Talking Birds
My mother and I talk in birds. I send her two pigeons in the morning, which means, Do you still love me?
She sends me a crow in response. The crow’s beak is dyed red from recently eaten roadkill. A tuft of fur sticks to its beak like a coiffed mustache. Lately, my mother’s birds have been taking longer detours. The gull she sent last week made it to me only yesterday. It got distracted by a garbage truck and followed the vehicle to a landfill, where it feasted for five days before remembering me.
I’m not sure what the crow means, though I know that crows and ravens are generally bad omens. My mother used to call me wuyazui: it means I have the gift of prophecy, but not in a good way. Only the bad things come true.
When I was little, I would look at the evening sky and say, I think it will probably rain. And that night, the sky would rip open like butcher paper and unleash a downpour of rotten eyeballs. On TV, I watched two candidates vie for the position of mayor, and the one I chose was beheaded by a mysteriously sharp frisbee.
Crowmouth, my mother said, shaking her head. She says it’s not so terrible, as far as curses go. It was preferable to her own. When she was little, my mother briefly was cursed with invisibility. She admits that the curse was partially her own fault, since she had wished it upon herself after witnessing the way her sisters fought with her mother, how their rage dismantled entire rooms, one time even the whole house. They had to live for a week in a canopy of trees after carving the walls of their house into spears and hurtling them at each other. Living in trees was not so bad, my mother said, because at least they established a little distance. Trees have boundaries in the form of branches, and for a week the family had peace.
My mother’s temporary invisibility allowed her to avoid all fights, conflicts, and potentially humiliating situations. Once, when her ninth-grade teacher signed her up for the school play, she forgot all her lines and had to pee, a problem she solved by peeing a drop at a time over the course of two hours, which was both excruciating and strangely pleasurable, like clawing off a scab too soon, the skin beneath shying from light. Luckily, being invisible, no one noticed the absence of her voice. She was credited in the program as “third shadow from the left, whose shape corresponds with nothing.” At home, my mother cultivated her invisibility carefully, standing in front of the mirror and stirring its watery surface until she was swirled into the silver depths.
I send the crow back to her. I don’t tie a message to its leg: the crow will inevitably find some small trinket or shelled nut to deliver to my mother, and besides, I no longer rely on anything as brittle and fickle as language. Birds are better than words, which tend to repeat themselves, losing meaning over time. Words are easily blanched, exhausting the air like a hungry set of lungs: I’m sorry. No. You don’t understand. Why didn’t you? Why are you? Why don’t you? You’re not listening. You never. You can’t. You don’t. Birds, on the other hand, don’t fade with every flight. They arrive with ripe hearts in the basket of their ribs. They sear the sky, slick-winged, glowing. They caw or sing or harmonize with a car horn, gorgeous or grating, urgent or unfurling. We no longer have to decide whether we are angry or ecstatic, sad or laughing, frustrated or forgiving: the birds choose for us. My mother sends a mischievous blue jay that shits on my sunglasses, droppings that stud my vision like constellations. I send a blackbird whose red wing creaks like a rusty hinge. It slams into her window again and again until she lets it in, its skull gone soft from repeated impact, its tiny feet crushed into salt. When it returns, I spot from afar its red plumage, incandescent with anger.
Every morning, I watch the sky. My eyes develop a permanent squint, and now I see everything flat as a horizon, lengthened into thread. It is easier this way. We no longer fight. We send our avian ambassadors back and forth. Occasionally our birds tussle in the air, claws interlacing, beaks jousting as they tumble through a cloud, but soon we learn not to send them at the same time. We wait an interval of at least three hours before replying. There was a time when such carefully curated rules were unnecessary, but I no longer remember when.
