you dream of birds

Part One
In Which You Dream of Birds

Four nights before your birthday, you dream of birds. There are a thousand of them perched in a great tree, their white wings drooped elegantly down their sides and their feathers trailing behind them like wedding veils. They sing a thousand beautiful songs each night, and you know this because they are singing them to you now. But one of them has no beak, and you know that if you catch it, it will grant you a wish.

When you wake up the sky is like frosted pearls, and you know that you must have a bird.

Part Two
In Which There Are Ants in the Walls

You have no idea why you didn’t think of purchasing a bird before. It is easily the best idea you have ever had. You can hang out with the bird on your shoulder and feed it crackers and teach it foul language and you simply must have a bird.

But there is one small hurdle to leap before you can get one, and that hurdle is your roommate.

Your roommate’s name is Narandal and she is from Mongolia. You didn’t know that was even still a place that had people in it, but apparently it is because every time you come home she’s right there in your apartment being Mongolian. Narandal is a sweet girl with a round face and dark hair, but she has obsessive compulsive disorder. You think it’s a little weird, but you guess you’re okay with it. You try not to make a fuss out of anything she does. Besides, her OCD means the apartment is always clean and as far as you’re concerned that is just swell.

But it’s also why a bird may be a problem. Animals are messy. You will need to go about this proposal very delicately.

When you get home, your roommate is sitting on the living room floor, peering earnestly at the couch. It is white and spotless, as is the carpet she is sitting on. There is a length of yellow measuring tape in her hand.

“Oh! Hello,” she says, a bit startled by your arrival.

“Hey Nina,” you say. You call her Nina because you do not know how to pronounce her real name. “What’re you doing down there?”

“Oh, the couch, it needs to be two inches away from the wall.”

“Why?”

“Well! You know, there could be ants in the walls,” she says, looking at her hands.

“Oh, neat,” you say. Narandal smiles at you and continues her meticulous calculations. You pause for a few moments before continuing. “Hey, so, I was wondering, do you mind if I get a bird?”

“A bird?” she asks. Her expression does not look promising. You grapple for a way to get her to agree. You must have a bird.

“Yeah it’s uh, it’s not my bird. It’s for, um… my friend. She’s going to… Canada. She needs me to watch it.”

“Oh,” she says, “How long will your friend be in Canada?”

“Uh. A while,” you say.

Your roommate looks uncertain.

“I’ll keep it out of the way in my room! And she says it’s like really quiet.”

“Well, alright,” Narandal says. Your heart explodes into multicolored confetti.

“Okay, cool. You need any help with the couch?”

“No, no. I’m fine,” she says, eyes fixed on the couch cushions. But you barely hear her. You are already in your room looking up pet stores.

Part Three
In Which You Have Waking Dreams

That afternoon you head out to purchase your bird. The pet store you decide on is called Basically Birds, which you think is a bit silly because how could anything be Complicatedly Birds, but you are just an accounting undergrad so what the hell do you know about bird stores anyway.

You park your car in a drab shopping plaza filled with sidewalk cracks and angry mothers. Basically Birds is nestled between a thrift store and an Armenian bakery. The smell of burnt sugar wafts over you as you head inside the pet shop.

Basically Birds turns out to be a very self-explanatory name. It is basically filled with birds. Everywhere. There are cages of birds on the walls and hanging from the ceiling and standing on the floor and just about anywhere a cage could possibly go. The birds that fill them are multicolored and numerous. Tufts of their feathers wander through the air like flecks of prismatic ash. Some of these birds you immediately recognize: a fat, ruby-red macaw, a slim ivory cockatiel, a shy brown finch. Yet others seem strange to you, the patterns on their feathers complicated and alien. They regard you with wide black eyes when you draw close. You can see your face, awkward and flat, reflected in their glassy surfaces, so you stare at the floor instead. The carpet is some kind of brown, and dust puffs out from it in tiny A-Bomb clouds whenever you shift your feet.

