Abby Provenzano has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and is an affiliated faculty member there. She was Redivider’s fiction editor and an intern at Ploughshares and Dzanc Books. Her work is published in Solstice and Delmarva Review, among others.
I didn’t notice when the bird first found me. Even though my parents and brother and I moved a lot, every moving truck to every house we ever lived in across New England to the Midwest brought the same spotted-wood birdhouse, stone birdbath, hanging feeders. An illusion of the same yard. And birds. Lots of them. Familiar, ever-present. Maybe my bird blended with the others—those outside my apartment and those of my childhood—flying and flocking and not standing out, not special. Nevertheless, one day I must have left the apartment window open while I was at one of my geology classes at Sinclair, because when I came back, the bird had come inside.
I sat my bag down on the wobbly missing-a-chair table my brother and I had found at a yard sale. I kept my movements slow, not wanting to startle the bird. He was on the kitchen counter, just sitting, just waiting. He cocked his head and looked me straight in the eye, ruffled his feathers. Bright black eyes rimmed in gold.
I didn’t find this strange. I felt instead like I was expecting him, like this bird and I belonged here, together. Like he came for a reason. Like I could use someone to talk to. After high school, half of my friends had started jobs and the other half had chosen other colleges, and scraping together enough for my own place seemed like a good plan until it was just me and my own place. So, a pet, this bird, might provide some company. Something I needed. Something.
My bird was a muted brown, then. Darker streaks on his puffed-out chest. Some kind of sparrow. Plain, but just lovely. Sparrows are known to associate with humans, I remembered my birdwatching U.P. grandmother telling me once, so maybe this could make sense. My bird chirped when I looked at him, began to warble—soft, growing—and in the song I could hear my name, Ava, Ava, Ava.
Here’s something about me: I was one of those bold and loud and playground-bossy little girls who grew up backwards—or maybe grew up right, depending on who you ask—into a quiet, nervous, look-both-ways kind of girl. Keep-both-feet-firmly-on-the-ground kind of girl.
Here’s something about the bird: He knew me well.
. . .
It’s blurry to look back at those early days with the bird, difficult. To track my bird’s progress, his coming and growing, the same way you would a recorded and predictable migration or nesting pattern. My grandmother used to have journals full of logs like that, neat pinchy notes only she could understand. I thought about this when I called her, tried to be light, tried to see if any bird like this ever happened to her. I hung up disappointed. I wouldn’t mention it again.
As an icebreaker at my first bland day of community college, my maybe-too-young, definitely-too-chipper professor had asked us to say our name and a defining moment of our life. All casual-like. I thought about our third old house in the Maine woods with the motion sensors that deer used to set off in the dead of night and the summer fireflies and the open scattered-star sky. How Cal and I built forts in the trees and cooked for our imaginary forest-families, mudpies and mossy salads and stews of wet pine needles and bark and dirt and stones. The now-lost feeling of my fingers digging in the dirt.
“Ava,” I had said like I rehearsed in my head while we went around the classroom. “And I guess being here as a freshman is a big life moment.” My professor smiled even though I didn’t quite mean it.
That first night(s), my bird liked to sing. He flew from the bedroom to the rest-of-the-apartment room and perched on the lamp, the ripped shoulder of the couch, the stack of textbooks, back to the counter. I decided I should start by finding him some birdseed and then I’d figure out the rest. I navigated the nearby hardware store’s aisles of garden hoses and fruit fly traps and slightly different sizes of screwdriver before I found a bag with a bird on it that looked like him, that didn’t look like him. Back in the apartment, the bird pecked some of the seed out of my hand and then fluttered up to land on my shoulder, nuzzling his head into my neck.
I talked to him, day after day. Natural. Without thinking. Pet-chat, really. You’re looking so cute and how was your day and this, this, and that about mine. He listened—I knew from the way he cocked his head to the side and nodded along and waited until pauses to preen his feathers and chirp.
He talked to me, and I listened, too. Do this and do this and do that. It was peculiar and it was not, just like his arrival, his immediate adaptation to my apartment. It was why he was here. I felt a prickling surge across my skin that settled, fast. I cared about what he said so I listened, scooped birdseed into a candy dish.
It had been about the size of a piece of birdseed, maybe larger—the lump I found that summer before college. I waited for it to go away, to go to the doctor. When it didn’t and I did, the doctor asked if the lump was movable under my touch, examined me while I wore a flimsy shirt-gown, and sent me away to a cold room the sun couldn’t find and a sharp needle. That I remember, and the feel of the nurse’s soothing hand on my leg while the sample-gathering needle clicked, methodical, harsh. I didn’t look and after I decided I was lucky, though I never felt lucky. I felt numb, only, until after the call, after the negative. My mom said it was odd that I never cried, not during, not after.
