Bird Warfare

By Emily Murray

The complex is a kaleidoscope of ice sheet surfaces this time of the morning. There is a terrible wailing of birds going on and I’ve been on hold with my oncologist waiting to hear whether or not I’ll die this year for long enough that my hands are starting to sweat inside these gloves. 

*

I keep thinking about my college boyfriend. 

Once when I was nineteen and he was twenty and we were both drunk, he told me that the hardest part about being a nihilist is the loneliness, when you talk into your bathroom mirror at four in the morning and know the only person who can hear you is your dormmate—and probably not even him because he’s busy drowning in porn on the other side of the door.

*

The neighbor’s window is open. The walls between our units are so thick I wouldn’t know I had neighbors if I didn’t step outside so often I could be a nicotine addict. I used to love the indoors but lately I get nauseated when I look at dried paint for too long, so I come out here and wish I smoked. 

I hear a pan scraping against the counter. Something sizzling. Maybe they are making eggs and maybe they have homemade apple butter to spread across thin pieces of toast like we had when I was little and my father used to hand-pick apples from the tree in our yard while my mother put slices of bread into the toaster.

*

Gordie and I met freshman year. We were at one of those orientation functions where two or three people make friends and the rest of us hope no one will notice that the space we’re standing in is occupied by flesh and blood.

He spotted me hiding behind a plastic shrub. 

“You look like a character in a Russian novel,” he said. He was two inches shorter than me, a Philosophy major, and the first person I remember choosing to love. “Do you swim?” 

*

The neighbor’s front gate creaks open and one of the children toddles out. She takes single-minded steps to our shared square of lawn and crouches down to tear frozen petals off a crystalized daisy. Observing her reminds me of when I’d wander through the screen door onto our back porch looking for silkworms gathering on fence posts. I watched them squirm. 

It was equally fascinating and horrifying, the infestive quality of those benign green shapes moving over the top of each other. I recall seeing one of the fatter ones bite the head off of another and in that moment realizing I could never trust the natural world.

“Tessa!” the older sister calls. She stands at the open gate and twirls a golden curl around her finger while the little one politely ignores her. “Mom said stay inside.”

Tessa starts to sing “Row, Row, Row your Boat.” I wonder if the daisy is cold without its petals.

*

There was a public pool on campus, but Gordie had a thing against chlorine. We’d drive his grandmother’s green Suburban forty-five minutes to the nearest lake. At night, the water was so dark I couldn’t believe it had a bottom. I drank decaf coffee in a thermos and watched Gordie cut lengths from the shore.

“You’re too afraid,” he told me when we were lying naked partly submerged in silver waves. “At some point you’ll have to pick a religion.”

*

The last time I talked to my mother she was still divorced from her second marriage and flirting with yoga. She lectured me about my lack of spirituality for an hour. It brought me back to childhood, to me and her, to my father and his Bible open on the kitchen table. 

“It’s all about releasing your expectations. I’ve been saying prayers in child pose every morning. Routine helps. The ladies at work say I look better than ever, Cassidy. I think the worst thing your father ever did was let me believe I could shape you and him into my own Heaven.”

“I don’t want to talk about Dad,” I interrupted. “Has work been good?

“It’s been awful. How are you doing? Are you exercising?”

“I’m fine.”

She left me a message two days ago telling me she got engaged. She really hit it off with her yoga instructor. I’m happy for her.

*

A voice calls from the open window of the neighbor’s apartment. “Girls, breakfast!”

The older child gives up on her sister and goes inside. Tessa is still singing but it’s not “Row your Boat,” it’s something else now. A song I can’t recognize in the state I’m in. It sounds like apple trees and calloused hands and a life before terminal illnesses.

*

Gordie broke up with me the summer after our senior year. I was headed to grad school but willing to make it work. He was going home to his personal library and a job at Grocery Outlet. He had other things on his mind.

“Don’t waste your life trying to be happy, Cassie,” were his parting words. “That’s what everyone else is doing. They’ll cut your throat for happiness, but you and me, we’ll be sitting pretty knowing we’re alone and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

He kissed me on the cheek. I was surprised by his tenderness and even more surprised by my detachment. I cried hours later when I was alone on my bed and feeling the empty space of comforter next to me, but in the moment, the only person I missed was my father.

*

There is a bird being murdered somewhere over my head. Two others across the complex are making love. 

I set my phone down on the railing and slip my gloves off slick hands. The gate eases open. I walk over to where Tessa is crouched and squat down beside her. 

She glances up but her attention is fixed on the pile of mangled flowers in her palm.

“They were already dead,” she states. 

“I feel that way, sometimes,” I say.

“Who are you?” she asks. I can hear my phone from this spot; I’m still on hold. 

“I am not a casual nihilist.”

She accepts this with a nod and we sit in silence listening to bird warfare. The grass is cold on my fingertips but I’d rather touch with skin than gloves. She passes me one of the lank stems and I thank her.

“This is nice,” I say, telling the truth. I’ve been starved for some company and it’s less lonely out here than usual.