Birds

In September she started to paint birds. She cut them out of paper, pasted black flocks onto cardboard and spread them out on the sterile walls and ceiling of her bedroom. She watched them fly over her and her face would pale with serious contemplation.

Her family was confused. "What is this obsession with birds? Is this some sort of phase?" Her father joked in his awkward way.

"Obsession is an ugly word." She replied.

Under the scarlet and umber leaves she would quote poetry, which spoke of flying on spans of wings that spread over the land and could touch the sun. There was no need to understand her desires. No one saw them as anything but foolish obsessions of a teenage girl.

"Birds? Her mother moaned, leafing through the bird dictionaries Rachel brought home from the school library.

"Couldn't you have chosen a more interesting obsession?" Her brother laughed his mouth thick with the remnants of his crackers and cheese.

Rachel did not answer. Her mother sighed and put on a sweater. She didn't know what to do with her peculiar daughter, so petite and quiet who rejected society, who wouldn't talk on the phone with friends and didn't share in the discussion at the family dinner table. She couldn't help feeling as though her real daughter had been taken by the fairies, and replaced with this dark changeling instead. It was hard to love her sometimes.

She thought on her young life more than most teenagers; things appeared to her in a way that was unusual for a young woman her age. Words rang with a truth that she could not understand fully for her years had not quite gathered enough to carry the strength of such knowledge. Yet realizing how small her world was, she longed for more than ordinary. Sounds reverberated through her contemplative mind and vibrated with a rhythm that was unfamiliar to her. In the waning moments of the day, when things were quiet and lonely, the shadows of her doubts and disappointments crept up and filled that inconsistent area of her heart that was weak and susceptible to negativity. Nothing but her world of the imaginary, filled with color and sound could free her form this mundane.

She would get carried away in the beautiful poetry that played on her stereo and she would cry with sorrow that erupted out of no where, shaking her frame which curled over her desktop in despaired loneliness and unrest. She would lose herself once again and it would take many hours or days to readjust itself again-A constant sorrow that had not quite healed and not quite begun. The confines and expectations of her small town sucked up the nutrients of her soul. No nourishment could be found here in a town of the conformed and processed.

It was the outside that fed her. The strange woman down the street told her about the migration of geese, the unity of their species. She bought a bird house and hung it in the tree. Numerous species of birds would come, filling up the yard, a mosaic tiling of brown, black, grey, red and blue.

"Rachel, please. Why don't you become friends with people? Things you can talk to." Her mother almost cried one night. "You know mammals. That can speak the English language."

Rachel couldn't defend herself. "I'm trying." She answered quietly and went up to her room to read.

By this time she had decided spending time alone and thinking was more valuable than interacting with her peers. On nice sunny days she would venture out into the brown paper-bag smell of fall, walking along the road until it narrowed into a secluded pathway. She would take her schoolwork and read in the local cemetery. There was a tree that overlooked the waving flags and factory-processed flowers and there she sat. After an interval of working she would lie on the crisp grass and copper colored leaves, thinking deep down into the soil, imagining the breathless bodies, victims of death, being hugged by the nutrient-rich soil. Her fear of death would give way at those moments and she would imagine herself someday, at the bottom of the world, flesh disintegrating and being fed to worm families that burrowed their way into her coffin.

Better to be cremated she determined. Better to be taken by the less judgmental air, flying wherever the wind willed. She would want to be let off over the ocean, somewhere far away from the confining shores of New England where people dressed in somber wools and wore scarves chicly over sweatpants and designer boots.

After awhile she thought about trying sex. It wasn't really something to try, like a piece of cake or a drink. But that was the word her mother used when Karen down the street got pregnant out of wedlock. "I just don't see why she would want to try sex." Her mother had said. It made sense to Rachel.

She started to date a boy named Bill and within two weeks she had given "it" up. She didn't bleed. It hurt like hell but she didn't bleed. If she could do it over she would have been drunk. That way she wouldn't have felt herself split apart like a piece of wood. They held each other, he was very nice but he did not understand what to do. "Motion like the ocean" someone had laughed in the hallway at school once. Rachel imagined herself being pulled back and forth like a wave under the influence of the moon. That was what sex was supposed to be like, sensual and natural like it was in her dreams. It wasn't that interesting. It was something to do, something she was proud of. Afterwards, she felt stretched and hallowed out. It felt good, like holding a secret that no one else was allowed to know. It was a privilege that added mystery and glamour to her demure. Bill had no glamour. He was thick, sporty and logical. She broke up with him saying she wanted to be alone. He did not seem to mind.

"What do you want to do?" The counselor's red hair sprung up in singed tufts at the sides and back of her head. "You must have goals. In this fast-paced world there is a lot of competition. You must be ready to stay ahead of the crowd. Those without motivations will be left behind."

Rachel did not want to fight for the top of the corporate line. She did not want to come home from conformity tired and hollow like her father.

The frizzy-tufted counselor handed out sheets for the student's goals. The black and white boxes stared up at Rachel with contempt. She did not fill in her goals. She returned the blank boxes.

The counselor put on her fuchsia glasses, which hung from a beaded chain around her neck.