So it made sense to me, the bird’s instructions, his keeping me safe. Isn’t that what everybody wants, if you don’t think too hard about it? Scrub scrub scrub scrub my hands, lathered, longer; check check check fires-in-waiting, things-left-wrong, leaving the apartment; question question food preparation, people’s spreading touch. Keep your hands to yourself. Stomping out danger, potentials. It made sense.
Still, I felt it would be easier, less draining, to go back to the way I was. Back then, I thought I still could. I left the apartment window open most nights, even in the cold. I waited for him to go away, but the bird didn’t go back outside. He stayed. Somewhere in there a shock of red bloomed on his chest, a robin. His eyes stayed the same—unblinking, watching. Rimmed in gold.
I found myself deep in the stacks of the library, in the section with nature and animal books. I squinted at the list of book call numbers, scribbled down using a pen I intentionally brought from home. I had tried before to google things like bird evolution and bird species change and bird kingdom, but the scrolling pages of hits weren’t right. My bird flew up and down the shelves of books, sometimes stopping to trace a title with a claw. In the end, I had the thickest ornithology guidebook, with glossy photographs and no answers. I thought about going to office hours for one of the other science professors. When I tried to picture their face, though, when I asked what I wanted to ask, described what I wanted to describe, it was suspicious, blank.
Here: The sharp of my bird’s talons, then and now and in between, digging into my skin while he sits on my shoulder.
. . .
I picked geology and earth and environmental sciences to study because there was some imaginary threshold the college built where, once over, you weren’t allowed to be undecided anymore. But also: because I always liked nature and the idea of order, underneath and around us. Peeling back layers and layers of earth. Exposing everything, understanding. Cause and effect. Or, just looking. Later, once I transferred to university, I’d take lab courses full of rocks and soils and like to think about where they’d been and where they’d go. What they meant. Though when someone brought in a tourmalinated quartz to pass around to the group—hand to hand to hand—I shied away, wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t look.
My bird, his commands, were like that, ordering and peeling, I think, though I didn’t think about it. A look, a word from him to make adjustments. Enhancements. And I did. What he was really saying, I determined, was what if what if what if. I found his silvery voice ricocheting around my head, disjointed music, and I joined impulsively in some kind of harmony. What if?
Here’s what you should know: I never questioned him. I couldn’t.
We’re meant to be, he twittered. He was helping me. He tugged at my ear to emphasize this like he would a worm. I had a lot to focus on—applications to transfer from community college and my grades and classes and exams and my job at the front desk of the public library that gave me just enough with loans to make rent. I liked sitting behind the desk at the library, straight and proper and alone, answering the phone. I began to think about where other people had been, where I was going. What they and then I might pick up from bus seats and friends’ hands and handrails and serve-yourself bakery tongs and phones. What might happen, what tomorrow could look like.
Once, I was at Walgreens right before my shift started and the bird pecked at my cheek, hard. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was looking at the mini to-go pack of Clorox wipes, and it was smart to buy them, really, and I started wiping down the library phone each day at work after that and later the zippers and handles of my backpack and my ID card when I got home. There’d be lots of little moments like that. Later, I’d buy disinfectant spray and use it on doorknobs, light switches, blow my bathroom fuse. Later, I’d wear socks on my hands in the communal laundry room. Later, I’d examine tamper-evident seals and container lids for nicks and tears. Later, I’d slather on lotion to fill the cracks in my skin.
Yeah, he went where I did. Those were the only times he went back outside. I don’t know if I mentioned that. He usually perched on my shoulder or flew serenely beside me, level with my head. Syrupy voice. No one else paid him any mind. Later, I’d wish I could be like that—not pay him any mind, not have to listen.
Peck peck peck for think think think and once—and every time since—it took me over half an hour to leave my apartment for the airport, and my bird said that was fine, right, so it was. His stomach oranged and his muddy feathers brightened to the crisp bold blue of the sky or the ocean I grew up with on a clear day.
Here is something about the earth: Every evolutionary process experienced, every change, can be tracked in its layers of rock. Our whole slow history built by rocks and rocks and their secrets.
For me, it all happened fast. I read an article about an ant that can snap its jaw at faster than two hundred miles-per-hour—it was like that. Or the elegant dive of a peregrine falcon, over 185 miles-per-hour when on the hunt. Or a blink-and-you-miss-it laser beam, barreling ahead at light speed. Or maybe the kind of speed boiling water has in that pot with the oblivious frog—steady, sure, triumphant. One day my bird wasn’t there, and then he was all there was.
