my abdomen. I ball my fingers into a fist to resist running them the length of the jagged scare. Mine would have been born to a father and a mother. Would have had a home. Connie’s will have only her.

“Why New Guinea?” Mother repeated between puffs, when I didn’t answer.

“It’s Roger,” Connie snorted.

“Is it?” Mother said pointing at me with her cigarette.

“Not everything is about that,” I say.

The bus bumps and pounds my body against the rough wooden bench seat as it climbs and jolts through the forest. Not everything is about Roger and the accident, Not everything is about grief, about loss. Somethings are about a bird.