BIRDIE (PART 4)
"Morning Sun" by Rich Lo | Greatsketch, all rights reserved.
(Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3)
“AMOS!”
Birdie stood. Her black eyes stayed transfixed upon the yellow wood. Don’t run. Don’t start.
“AMOS, GET IN HERE.”
Mother Hayes grabbed that chick like it was a tatty old play toy and stormed down the stairs, holding Birdie loosely in her crooked arm. Mother Hayes threw Birdie upwards as though she expected her to take flight. With a pathetic plop onto the front yard, she laid feebly on her crumpled left wing, the pain shooting up her shoulder the way fire catches poured gasoline. Birdie rolled over cautiously, her feathered neck lax and rubbery. She stood up with the finesse of a wooden puppet, always but a moment away from collapse. The sweetest relief, after all that time spent trying in vain… Birdie could feel the scratch of the bright green glades push up underneath her talons. Finally, she relieved her itch, her primal hunger for something she could feel the absence of but not identify. She raised her chin just a hair, as chickens are limited to, and let the hot orange light of the sun envelop her entirely. She stood there, alone, soaking in the fierce power of the sunshine. Birdie seemed to forget that a mad woman was, at most, four-and-a-half feet away. But God, was she satisfied.
As she looked out again and stared at the landscape of green, Birdie realized… for the first time… she had no idea where she was supposed to go. She had finally made it outside, further than she ever could’ve imagined she would. But she didn’t feel unbound. She didn’t feel free. If she was free, she’d be able to take a step forward. She wouldn’t be standing as she was now, frozen in place. One might expect her to run. But she had nothing to run towards. She didn’t remember anything about that shed where she was born, not even the color of the paint that covered the wooden walls. She had been inside for so long. The realization squeezed her like a garter snake coil, the pressure coming down on her chest: Just move! Pick a direction and move! Birdie had never had to pick anything.
Just as Birdie was starting to panic, Amos was thrown outside by his mother, collapsing comically in the grass like a dusty ragdoll slumps in the donation bin. Amos pushed himself up with two dirt-covered palms and clumsily ran over to Birdie. The single tear in his eye had flown off his cheek the way a raindrop shakes and swipes horizontally off the window of a fast-moving car. Amos was weak from his mother’s discipline; he needed two hands now to lift Birdie up. He whispered from underneath a pink, swollen nose, “I guess we got caught, Bird.”
Amos placed Birdie underneath his left arm and started to walk slowly in the direction of the shallow hills, his armpit squishing harshly up against her bad wing. Birdie watched the house get smaller as they drudged, Amos’ sniffs breaking up the sounds of his bare feet mashing against wet mud. Birdie had stayed quiet for so long that to hear the high-pitched noise she let pour out surprised even herself when Amos tightened his arm up against her side once again—the instinctual “yap” of a puppy when a shoe meets the tip of their tail. “Stop whining…” Amos yelled between snotty sobs, without even looking down at her. She tried it again. What else could she do? “Stop, Birdie, I’m sorry!” He picked up pace into a run, and when he met the barn door, hoisted it open with a force that could prove to an outsider that this kid was becoming a man. Holding Birdie with two hands, Amos charged towards that same corner he hid in when it rained, his intensity radiating outwards enough that the small chicks that crowded the hay floor ran their orange feet quickly out of his footpath. Amos slid down again into that same corner, the one where they first met. He held Birdie close to his face, just like he used to, whispering to her like she was still a chick, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry I got you in trouble…” Amos’ weeping exhausted him to sleep some 30 minutes after. Birdie waited until Amos relaxed his hands to fully fall asleep herself atop his folded arms, resting her feathered cheek into the soft pillow of his old flannel button-up.
Amos and Birdie’s peaceful inhales were near perfectly synchronized, when an almighty force, the kind that shocks your body into immediate alertness, threw the barn door open. That door of knotty pine slapped severely against the wall adjacent, blowing stuffy hay-dust clouds into the air. The door’s creak sounded like a scream, as if a formidable warrior had transferred his wrath into the metal screws that held it, just to make them cower and loosen in fear. If a feeling that carried a strong enough charge could cause steel to bend, the rage of Father Hayes would have melted those door hinges clean off. They’d lie in a grey puddle on the floor, once strong, now useless. How Amos wished he could melt, move as an undetectable, amorphous mass, spread himself thin and slip under the door, hide in the leafbed of the forest and sink into the soil, get away, escape, get anywhere else. “I saw your room,” Father Hayes spoke between tight lips and clutched his son’s arm pitilessly, pulling him only halfway off of the floor before beginning to drag him out of the barn by the nook of his elbow. Birdie tumbled out of his arms, her cheek and shoulder breaking her fall onto the thin layer of hay covering the wooden floor underneath. She landed squarely on her good wing, and a quick matchlight of friction sent pain shooting up her pebbled skin. The way the barn door was designed to double-swing made Birdie see Amos’ fate in flashes—vignettes of him being dragged further and further away from the shed visible only every other second. Amos drew his feet deep into the hay floor as he was dragged, leaving grooves like winding map paths from the safe corner to the door that screeched. Those pathways could lead an explorer like Birdie all the way to Hell. The door finally stopped swinging, and Birdie couldn’t hear their hollering anymore.
End of Part 4