. . .
I graduated with my bachelor’s on a drizzly weekend, another life-defining moment. Strappy-sandaled ankles crossed as I waited for my name to be called, to get the handshake over with. Sanitizer tucked into the pocket of my robe, my bird on my shoulder. He pulled on the strands of my tassel. I pictured him choking on them, strings of gold wedged in his throat. By the time the ceremony was over, I was half-dozing and my shoulder ached under his weight. At the restaurant after, I ordered pasta drowning in alfredo sauce and a new fork—not the one already rolled up in a napkin and on the table when I arrived—though I wanted a flatbread pizza. My parents made the semi-long trip to Kent State for the occasion. They gave me an amethyst necklace, my birthstone. I waited to unwrap it because I had just come back from washing my hands and the waitress was setting down our food. My dad’s smile and enthusiasm faltered a little and my mom protested at the waiting, but not enough. We did dinner first, then the gift. The necklace was beautiful. When I got home later that night, I’d take it off, leave it on the table by the door, give it a few days to sit before touching it again.
Other life-defining moments around here: I decided to go for my master’s, too. And Cal had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, had a thrown-together wedding at our parents’ house. I remember dodging hugs and the buffet, stomach rumbling, watching Cal shove cake into his bride’s mouth, fingers sticky and dirty. Her lipstick smeared on his cheek. My bird telling me to wait, just a little longer. I remember holding my niece in the hospital and being asked to sanitize my hands first, using this as reassurance. I was like all of them. They were like me. We were all being reasonable, safe. That was all. My bird beat his wings in the doorway of the hospital room, nodding with me, agreeing. Better, he chirped, like I was.
My bird grew bigger, more handsome, with the vivid patterned wings and the feather comb of a blue jay. My mom used to scare blue jays away from our backyard birdbath—they were too aggressive, too territorial. I confirmed this in the copy I’d bought of the guidebook from the library. Not that it made a difference.
My bird helped me find new ways to do things that fit with our rules. Like: no handheld pastries with coffee at cafés. Like: loitering, finding something to pretend to look at until someone else opened a door. Like: going to the store early, the very start of the day. Like: staying in, mostly. There was one night when I was in the shower and the fire alarm of my building went off, and my bird—sitting on the shower curtain rod—and I decided I shouldn’t get out, leave the building, until I was all the way clean. All the way finished with the top-down, head-to-toe washing. By the time I toweled off the blaring alarm had stopped. Must have been a burned popcorn sort of accident, no harm done. There was a stretch of minutes where I stood in the towel and thought, maybe this isn’t right. It passed just as time keeps passing as my bird began to sing a melody, loud and louder and louder.
Here’s a question: Could I, with my bird, be a researcher out in the field, as I originally planned I’d do with my master’s? When I tried to draw up my future, it was scribbles, blurry, too. I liked to imagine myself out there anyway, combing through soil and forests with my fingers, doing something that mattered. Able to hold what I was studying in my hands, feel it for myself.
. . .
In grad school, there’s a man I met who I know I’d love if I could touch him. If I’d let him touch me. But he can eat burgers and grab the handgrip on the bus and use the pin pad at the register without thinking about it, without consequence. My bird knows me well. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t need to.
Right before high school ended, right before the maybe-cancer and the move away from home, I met my first love. Back then, bird-less, we shared pizza late at night and I ate all the crust, even his, licked pepperoni grease off my fingers. And I slept in the jacket he wore outside at a bonfire, breathing in the him-smell and the smoke-smell before I fell asleep. And we shared slushies I let him put the straws into without caring, even after holding his wallet, his car keys. And we went to Cedar Point, squeezed together on the rollercoasters and the tilt-a-whirl, gripped safety lap bar after lap bar, poured powdered sugar over doughy elephant ears. And we drove his car to a church parking lot in the dark, the most isolated one we could think of. Put the seats down and fumbled with buttons and kissed with him on top of me, hands on my hair my face my skin.
Here is what I’ve lost: (We know).
My bird, sociable, enjoyed going out with the small group of people I met at grad school orientation. We’d squeeze together into a booth at a bar or in movie theater seats and I’d try to shrink, keep my body from pressing against someone else’s. My bird perched on my head, my neck, the hanging lamp over the table, the armrest, sometimes burrowing into my hair. A lot of times it was easier to wait to go back home—trustworthy—to eat. To un-tense. It’s funny, but it’s only with other people like my new almost-friends where I feel exposed, ashamed, awkward for things I do, things I choose, for my bird. That they can see.
