1 post tagged “birds”

                  Work had been a bitch. He couldn’t remember when it hadn’t been. Rather than suppose that it was his perception that was off, he clung bitterly to the idea that his days could have been better, on the whole. It was not all relative. It couldn’t have been, because that would have necessitated that these awful days were actually okay days, and that the okay days were actually good days, and he’d be damned if he looked forward to days that were just okay.
                  For her, however, it really was relative. As she sat across from him composing her salad in a white porcelain bowl, he put a large piece of chicken in his mouth and then, without ever having closed his mouth, he began to speak around the chunk of bird:
                  “Work was a bitch.”
                  She nodded blankly. “Oh?” she said, with the slightest bit of coerced interest reluctantly forming the curl of the question mark.
                  “Mm,” he mumbled quickly, as if what he was about to say was not at all contingent upon her pretending to give a shit. “Jack’s an asshole, and he has no idea what he’s doing. Double whammy. A monkey could run this company better.”
                  She continued to nod, having never actually ceased. It had been an okay day, relatively speaking, she figured.
                  “You’re welcome,” she said.
                  “Huh?”
                  “Nothing.”
                  “Say, we have any balsamic vinegar?”
                  She looked vacantly at pantry door. “Somewhere.”
                  He grunted, and in doing so admitted that if she wasn’t willing to go get it, then he didn’t really need it anyway. She responded with silence, an ambiguous gesture which she commonly used and which he never sought to interpret. Life was too short, he figured. For her, it was all relative, and for him, life was too short. These philosophies were not explicitly contradictory, but in this case, they never strove to get along or even to meet. Two trains on separate tracks travelling in opposite directions.
                  It was cliché, the whole lot of it. Neither of them ever thought far back in their minds, because this led to the question: How did I get here? This, in turn, led to the mind’s montage of hundreds of clips from bad movies. Instead, they turned to their philosophies. As she sat up in bed reading some trashy novel she had picked up from the airport weeks earlier, she thought, Well, it could be worse. But thoughts such as these come in pairs; this one was married to, Well, it could be better. Her subconscious spent much of its energy playing the part of bouncer for the sake of that fragile semblance of hope for life.
                  He, on the other hand, had not read a book that wasn’t business-related in twenty years. As he clicked off his bedside lamp he pulled the covers over his head to hint to his wife that, yes, she was still awake. He thought, Life is too damn short.
                  He was not a gerontologist. If he had been, making love to his wife of twenty-nine years might have been at least technically appealing. Instead, he dozed off to thoughts about money, the pursuit of which was far more interesting than his wife’s sagging body. It was a defensible desire, because he knew that it potentially meant a nicer house, a bigger yard, a bigger pool, a nicer retirement, and even nice things for his wife, should he ever get around to that. So it was, Life is too short, why not fill it with nice things? But this mantra, too, had a certain iniquitous duplicity; if life is too short, it frees one from certain moral and societal constraints, but then, life is too short, so where is the solace in that? But a man can stop his logic where he needs it to be.
                  She turned off her light at the end of the chapter, which ended thusly:

                  Maximus lurched forward suddenly, gripping her arms and holding her close against him. “Regina,” he whispered, “You’re all the woman I need.”
                  She could feel his gentle breath in her hair. “OH, Maximus!”
                  “Call me Max,” he said. They locked eyes, and then she felt his manhood pressing against her stomach.

                  She lay in the dark, thinking, What a cliffhanger! Better save the sex for tomorrow night. She fell asleep before him because, although he had had more time like always, he spent it thinking about how she still wasn’t turning off the fucking light.
                  When he finally did fall asleep (“fall” was not always so apt a word for the idea of repose, but in his case it was, if only because of when he hit the bottom), the night commenced to pass at an unreal speed, because there was no one awake to experience it.
                  But suddenly, his feet hit the carpet and he hobbled to the bathroom awkwardly, dropping to the cold tile to unleash his dinner into the toilet bowl. In all its momentum, time came crashing down upon itself. He felt consciousness pressing in even as he begged it not to, thinking that if it would just hold off, he could crawl back into bed and back into sleep without that horrifying hour of wakefulness that afflicted him so often thanks to his swollen prostate.
                  As the last bits of chicken and acid dripped into the toilet, he breathed deeply through his nose. He hated the musky smell. Fully awake now, he stood slowly and turned to stare at his bewildered face in the mirror. He looked as if he had been picked up by a tornado in the night. There was no rhyme or reason to the ravines that ran helter-skelter through his face.
                  When he walked back to the bed, he saw that the window was open, and the curtains were flailing to the side in the night air. His wife was not in the bed.
                  He didn’t know what to think or do, so he lay down. He faced the window, and time was not kind to him. He watched the old oak’s branches move this way and that, and behind them he saw the sky change colors. He finally drifted into a light sort of sleep, like soft thin sheets that the slightest breeze might set loose. When a crow alighted on the window sill, the click stirred him from the place just inside the doorway of sleep. His eyelids lifted just barely, and he saw the black bird sitting there. Before he had time to be surprised or even confused, it transformed into his wife. She walked over to his side.
                  “You look pale,” she said. She felt his head. “And you’re warm.”
                  He could feel his mouth hanging open, but he couldn’t close it. He felt stupid and clumsy. His tongue seemed to fill up his entire mouth, that or he had been chewing on cotton balls in the night, unbeknownst to him. He didn’t know how this could be, but he was pretty sure the bags beneath his eyes were swollen and actually obscuring his vision.
                  “Goodness,” she said. “It’s chilly in here! Did you open the window?”
                  He thought he was shaking his head, but it occurred to him that maybe the world was shaking from side to side, and his head was just in place.
                  “Urgh…” he said.
                  “Oh gee,” she said, looking down with a look on her face that was perhaps a cousin of concern. She felt his forehead again. Her lip made a little pout. “I’ll call work for you, how about that?”
                  He tried to nod, but again, he wasn’t sure. Maybe his body was in revolt, only responding when it felt like responding. He looked at his arm, laid sleepily across his body. Could he move it if he wanted to? Nothing. But then, was he only thinking about moving it, instead of trying to move it? It was as if he was inside his head, and he could not find the controls to anything.
                   She picked up the remote and clicked on the television, without looking at it. “Let me get you something to eat,” she said. “You look awful.” She walked out, and through where she stood he saw the screen.
                  There was a flock of white birds standing in what looked like an African marsh or something. “Urrr…” he said. He reached for the remote, but then, his mind was in it and his body wasn't. He saw his arm in exactly the same position, looking for all the world like it was a dead limb, even turning a light shade of gray. “Brmph…” he said. He couldn’t hear the narration. All he could hear was, “Hrmb brmf fr krbtldj rmm…” as if the television was trying to respond to him in his own language.
                  “Algghh!” he moaned loudly.
                  From downstairs he heard her shout, “Hold on a sec!”
                  “Glrg!”
                  The birds were taking off, all of them at different times but collecting together like they were one patient thing, slow and careful, and then they were all off, all of them at once, moving toward the sky…

                  “I’m really sorry,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “This is really awful.”
                  She stood in the kitchen, which was finally truly clean, for the first time in who knows how long.
                  She said, “Yes, well, you know what I like to say…” She paused.
                  “Life is just too short. You know?"