Eventually the owner of the store shuffles sleepily through the corridor of cages to greet you. With your nose still saturated with the scent of sucrose from the bakery outside, you find yourself immediately comparing her to a cake. If cakes could be people, you feel that she is just what one might look like. She moves toward you, large and lumbering, as though she may tilt too far and topple over at any moment. Her face is framed by lazy curls of russet hair that spill out from her scalp and her clothes are candy-colored and puffy. Her eyes, deep and tired, examine you skeptically before she welcomes to the store.

“Hi! I’m, uh, I’m here to buy a bird,” you tell her. You find yourself raising your voice to compete with the squawks and chirps around you.

“Obviously,” she says, moseying over to the counter near the door. You note disappointedly that her voice is bored and gray and not very cake-like. “What kind?”

This question, though simple, catches you a little off guard. You didn’t really think about what kind of bird. You just want a bird. You are going to feed it crackers and teach it foul language and train it to bring you tiny objects that you are too lazy to fetch across the room. Who cares what kind it is?

“Well, maybe one that can talk?” you venture, “And… that’s friendly?”

“Parakeet,” the store owner responds before leading you over to a tall gray cage filled with small, flashy birds the color of almost ripe bananas. They flutter excitedly from perch to perch at your approach, chirping pleasantly and preening their feathers. A few of them hop closer and turn their heads to the side to view you with one eye before scampering away again. You decide that parakeets are adorable.

“Which one?” the owner asks.

You lean forward to give the flock a closer examination. They all seem pretty wonderful, but pretty identical too. How does she expect you to choose? You spend a few moments watching them quietly, trying to see if there are any personalities that stand out, but none do. They nibble at their yellow-green feathers and climb up the walls and squabble with each other for rights to the food bowl.

And then you see it.

Hidden away at the very top of the cage, above your head, is a bird the color of a pale summer sky. It is the sort of blue Aztecs wore in beaded flecks in their hair. It’s the indigo-gray that swallows up the sky after a deep storm. It’s the kind of sapphire that splashes up from the sea when it meets an ancient cliff. It is the innocent cobalt of a fresh-picked berry. It is the brilliant cerulean of a cloudless dawn. It is all of these, and yet none of them at the same time. It is beautiful. It is perfect.

“That one!” you say, pointing up at it.

“Huh,” the owner says, “You sure?” You nod enthusiastically.

She shrugs and reaches over your head to open a small latched door at the top of the cage. Several birds scatter out of the way of her hand, but the blue bird does not seem to mind the invasion of its space. She gathers it up in her palms and, holding it gently, removes it from the cage and places it into a small box. You hand her several crumpled bills from your pocket, take the box, and head for home.

Part Four
In Which There Are Two Thousand Eyes

Three nights before your birthday, you dream of birds. They circle their great tree as a flock. Their fluttering sheds the small, fluffy feathers beneath their wings and these fall around you like snow. You call up to them, asking them to come down and sing for you, but you cannot hear your voice above the discordant ruffling of their wings. They do not land. One thousand white feathered heads turn look at you from above.

They watch you until you wake up.

Part Five
In Which You Speak to the Wings Beneath the Sun

Your roommate Narandal is not interested in seeing the bird. She is incredibly busy. When you wander out into the kitchen to give your new bird some quiet time, you find that she has removed everything from the cabinets and has set to lining them with very precisely cut lengths of cardboard. She’s good at it, and you wonder where she learned to cut cardboard for lining cabinetry. You speculate over what she did when she lived in Mongolia. Sometimes you hear her speaking in Mongolian over the phone, and you wonder if she is talking about you.

Narandal never speaks to you about her old home, which is probably because you never ask. The one time you did, she told you that her mother had abandoned her when she was very young, and you weren’t sure what to say about that, so then she told you her real name.

“My mother chose it,” she explained to you, smiling and patient.

“How do you say it? Narndle?”

“Narandal. Roll the R,” she said gently.

