Girl with Bird

by Frances Gill

This morning Sarah woke up with something wriggling around in her belly. She is home for the holidays so she spreads wide the Pocahontas curtains and opens the transom window to let in winter air. When she’s here she tries to develop her tactile understanding of childhood so she scrapes the outside wood of the house with her palms and then presses the cold butts of dirty hands to her eyelids. She has a theory that by aggressively conjoining sensory input she can induce synesthesia.

She feels like a toucan is rustling anxiously around in her uterus. His beak doesn’t fit in there, and he is perching it awkwardly on her cervix. No man can understand the mind of a bird and she certainly doesn’t understand the mind of this one, trying to nest in the wrong womb, trying to pluck fruit from fallopian tubes and gobble it up. She pokes one finger gingerly into her flesh. The bird squawks.

Downstairs her mom smells like butter. She’s baking barrelfuls of Chex Mix and Scandinavian holiday cookies. “Mom, I think there’s a bird in me.”

Her mother is moving frantically about the kitchen like a culinary Tasmanian devil. She’s rattling through the junk drawer for some particular utensil, manuevering dough into figure eights, basting a roast duck, popping marshmellows into her mouth to stifle yawns. She looks nervously around her food kingdom and then stops fidgeting to address her daughter.

“Sarah, I was nineteen when I first got married. Senior year of high school I spent whole afternoons fantasizing about sitting room color schemes and embroidered throw pillows and baby shower party games. Prom didn’t even cross my mind. And in August, after I had graduated and moved out of your grandmother’s house, he and I went to the courthouse and the thing was done.”

Sarah sighs elaborately and plucks Cheetos out of the Chex Mix.

“We played house for a year and a half. He worked nights at the sausage factory three times a week. And then on one of those lonelier nights, an older neighbor lady came over to drop off a sieve she’d borrowed and I offered her coffee and it was very neighborly and then I offered her a glass of shiraz. She stayed until it was late and then told me her husband had gone to Cinncinnati on business five weeks prior. She hadn’t heard from him since. And listening to her in that dining room, my dining room—”

“Yes, yes, mammy, I really do know, but listen I think there’s something avian moving around under my ribcage.”

“—I started to realize that the selfish moments of my youth would become the small atrocities of my middle age.”

“And you left him two weeks later and haven’t looked back since.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And you met Dad when you were twenty-eight and you could never have stayed together if you had seen him a moment sooner.”

“Oh, right, I have told you this before. Because he had just shaved his moustache that morning. Do you want to taste-test this kringler for me?”

Sarah calls her boyfriend on Friday when she gets back to New York. They spend Saturday stoned on her couch thinking about turning on the TV. Every time she starts to come up for air he asks her for the lighter. She is trying to read. That is, she has a textbook open. She is looking at a flow chart and thinking about whether or not it is high-behavior to act like you are going to study while high. She doesn’t know why she fronts like this but the weight of the book feels good on her lap.

“Sarah, I can’t wait to name your abortion.”

“Suck a dick, Ralph, it’s not a baby. It’s a toucan, I think. Women get birds lodged in their organs all the time; I read about it on the Internet.”

“Are you sure? And also do you want me to come with you on Tuesday?”

“No, no, don’t worry about it, it’s only about a fifteen-minute procedure. I think they just lure it out with a peanut or something. It’s like when you get an earwig.”

“Okay. You know, I think I don’t really understand why you don’t just give it up for adoption.”

Sarah leans luxuriously into the couch cushions and rolls her eyes and also grins a little bit. “Ralph, you are not understanding me: no one would want to adopt an earwig and this is basically the uterine equivalent of an earwig.”

“Well, okay. Fair.” Ralph disappears for an hour and returns with three bottles of Chateau Diana White Zinfandel. They drink and then they fuck. Intercourse doesn’t seem to bother her winged intruder. When they are falling asleep in each other’s arms, begging indifference but brewing need like it’s going out of style, the bird wiggles its ungainly beak and protrudes briefly from her belly button.

“Look, Ralph, there it is! Wow, he’s so handsome.”

“Sshshshs little Sarah. I’m trying to sleep.” The bird peers at her warily and Sarah leans back into her pillow, trying not to make eye contact, taking deep breaths, and counting backward from one-hundred until she falls asleep.

Sunday morning, as per custom, Sarah skips church and goes to yoga instead. She is riding her bike past an industrial park when a dusty airborne crumblet gets caught on her uvula. She starts coughing up a storm and then she feels something plumey working its way up her esophagus. She expels a long, wet, scarlet feather and wonders if maybe the bird is actually a macaw. Maybe its rather large beak is a deformity. Sarah hopes so: the thought of a perfect toucan plunking itself merrily into her insides makes her sort of queasy with responsibility.