My bird expanded by the week, by the month, plumage brightening, beak curving and thickening, morphing little by little into something like a cockatiel, bluish-gray. I started buying him more than just seed: fresh fruit I cut into slices and berries and mixed nuts. We sat on my apartment couch together, comfortable, after I declined an invitation out. “I like staying here,” I said, listening, exhausted. “I’m good company, just by myself.”
And don’t forget about me! He screeched, flapping his wings, and I laughed because I can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t.
Here is what I’ve learned, I’ve gained: If somebody asked me how I felt, I could say something like safe. I could mean it. But it will not last.
My bird chattered and squawked on and stopped singing. Bites from his bigger beak hurt. His pealing voice, his laughter, caused a dull throb in the back of my head. Sometimes I had to dodge his impressive wings. If I asked myself how I felt, it might occur to me that
I loved my bird.
I hated my bird.
We continued to live together as I went to classes, went to work, tried to see my future. What else could I do?
Once, I tried:
It was cold, right after traveling back to my apartment from the holidays, where I had been at-home and on high-alert. A light layer of snow spread on the ground, and I remember, too, feeling stretched and thinning. I held out my arm for the bird to perch, a usual motion. He was by then a full macaw, a bulky body of pure gorgeous blue with rich golden cheeks. Each feather placed just so, immaculate. The same eyes peered at me as he climbed on, clenching into my skin. He rubbed his face against mine, cooing.
“I need you to leave,” I said before I could change my mind. “Please.” He studied me with those hypnotizing eyes.
You need to be safe. I keep you safe. Be grateful. His voice was ugly, grating.
“Please. I want to live.” It was true. My hands twitched, and even as I felt his feathers tickle my face, I thought about how easily I could snap his neck, one motion, be free. He watched my movement, my face.
Can you, without thinking?
I know I was, and am, tired of thinking, of details. I moved towards the window that led to the fire escape, eased it open. I gripped his legs in my hand and lifted him, trembling, off my arm. I climbed onto the tiny metal platform, solid under my feet. With my other hand, I clung to the fire escape rail, knuckles white. I thrust the arm holding him over the side, told myself to let go.
But even as I stood there, poised and quivering, I was thinking—without his voice, but with mine—would he fly or would he fall? If he flew, I’d have to figure out how to go on without him. If he fell, I’d have to go down there and clean up after, all that blood, and then touch the body and get rid of it and then clean my hands and shower and scrub each part of my body and then not believe I have, without him there to confirm, and then do it again and then fully dry off and moisturize and slide into bed without getting anything on the sheets and
It’s not easy, you know. My bird was rigid in my grip, one pearled tear gathering at the corner of his eye. I could feel his brittle bones under all the down and feathers. A breeze rippled through his feathers, my hair. He was beautiful, magnificent. Is there such a thing as free?
I pulled him back towards me, held him to my chest. Brought us both off the fire escape and inside, loosened my grip on him, shut the window. He stretched out his wings, shook them, was still.
Here and now: He returned and returns to my shoulder, heavy and warm and comforting. His sharp talons cling and squeeze, piercing into my skin.
. . .
I am more than halfway through grad school now and my bird has changed into a blue-and-gold macaw. Aptly named. He is large with an exquisite face, patterned black and white. Gold body with a cloak of blue and green and turquoise over his back and wings. You should look up a picture, see for yourself. I guess I should’ve brought my book, to show you. Maybe I will, at our next session. His is a raucous comfortable voice. He chats and flies in tight circles around my head and demands my attention and loves it.
I can’t live with him, but I do because I can, I have, I am.
Here’s what I miss: After one particularly long day, I find an old valentine for elementary-age me from my late grandmother, her same handwriting, her forgotten message—it’s a special gift to always be able to have so much fun, she wrote. Don’t lose that spark.
Sure, I can feel the weight of the years and my bird on my shoulders, always, but maybe that one message was why I decided to talk to you. If that is one of your questions.
A long time ago, before all this, in some general science class, the teacher talked about animals, how some change, how some metamorphosize. Birds molting, gaining new feathers. Or even more: caterpillar to butterfly, tadpole to frog, that sort of thing. I remember thinking about the dark damp of the chrysalis, the waiting; the gradual amphibian growth of legs, of lungs. Emerging to fly or feel the earth beneath hopping feet. I feel like both my bird and I could try to be in one of those stages—patient transition. I’d like to be, now. I’d like to see where I’d end up.
Here’s what I know: My guidebook says blue-and-gold macaws adore their friends and live long, will stay with you for a lifetime. I don’t doubt that. And yet—when I close my eyes, I can see myself releasing him, someday. His glorious bright colors against the sky as he soars, higher and higher and higher. Only his dropped feathers, little pieces of him, left behind.
