Birds on a Wire

somewhere, sometime, somehow

Little birds crowd along the wires all the way down the street. They chitter-chatter about getting away, somewhere warmer, somewhere south of here. “Summer here until summer ends, then pick it up and take it somewhere else.” I count them as I smoke, losing track around twenty-four. You see, today at work, a man imagined me naked. He asked if I liked working there — if I liked helping old men like him. His eyes slid over my shoulders, my shirt, through the teeth of my zipper, wondering what he’d find. Then he opened up, or collapsed inward, a hungry sinkhole drinking in the tension between us. I stood and let him consider things more akin to eating than fucking, and his wife stood still behind him. He tells me I am pretty, and I say thank you as I look at her, and I replay it now as I attempt to count twenty-five birds.

I guess I asked for it working there, living here; when my friends and I chatter, it’s about leaving too. But there’s so much to do first, saving and packing and saying goodbye, so much more of a hassle than just flying away. The birds laugh and ask why we don’t just come with them. I say it’s complicated. No, we aren’t really welcome, and we don’t make much money or eat all that well. Sometimes they want to eat us, sometimes they do. But we know all the street names and the best places to dance, and sometimes that makes it worth it. Our hearts are laid down like hearthstones, I say, too heavy for hollow bones to carry. They cock little heads to the side, how strange. I guess they’re right. It’s our fault — my fault for staying.

They turn back to the wire, as bored by my confusion as I am. Somehow, winter occupies us when they go. Are we just too stubborn? Proud to brace against the cold or too proud to admit we are frost-bitten, we stay here, huddled together for warmth. We’ve always been here, popping up out of the soil like weeds, and somehow we’ve found our way until now. But across the street I spot one, a little bird dead on the lawn, and as the others sing above, a hawk tears her guts into ribbons. Somehow they have already forgotten her, and when it grows cold again they will leave her and her name behind. The dead are heavy too. I look at the birds, and they look back once more, and I realize we are not the same. I walk under the wire, under the gleeful chitter-chatter, and scoop her up gently from the grass. Under a bush just down the way, honeysuckle and crepe myrtle entangled, I fold her wings over the slit in her chest as I tuck her softly beneath.