I read today that crows can remember individual faces for up to ten years at a time. They record their enemies and rejoice at the sight of their friends. They are tickled by an ancient terror. Crows who have been harassed by human researchers will warn their flock-mates to stay away, and when they see their enemies once again, even after years of separation, they know to fight or flee. The same goes for the ones they love, the ones who taught them how to solve plastic puzzles, the ones who fed them little treats: they will remember such acts of tenderness. At times, this memory seems to me like a punishment. Would their lives not be simpler, easier, kinder, if they could forget the ones who hurt them? If they could choose to sever themselves from the source of their hurt with a single snip of their beaks? Would they make that choice? Even crows can carry a curse. Even crows inherit fear.
This morning, my mother sends me a hummingbird with a broken wing. I cup it in my palms, and the blades of its heart are whirring at high speed, slicing into my fingers. It was my mother who taught me that hummingbirds don’t sleep: they fall into a state called torpor, which is deeper than sleep, more akin to hibernation. Their hearts slow into stretched-out ribbons of honey, and their eyes are like a corpse’s, bright and unblinking. You can scoop them up and toss them in the air or turn them upside down or knead them in your palms, and still they won’t wake, their vulnerability so total that even gazing at them feels like a violation. I don’t understand, I said to my mother, how it’s possible to sleep in such an unprotected state. How do they survive the night? She laughed and said, Nearing death is the only way they can ever rest.
The night I fled my mother’s house, I waited for her to fall asleep. She slept beside my father, and I imagined her in his cupped palm, seconds away from being crushed. I thought of waking her, of resuming the fight we’d had earlier, the two of us crammed into the hallway closet, which was padded with pillows to prevent sound from seeping out. My mother called it the invisibility room, claiming that we disappeared whenever we entered it, our existences plucked from the timeline like grapes from a vine. It was the only place where we could converse together in secret, walled off from my father. He’s in a bad mood today, my mother said, We must be quiet. Don’t cross his path or enter his vision. Don’t appear anywhere on his horizon. For your sake, say nothing. Crouched in the closet, I accused my mother of never protecting me from him. Whenever he cornered me, whenever his shadow fell like an axe upon my back, my mother flitted in the background, washing the dishes or dusting the windowsills, oiling the doorknob or fluffing the pillows, as if I’d become invisible, as if her curse had become my own. She turned away from me then, facing the back of the closet, where mold patterned the wall into lace. You always turned away, I said, you always walked away. You always left me alone with him.
I walked out of the closet and out of the apartment and kept walking until I reached a street I didn’t recognize. There were trees in this part of the city, real trees with real branches, their shadows stroking my feet like velvet. In the trees were crows, bending the branches with the weight of their bodies. Another thing I didn’t remember learning: crows speak from the chest and not the throat. The source of their sound is rooted deeper, their words truer, juiced from the tiny fruits of their hearts.
I watched the crows until they camouflaged with the night. Then I kept walking, stepping in mounds of droppings. It was a moonless night, so dark that I couldn’t see my own feet. I wriggled my toes, and it felt like they were rooted somewhere above me, attached to the trees, sentient leaves. In sixth grade, for the school play, I was assigned the role of night. It was the only non-speaking role, and my only job was to pull a swathe of lightless fabric across the set. On my head I wore a cardboard crown, a flimsy moon. But as I stepped on stage, I remembered my mother’s story about peeing one drop at a time in the hopes that no one would notice, counting out one hundred seconds between each release, praying that that was enough time for each drop to evaporate. Though my teacher stood in the wings, shushing me, I couldn’t help laughing every time I crossed the stage, the moon on my head bobbing up and down. In the audience, I could hear the echo of my mother’s laughter, our memories converging. Suddenly we were alone together, a real aloneness, not the kind we tried to kindle in the hallway closet, pretending that it was comfortable to crouch, when really there was nowhere else to go.
I keep the hummingbird she sends me, the one with the broken wing. It lives in my left breast pocket, and at night, when it enters the state of torpor, unable to move, unable to speak, not even to dream, I hold it in my hands. I whisper: You will get up tomorrow. You will go. You will return. I pray that my curse remains, that I still have the mouth of a crow: what I speak will come true, even if it means only the bad things. What I want is the ordinary magic of making life happen. The hummingbird thrashes in the dark, beating its wings to each word, hatching out of my chest.