Her favorite yoga teacher is in charge today. Sarah coughs up another feather during downward dog. After final savasana and the ringing of the Tibetan prayer bowl, the teacher and Sarah go get coffee and smoke cigarettes in the park. Sarah explains the feather. “Well, I made an appointment to get it excised on Tuesday, but in the meantime I am just losing feathers out of most orifices. It’s not quite a rite of passage, but it’s really extremely common.”

Ambrina has this absolute halo of unkempt, constantly yoga-fied hair. She’s thirty-seven years old and has been almost everywhere and done almost everything and drinks Kourtaki Retsina exclusively.

“Sarah, I used to be an erotic masseuse. I wasn’t even very professional about it; I just answered skeezy classified ads. I would call these men and they’d tell me a fake name and ask me to come by in the middle of the day. They always said ‘nothing sexual’ and most of the time they really meant it.”

The first time she meets a new client, it is in a coffee shop by his apartment, and his eyes are usually apologetic but not too much so. He just wants a pretty girl with pretty hands. He just wants to be touched by a stranger. Nothing sexual. So of course she goes back to his apartment, daring herself forward, one small footstep at a time.

They go up some stairs, or usually there’s an elevator, and she never finds herself in a “nice” place but there is always money being spent, like on drinks or clubs or food or a lifestyle, even if that means sacrificing the fundamentals, and so they usually live somewhere depressing. Sometimes there is clutter, but there’s always a big TV.

And of course on which she just can’t help but picture him jerking it to low-quality porn, probably nothing pervy even, just a guy and a girl fuckin and suckin.

Only when he slides his thick fingers harshly around her slim wrist and directs her hand southward does a thin, painful fear develop in her belly. She wriggles herself out of his grip and he apologizes instantly, sincerely, profusely. She is all grace and forgiveness, and he tips her well.

Walking home she has never felt sexier, never felt more explosively exposed. She plucks flowers from traffic island gardens and blows kisses at strangers. She is elated by her invincibility, her brush with the unsavory.

“But eventually, like after a few months of this, I started to just feel tired afterward. And when something so thrillingly awful becomes mundane, it’s like you’ve eaten up the evil of it and you’re full. The weird awe I had had, of a man’s sexual appetite, and of my own capacity for daring, vanishes and I’m only left with the choices I made.”

“So you’re saying...I mean...it’s really not a big deal though, you know? I guess I honestly don’t really know what you’re saying.” Sarah wonders if Ambrina is listening to her, or if she’s only listening to the young sex worker of yesteryear.

“All I’m saying, Sarah, is that it’s hard to see now what you’ll remember with a vengeance later.”

Sarah and Ambrina part ways.

Early the next morning Sarah sits on her bed and calls her big sister. When she picks up, Sarah says, “Sister, there’s something lodged in me and I don’t know whether it’s better to get it out or to keep it in. At first I thought that it was just a nuisance and a pain, and I hated to have it loping around in my uterus, pecking at my intestines, nibbling on my kidneys. But now it’s been here for four days, and I am worried what will be missing when he leaves.”

The talons of the bird scratch anxiously at her core.

Her sister says, “Sarah, two years ago I woke up next to a boy I had no recollection of meeting. I opened my eyes and saw this mess of flannel and floppy straight brown hair and the pain of an ungodly hangover and I knew it might be love. He woke up; his name was revealed to be Henry. We got breakfast across the street from his dorm, and then he walked me to the bus stop, even though I told him he didn’t have to. And of course he never called me back, and of course I felt unbelievably silly for even thinking it could ever have been anything but what it was.

“Sarah, two days ago I woke up next a boy that I have known for a long time. I opened my eyes, and I saw the familiar clutch of yellow hair, and I felt the crook of him, into which I had worn a perfect divet, and I knew it didn’t matter that I had ever been that silly, because the story can always be rewritten to show me moving in a slightly more favorable light.

“The point of which, Sarah, is that I don’t know what on earth you should do about something so odd as a bird in your uterus.” Raven laughs like a crazy woman. “Just try not to think too hard about it.”

“Goodnight, Raven.” Sarah hangs up the phone and crawls back into her quilted bed.

Tuesday at 4:05 p.m. Sarah climbs into the stirrups and then she starts to cry. “I don’t know where these tears are from.” She hawks up a huge breathy sob and then her shoulders start to shake. “Everything is just so insanely sad.” The lady doctor scoops Sarah’s fingers into her own in a tight girl power grip, and the bird tunnels outward, taking moist flight for just a moment in the examining room before whipping out the window and into the infinite could-have-beens.