This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards

He was perched atop a tall stool with no back, sipping tea. He must have been in his 70s. Wise professor. I sat across from him, a long table to our side, but not between us. My chair was short and comfortable. Yes, cushy almost. Our conversation was relaxed yet stimulating. I miss these kinds of conversations so much.

He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to be a writer.” He told me that my answer is the only answer there is and I must remember this. Just then my husband’s phone rang. I realized that he had left it among my things on the long table. I answered. The professor continued speaking, looking directly at me. I couldn’t hear him.

On the phone, a girl’s voice. “I need to talk to you. I need your advice. I am sad. I’m angry. My husband is a jerk. My life is crazy. Listen to me. Listen. Who else are you talking to you?”

I tried to console the girl. I wanted this voice to do away, desperately. I wanted to throw the phone in a bucket of water. I wanted to drown everything in the world and just listen to the professor.

I wanted him to keep telling me to be who I am and to live my dreams and that it really was okay. When I hung up the phone, he was gone and I felt so tired.

I’m crawling on hands and knees up the first hill of a roller coaster. I have an old matchbox car in my left hand, and I’m trying desperately not to drop it. I must get the car up this hill, so I can push it down the other side. It’s urgent. The rails are painted red, most of them are vertical. I choose each horizontal rung carefully. Every few rungs I ascend, I have to push these plastic buttons to set the date and time. Once I do, tiny lights come on for a few more feet to light the way. The buttons are shoddy and sometimes when I push them, they fall right through. I see piles of gray, plastic buttons laying in the grass below me.

All around, down on the ground, is a carnival. All my friends and family from back home are there. They’re drinking and dancing and celebrating. None of them see me climbing.  I keep pressing forward because I must get this little car to the top of the hill. Just as I begin to enter the date into the rungs of the roller coaster for the last time, just before I can push the matchbox car down its slope, my alarm clock rings.

There was a community party outside, behind the bar. White tents and Christmas lights everywhere. Country music from a live band and drunks staggering around. The tiny white cross was stuffed into dirt by the side of the building. It was right in the mini-ditch where water dripped off the roof. She was wobbling there in front of it, explaining to someone who didn’t care that there in the ground, in a coffee can, was Pete.

Contrary to what you may be thinking, Pete is indeed a human being.

She crouched onto all fours and crawled over to Pete’s tiny mound of dirt. She said something lengthy, emotional, and completely incomprehensible, then she looked to me as though I should speak. I couldn’t say a word.

I am standing in a loft apartment. The walls are brick. I see dust floating through a stream of weak light fighting its way through a moth eaten curtain. To my right is a bed with one pillow and one sheet. There is a dresser with no drawers. In the middle of the room is an old, porcelain bathtub. To my left is a full length mirror. The mirror is old, dirty. Its frame is unsubstantial.

I’m naked, staring confused into the mirror. I have wings — enormous, white, feathered wings. They feel kind of like my arms do and I make my wings open the same way I lift my arms over my head. When I yawn, they ruffle. These wings were not here yesterday and I wonder whether they’ll be here tomorrow. I wonder if I can fly with these wings. I touch them with my fingertips and they seem sturdy enough. It feels possible.

Tiptoeing across the room to the window I decide, before even pulling the curtain, that attempting to fly is a terrible idea — unsafe and crazy — even though I have wings. I wrap my wings around my shoulders and make a cup of tea instead.

Wandering through an almost magical-looking forest, I notice an old railroad car. The end door is visible, but most of the car is wedged into a hill. It appears almost as if its been buried. I decide to take a closer look and notice that the door is slightly open. Someone else took the trouble of smashing off the lock. It lays broken at my feet.
Inside the car smells musty, but it’s pretty clean. The sides are painted gray (recently) and the floor has been swept. I can’t see the back of the car, but as my eyes adjust to the dark, I notice a tiny speck of light. Assuming the light is imagined, I tip toe toward the back of the car, one hand in front of my face and the other sliding along the wall to guide me. The closer I get to the back of the car, the bigger the light appears. Eventually I realize that my fingertips are no longer brushing metal, but dirt. Glancing back, the door I entered looks something akin to a mouse hole and I wonder how long I’ve been in here. Just about the time that the former light speck has grown to the size of a harvest moon, I detect a shadow moving back and forth, slowly, in front of the light. As I walk, I strain to focus on the shadow, realizing that it is a man. Further realizing that it is him and that he is startlingly close to me. I can feel his breath (it’s freezing cold), but I can’t touch him. I flail my arms in front of me like a zombie movie extra, but I feel nothing. Stranger still, I could swear that I am nearly nose to nose with him. Still, I cannot feel him there.

