I AM THE DEAD BIRD

There was the small body of a dead bird lying in a heap of feathers of an indistinguishable color on the corner of Ibbings and Elm Street, still and terrible in its smallness, the wings fanned out at odd angles in testament to its fall from flight. She did not kneel or make any moves to bury it, nor did she touch it or come near, as though breathing would disturb the small dead thing. She had heard that dead things should look like they were sleeping, that by rights she should be waiting for it to leap back into flight, but it did not look sleeping. It looked broken and twisted beyond all use. She did not touch it.

Later, the broken wings and the glassy, staring eyes danced in her dreams, popping out from the asphalt of nightmare streets, flying through twisted metal and fantastic colored landscapes. She awoke at last and breathed the still grey air of morning, donning clothes with mechanical rapidity, shouldering her bag and stalking the seven and a half blocks to school like a cat, her shoes striking the street with ringing tones.

The fluorescent lights in the classrooms flared, flickered and went out with a crushed-insect buzz, plunging the students into darkness. She sat quietly in the dark, tracing the lines of a broken jutting wingbone on the desk, stroking the dead thing she had never touched; its feathers were soft under the caked residue of blood and grime. Its beak had been shattered.

The hot, dark, stifling air of the classroom swam like water, slowing the floating words of sweating classmates to a sluggish, distorted murmur. It seemed to her that she had always heard them that way, flat and distorted, as though behind aquarium glass.

Later, she was home, and the stillness of the afternoon was the pale one of a fried egg. It passed in quiet, wobbly lumps. She drew a lump of quiet, collapsed, twisted, dead. She did not draw it in flight. It had small, splayed feet, one half-crushed and protruding at right angles. The glassy eyes had not yet begun to decompose.

The walls of her room were a tinted off-white, soft and dreamy in the yellow light of a dimming bulb. The walls surrounded her, low and curved, washing her in whiteness, a dim roaring in her ears...she felt held in the whorls of a seashell, enwrapped in the afternoon. The smooth, sleek curves of flight, broken and discarded; the body small and circular and heaped on the ground, so quiet and self-contained...she could not be so still as that, though she closed her eyes. The beating in her chest betrayed her, again and again.

Everything washed back and forth as she breathed, blurring and swaying. Her seashell room tapered to a point in the distance, sharp and tall and far away. It was all such a noise in her ears. She longed to be a lump of broken quiet, fractured and feathered against the concrete, eyes staring up at the deserted sky. How lovely to be so still, so still...

The bridge was large and steel, the cables thick as her arms twice-doubled. She walked the pedestrian's path, watching the cars pass by. The people were like goldfish in their different-plated bowls, driving by in cars with tinted windows. The railing was solid and cold against her hand, though the air shimmered with heat. The water was far below, blue and flat and calm as an asphalt street. She turned and faced the distant clouds. A broken lump of quiet...

I am the dead bird, she thought. She flew.