“Narrrr-andle,” you said, butchering it as much as possible.

“Nina is fine,” she said.

“What does it mean?” you asked. Narandal paused a few moments before responding, looking thoughtful.

“Sort of like… a pair of great wings spread out beneath the sun.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Yes. I think choosing it is the one thing she did right,” Narandal said with a frown, referring to her mother, and it was then you decided not to ask again. At the time you meant you’d never ask her about Mongolia, but somehow not talking about Mongolia became not talking about anything at all. You don’t ask her why she thinks there are ants in the walls, or why covering the cabinets in cardboard will keep them safe, or why she scrubs the counters even when they’re already glittering.

You leave her in her life and you stay occupied in your own.

Part Six
In Which You Wait For Silence

After sitting silently for an entire day, your new bird has begun to move. It slides slowly across its perch to examine the toy on one end, and then back to the other side, over and over. It does not seem very similar to the excitable fluttering you observed at the pet store, but you are sure that it will take up more entertaining behavior in time. It is cute with fluffy feathers and you are going to teach it foul language and feed it crackers and take it for walks in the bird park, if that is even a real thing. You just need to be patient, as the woman you bought it from suggested.

So you leave the bird to get comfortable. While it settles you work on knitting a hat for your friend’s new baby. You can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl, so you make it green. You work on a paper for your Auditing and Corporate Governance class, which is exactly as boring as it sounds. You pick up your room a little while Narandal washes the living room walls. You check your work schedule for the coming weekend. You quietly, and patiently, wait for your bird to notice you.

And that patience is rewarded with a shriek.

There is no other way for you to describe it. Suddenly, with provocation, your bird has begun to scowl and scream. The noise is high-pitched and unpleasant in every possible way. It flaps its long, beautiful wings and clicks its tiny orange beak and shouts and shouts and shouts.

This is not what you expected at all.

You phone the owner of Basically Birds, and she answers in a manner that suggests a recent nap. You picture red velvet cupcakes in the place of her hair as you speak to her.

“Hi, I bought a parakeet from you the other day and it’s making this really loud, squawking kind of noise,” you tell her.

“Yup,” she says, “They do that.”

“What do you mean, they do that?” you ask.

“They do that. They make all sorts of noises. That’s one of them,” she sounds bored with you.

“Well, you didn’t say that before,” you say, confused and worried.

“Yup, well, they do that,” she says again.

“Is there a way to make them stop?”

“Just give it attention and don’t stress it out. Should shout less. But they still do that. It’s one of their sounds.”

“Okay. Thanks, I guess,” you say, before hanging up the phone.

It takes another ten minutes for your new bird to calm down. Its vocal chords exercised, it takes to sitting silently once more. You are left feeling nervous and unsure, and you do not even think about feeding it crackers.

Part Seven
In Which Something is Wrong

Two nights before your birthday, you dream of birds. They funnel into the sky like a glorious waterspout, but something is wrong. They are not beautiful and elegant. Instead, they are ragged and afraid. They flee their great tree as though it will bite. “What’s wrong?” you ask them, “Where are you going?” One of the birds lands on your shoulder.

“We have seen one thousand silver suns in the sky,” it says, “And they light the way to freedom.”

“But where?” you ask, watching the cloud of wings above you, “Where are you going?”

You turn to look at the bird and it is gone. The bird with no beak has taken its place, and it cannot speak to you. It turns its head to face you with one eye. It is wide and black and deep, like a chasm that falls down to the center of the Earth. You shiver, and find that you can wish for nothing but for it to leave.

Part Eight
In Which You Take the Bad Luck

Your roommate is too nervous to drive anywhere, so the next morning when she tells you that she needs groceries you are the one to take her. You’re happy to go this time. Your new bird is still shrieking about once an hour and you would be lying if you said it wasn’t a little annoying. You wait quietly as she examines the expiration dates on every item she selects, sometimes rifling through a shelf for several minutes to find a specific one. She blinks nervously at the shelves as though they are plotting to kill her.