"You must have something you want in life." Rachel did not answer, she looked through the counselor's glasses, at the lines, the drooping eyelids and the woman's dark under-eyes like tiny blue moons. The truth was, she could not see her future. It did not fit on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch plane. The counselor tapped her fingers and shifted in her cushioned chair. "Well. You simply can't leave your life uncharted." Rachel was not allowed to go back to class until she filled out at least half of the sheet.

They came again, the dreams that kept her paralyzed in bed in the mornings; she would lie still trying to keep her heart inside her ribs. She would cough a little, to jumpstart her body into motion. They were "stuck" dreams, where she could not move her limbs and could barely open her eyes to see, standing in a hallway or a room unable to get out. They were signals to her body, a reminder that time was ticking by. "It is almost time to go," she would whisper to herself.

"Why?" Her peers at school would ask in their perplexed way of someone who had never crossed the state border. "Why would you want to leave?" She knew that was what they would say they would not mind if she left, but they would not understand. She hadn't had an answer until today, when she sat in the graveyard. "If I do not leave soon," she told the graves around her, "if I do not leave soon...I never will." That was what she would tell them when the time came; there was no need for any longer explanation than that.

"It is time for migration," she whispered to the naked, skeleton trees. The last Canadian Geese called to each other as their shadows brushed over the golden trampled grasses.

She knew what it would be like if she stayed. She would be carded and numbered like everyone else. She would be placed in a box with short walls that she could see over into other boxes where grey people in grey suits stared at offensively crisp computer screens. She would work in a coffin of modern concrete and fluorescent. Eventually forgetting the birds, forgetting the fresh air and she would drown under the deadlines and the office supplies. When they took her away in her own wooden coffin and buried her under the Earth, her gravestone would declare: "She died of fear. She was found many times by other co-workers at her desk, staring at a stalled solitaire game. She was heard to say during these incidents that she was unable to decide which card to flip over, there were so many options and she might choose the wrong one. She was paralyzed by the fear of error and eventually, she died."

Rachel liked the beginning of snow, before it was defiled by the cars, the footprints and the dogs. The graves were hidden, dusted with snow, speckled white and black. The snow covered up the names and histories. She could no longer sit outside.

Tiny lines of triangular bird feet trekked back and forth through the seedless yards. In these winter months there was nothing to turn their seeds into sunflowers.

The snow continued to layer itself upon the ground, weighing her down as it did mailboxes and flowerbeds. When she walked outside, she could no longer see the Earth. She imagined the snow falling upon her, pressing her chest, burying her in a glove of frosted darkness. She missed the summer birds, hearing their musical twittering in the haze of the early morning. They will come back she reminded herself as the sunlight faded into winter's unforgiving darkness.

It was Valentine's Day. There were chocolates, expected bouquets and impersonal printed messages stuck to white and red lollipops. She watched people pass these things out to one another. She was invited to a Valentine's baking party at the house of one of the pink girls. The hostess snapped her gum over lacquered lips and orange-tinted skin from bottle tans and thick foundation. They smiled when she talked, but their eyes were vacant with disinterest, quick to change the subject whenever convenient, any moment when they could tilt the conversation towards themselves.

She could see the hope in her mother's eyes when she returned hours later, but all she had to offer her mother were pink sugar cookies with little to say about her prospective friends.

The wind began to soften again, whispering to her in the late afternoons of March, making promises of what lay ahead. Her heart quickened as the sun lengthened the days and warmed the muddy, cracked ground. She felt a change in the earth, a shift. The time had come.

The birds returned, filling the trees, but she was not there-her family could not find her and as the days lengthened, it seemed she had vanished with the melting snow. They didn't know where she went. Her mother began to feed the birds, filling her daughter's feeders that hung in the backyard trees. Her parents had spent many nightly conversations discussing their daughter's "situation."

"It's not as if she's a drug addict, as if we could send her to rehab." Her father said, exasperated.

"Maybe she is. Maybe that's the reason for it all." Her mother was desperate to find a physical solution to her daughter's abnormalities. Her husband snorted.

"She's just peculiar. How easy it would be if she was a drug addict. Then I would know I'd fucked up with her in some way. But as it is, she's simply abnormal.'

"Should we give up then?" One last attempt at a conclusion. He shrugged indifferently.

That was that - the end of such conversations.

Her mother remembered Rachel's face, filling her hands with black and white slivers, lovingly spilling them into the troughs of the feeder. In those instances, watching Rachel from afar, her daughter was strangely beautiful and she almost understood her...almost.

Rachel's mother bought a bird book and sat in the peppery summer afternoons, matching birds with her index, marking the pictures to the birds that flocked the feeders, tipping out seeds which speckled the ground like tiny graves. When the sunflowers grew, their rich golden faces turned towards the sky, she noticed a new bird she could not identify. Flipping through the guidebook's pages, flashes of red X's rushing past, she could not find a match. The bird watched her intently, hopping closer than any of the other birds, cocking its head to the side and chirping softly. Rachel's mother called the "bird" neighbor who taught her daughter to study the migration of geese and ducks before Rachel disappeared.

"Murielle," the neighbor remarked, never taking her eyes off the little black bird, which was small and beautiful in its strangeness. "You seem to have a new species on your hands, at least one I have never seen before. Consider yourself lucky that you've witnessed such a phenomenon." The bird looked at them, so small and sincere.

"Truly fascinating," Murielle breathed. "If only Rachel were here." The words, fighting the thickness in her throat, "She would have simply fallen in love with it."