Swansong

I was standing in my kitchen, and when I glanced out the window to note the huge thunderheads, I thought I saw something on the power line. Assuming it was nothing out of the ordinary, I turned to face it fully, but there was nothing there. Except...it was like a bulge in the movie screen. I could only see a black blur of it out of the corner of my eyes. I tried hard to focus on it, but I couldn't--my gaze rolled off of it like a marble on a globe. It took a minute of seriously straining my eyes to roll it into my field of vison, but I had nothing to do particularly.

I gawked. It was this huge bird. Not comically huge, but big enough to take down a baby deer. The power line was a little weighed down by it. Claws for ripping, more like talons, really. It was eerily silent too, like radio booth foam, as if sound was drawn into it and then cancelled out. The bird just sat, staring off down the graffiti and broken glass soaked alley, unmoving. It had the darkly intelligent, detached look of a bird of prey, but no raptor I’ve ever seen was that shade of black, glinting coral blues and turquoise opals in the morning sun. The beak was long and curved, elegantly sharp and, like its breastfeathers, were iridescent, oils on colored glass.

What really got me were the eyes, though. Size of a half dollar, yellow-gold, gold-yellow-orange, purple-green-blue, I'm not sure. But they pierced you, went right down into your heart and just grabbed hold of the soft spots. All those places where you are thin and scabbed over, where some holes are so deep that to survive, you must patch glossy veneers over them, like bridges made of bone china. Those eyes speared you right in the heart of the matter, held you there, shined a spotlight on them so brightly you couldn’t look away anymore. I gasped, because I was forgetting to breathe, and because suddenly I was inside the surging rush of blood pounding at my temples and inside my chest. Time slowed and crystallized. Finally, the bird opened its beak, a slow moment of beauty in and of itself.

He spoke one word--my name. It was the voice of my younger brother, who had died two months ago. I was shocked at how much one can cry silently if he just stops blinking long enough. He gave me what I could only interpret as an expectant smirk.

An audible gasp broke the spell for an instant, and over the shoulder of his wing I noticed a tired neighbor-lady standing on her balcony across the way. She was smoking a cigarette and wearing what may have been a maid or waitresses dress. The cigarette dangled off her lips in an impossible way, and her mouth hung wide. She had heard the bird speak as well. "Harold? Is that you? Harold?" She shouted, working her way up to a hysterical pitch. Then she stopped, mouthed I love you, and hugged herself with both arms, rocking slowly back and forth, humming an old slow song to herself.

As for the bird, it still had not moved, but now he contracted and burst off the line in one liquid motion, and as his wingspan, impossibly huge, expanded outwards, I saw what may have been an entire galaxy of stars and planets, or blue fire, or melting diamonds, or the memory of my brother and I, throwing a ball for the dog at the park, trading stories. Then it set off in an easterly direction.