When you get back to the apartment, Narandal refuses to go inside. There is a white cat lounging near the door. “We have to wait,” she tells you, grasping your upper arm, “We have to wait for someone else to go near to take the bad luck, or it will be ours.”

“That’s black cats,” you tell her.

“No,” she says, her dark eyes fixed on the animal’s fur, “No, it is white.”

You walk up to the door and shoo the cat away. You don’t think OCD makes people superstitious, so it’s probably just one of those Mongolian things. She probably has all kinds of crazy foreign ideas about bad omens and spirits and junk. Your roommate smiles cautiously at you as you walk inside together.

While Narandal spends the next hour putting her purchases away in carefully measured rows, you go to check on your new bird. It screeches at your approach.

“Hey, shh, shh, relax. It’s okay, little bird. It’s alright,” you say in a voice that could be soothing. The bird only shrieks some more. “Shhh, shhh,” you say. You promised your roommate that it wouldn’t be noisy, and you know she can hear it screaming from your room. You have to get it to quiet down, but it just won’t. The more you try to assure it, the more it yells and flutters and squawks.

“Just shut up!” you eventually hiss, but it doesn’t.

Part Nine
In Which You Dream of Nothing At All

The night before your birthday you dream of nothing at all, and this is because you do not sleep. The bird will not stop screaming. You are sure any moment Narandal will come in to confront you about it, but she does not. Why won’t it stop screaming? It seems to you that it barely even pauses to breathe. It just shouts and shrieks and screeches. You resolve the next morning to bring it back to the pet shop. Thoughts of teaching it foul language and feeding it crackers are far behind you. You barely think anything at all. It’s too loud to think.

Your fingers clutch at the quilt of your bed and the sweat of your palms rubs off on the blue-gray pattern of the fabric. Why won’t it stop screaming? You turn your head and yell back at your bird, but it is too loud to hear yourself above its shrieks. It’s too much. You leap out of bed and hurry to Narandal’s room. You need to apologize. She spends her life worrying about ants and cats and dirt and now she has to listen to your new bird and you just can’t stand it. You shove her door open and you are startled to find that she had been asleep. She sits up and asks you something. You know this because you see her mouth move, but it is too loud to hear what she is saying. She gets out of bed and clasps your hands, asking again. But you cannot hear her, and she cannot hear you when you respond. The bird isn’t just screaming now, it’s wailing and howling and squealing and roaring and you just can’t think at all.

You tear back into your room with the sun rising on your back and to your new bird’s cage. Its wings are the blue of old midnights and cold stars. You scream back at it to stop, to shut up, to keep quiet, but still you can hear nothing. Why won’t it stop screaming?

You rip open the door of the cage and seize the bird, its small beak open wide in an unholy outcry. You shake its tiny feathered form, begging it, pleading with it to be quiet, and it is only when small splotches of red begin to dye its indigo feathers do you realize that it is dead.

But its screams do not go with it. They cling to your ears and rattle at your ribcage and leap down your throat and you begin to realize that the shrieks are coming from you and it is just too loud to think, so you think of nothing at all. Every sound begins to amplify itself in your mind’s emptiness. Your heart beats staccato rolls of thunder against your chest. Your blood pulses in ocean waves, crashing and roaring on the surf of your veins. Each ear-splitting exhalation that rushes through your teeth comes as a monsoon melody, dripping down into the cavernous bellow that is boiling in your stomach. It reverberates in a harrowing cacophony of sound, jumbled together and leaping from wall to wall, breath to breath, and ear to ear. Your eyes are filling up with the red of disharmony and your hands are filled with blue feathers and hollow bones.

You sink to the floor, surrounded by the remains of your new bird.

It all stops when you run out of air. The sound dwindles into the emptiness of your lungs, shirking away like a scarlet shadow.

There is no noise, now.

And that silence, quietly deafening, is the loudest of all.