Behind the warehouse, the daylight was shocking to my eyes. I walked through the alley of vendor booths, all closed, but one. The sign was so old I couldn’t read it, but there was one customer holding a small, white, disposable cup. I realized it was fresh squeezed lemonade and stopped to buy a cup. The handsome young man behind the wooden table grinned when I approached. He immediately began making my drink. I wanted pink lemonade, but that’s not what he was making. Somehow he knew where I was heading. He must have heard about these people. This could go well, as promised, or it could take a turn. It was a risk I was willing to take to get back what was so precious to me. During his well-practiced drink creation, he looked up at me and said, “If you need help down there, I will be there. I can hear everything that happens from here.” I thanked him and drank the most delicious lemonade from the tiniest cup.

I’m wrapped in a towel, brushing my teeth when this bolt of pain shoots through my jaw. I lean over the sink to inspect my teeth and notice a crack. It’s real. It’s horizontal. It looks like the very top of my bottom, front tooth is taking its last stand. It is shooting pain through my gums to warn me that this is it, so I do what any person would do in this situation. Using the tip of my pinky finger, I push on the cracked tooth. It crumbles and begins to bleed, but the pain stops. Upon even closer inspection I realize that every single tooth in my mouth is cracked. There are spider cracks on every tooth, like heat cracks through a cheap coffee mug. I begin pushing on another tooth and it, too, disintegrates. It is at that moment that I decide the only thing to do is to stuff a washcloth into my mouth and go back to sleep.

We were back in the tattoo shop, last year, getting tattoos. She was there and I met her first. I introduced him to her as my fiance. She was annoyingly young. He bitched about her later, and told me after I left that she tried to hang out, but that no one in his circle of friends liked her. It changed the course of the next year so dramatically. When I woke up and looked next to me, I wasn’t sure whether there was love or hate there.

My shoes were too muddy to walk inside the house, so my mom told me to put them outside on the front porch before going to bed. Barefoot, I stepped into the dark and onto the front porch. I always hated how my toes stick down through the slats if I don’t step in exactly the right spots. I especially hated it when it was so dark I couldn’t see what was beneath me. On this particular night, as I set down my shoes, I hoped that dog wouldn’t come in the night and steal them. Just as I thought of a dog stealing my shoes, I noticed a pair of yellow eyes beneath my feet. I heard a growl and jumped. Suddenly I realized there was a wolf under the porch, a scary, growling wolf with huge, shiny teeth. It didn’t want my shoes. It wanted my toes.

When I was in high school, this kid I’d known since elementary school was killed in a car accident. When we were little kids, we rode the same bus. One day he spit on me because I had a new coat. I screamed, “Fuck you,” at him because it was the worst thing I could think of to say at age 10. The bus driver wrote us up, but only he got in trouble. Looking back, it was unfair and maybe someone should have tried to figure out why he was so angry all the time.

In high school, he was really nice to me. No, we didn’t become best friends. We didn’t hang out at parties or fall in love. This isn’t a movie. This part is reality. He was killed in that crash right before our senior year of high school. It was a mile or so from my house. It was weird and horrible and sad…

Last night I saw him. I was at his house. Not his parent’s house when we were kids. He had this small, white house. All the walls were white. He was sitting on the couch in a tux. The couch was yellow and brown tweed. He smiled and said, “I’m getting married today.” His soon-to-be wife entered the room in a flowing, white gown. It wasn’t really a wedding dress. It was almost more like a nightgown. She had a beautiful face and long brown hair that was all tied up like a princess. I have never seen her before. I don’t remember her name now. She gave me a hug and said, “This is exactly how it should be.” Mike said, “I’ve never been so happy before today.”