I
had fled to the bay for safety but the storm caught me there and
killed me. My last experience was the waves sinking their cold molars
into my plumage. They tossed and tousled me as the storm raged, and,
when my breath and the breath of the gods had ceased, they smoothed
my feathers back to perfection in the darkness. The tide left my body
on a beach on the west side of the bay.
I had died with thrice bad luck:
dishonourable retreat, disorienting circumstances, and far from the
open ocean. My Three Days of Grace began at dawn.
I had several admirers that first
day. Just after sunrise a golden dog bounded over to me. He had a
goofy gait, his hind legs not quite sure the direction of his front
legs. He sniffed along my left wing and my face as an old man hobbled
down the steps of the seawall.
“Thor!” the man called, “get
outta there.” He shooed Thor away, gave my body a cursory glance,
and moved on.
This was the blueprint for the
next three interactions. The fifth beach stroller stopped and
crouched beside me. Her mother examined me from a distance.
“It's beautiful,” said the
croucher, whose name was Noemi. She had a slight build and was in her
twenties. Her eyes and her hat were green. Underneath her black hair
was cut haphazardly short. Her facial features blended from sharp to
smooth in all the right ways and places to make a human handsome, but
there was something a bit off about them: the angles skewed, perhaps,
and the curves slightly too voluptious. Because of this and her habit
of staring at people's noses as they talked and taking a very long
time to answer, she was generally considered unsettling. To
complement her unsettling of people, she didn't much like them.
“Is it an eagle?” her mother
asked.
“It's an osprey.”
Her mother edged closer. “I
think it's an eagle—a young one.”
“No,” Noemi continued,
frustration creeping into her voice. “The only eagles on this coast
are bald and golden.”
“Exactly: a young bald eagle.
That's sad.”
“There's far too much white. A
young bald eagle is all brown-black. There was one in the nest on
Cedar Street this fall.”
“I don't know.... Look at its
feet.”
“Mum—it's an osprey.”
“Let's google it.”
“Fine.”
Noemi slid from the sand a small
stick that wouldn't leave splinters in her hands. She called one of
the dogs to her and threw the stick. They moved on.
Noemi returned that evening after
the clouds had rolled across the bay and inland, clutching a thermos
in one hand. It contained Alba Andina Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina.
A smooth driftwood log lay a few feet to my left and on this she sat.
"Hello, osprey," she
said.
Hello, Noemi, I wanted to
reply.
"The wind's died," she
remarked.
The wind is waiting.
She was looking up at the stars
now, at Orion's Belt and the Big Dipper and Sirius. To the north the
city and the ski hills lit the sky and shrouded the stars. She
imagined the world a thousand years before, when there was negligible
light pollution, and on a clear night the heavens shone
unadulterated. Countless stars illuminated her mind's eye; she felt a
sense of peace and wonder and comfort. A tear trickled down her face
and the illusion fled.
She wrenched her gaze from above
to view below: the cement wall and road dissolved, the rows of cabins
grew into pines and oaks and willows. The beach curved up to meet the
forest seamless. Noemi drank a little more and breathed short and
shallow to keep herself from crying.
"Here, osprey--for
your companionship." She poured wine on my breast and walked
away.
My pleasure.
On the second day she brought her
painting supplies. When she found the place where I had lain empty,
the breath caught in her throat and she trembled and then she walked
on. My body sprawled two hundred yards to the south, near the tip of
the bay. She had only brought blacks and whites and browns, which
suited my former seat fine but I now lay on small rocks.
After a time spent considering
and staring from my body to the rocks to her canvas to her paints,
she began. First, a background of browns and black dabbled sand
flowed over her canvas. She then trekked back to the cabin to
retrieve the blues and yellows and reds she needed for the rocks. She
painted the rocks carefully, recrafting their wholeness and their
brokenness, their individuality and their community. The last rock,
blue-black with streakings of silver and red, took her an hour. She
had painted them on the edges of the canvas, leaving a circle of sand
for my body to rest on.
After lunch she returned,
although the food sat in her stomach and her fear weighed upon her.
Her fear was an ominous, nameless, and haunting thing, but she
conquered it and made the first bold black stroke of my wing. From
there, it was simple. She reformed my figure in oils, remade me a
sleek midnight sea traversed by a fleet of sails. I was brought to
new life by her alchemy. As the sun set over the ocean, beyond the
hills and the islands, she packed up and left.
Thank you.
That night the tide stole upon me
like a lover. It caressed my down and encompassed me within itself
and transported me towards my home.
Please, I wished, take
me with you. Guide me to your currents. Let us drift together to the
open ocean.
It left me on the lip of the bay.
This was the third and final Day
of Grace. I needed to traverse the labyrinth of islands to the south;
I needed to get to my final place of rest before the next sunrise. I
called to the tide as it ran away and begged it to return that night
and carry me off.
The sun rose pink and orange and
misted. Noemi came soon after, wearing purple gardening gloves with
grey padded palms. I felt her vicious intent and, for the first time,
I feared her. She tied the smallest and wildest of the dogs to a log
and let the others roam as she examined my fallen body like a
surgeon.
"Why have you not been
eaten?" she asked. “Why are you untouched? Why are you still
so perfect, osprey?”
She grasped my longest pinion
feather on my left wing and pulled.
Stop! I wanted—needed—to
cry out. Don't, Noemi! I must stay whole.
My feather held firm. If I had
had human breath I would have sighed, or laughed. I knew every
feather of my body. I knew the weight and how to maneuver each in any
wind; I knew which ones were healthy and I knew if there were
weaknesses. She wasn't done. The wing had stretched out and the wind
lifted it up on display. After a long moment Noemi eased it back to
the sand and then, methodically, pulled on the next feather, and the
next, testing. None gave way to her. She tested the other wing with
the same result. After a quick fit of frustration that consisted of
heavy breathing and a bug-eyed glare, she attacked my tail.
Please. The wind was my
voice, nipping her. She bundled deeper into her jacket. No, Noemi,
no.
There was a feather on the left
of my tail that was frayed. It was inconsequential in life and would
have fallen out within a few days, but the rules of pergatory were
different. She pulled, was thwarted, pulled, was thwarted, pulled...
and my Grace was broken.
She took her ragged treasure home
and left me to the flies and the crows. I did not expect her to
return: she had played her miserable part.
Noemi returned that evening,
alone. Why did she seek my company? I had no choice but to accept
hers, though I did so bitterly. Did she know what she had done? No,
of course not. How had she touched me, sullied me so when others
could not?
She chased off the ravens and
built a small fire nearby. She had brought three items. The feather
was in her grasp; she twirled it, staring from it to the flames and
back. Her thermos was with her, this time bearing a wine from Italy.
Lastly, wrapped in brown paper, was her painting. What was her role?
Was she the trickster: stealing my old salvation after creating me
anew?
No, her next act revealed her.
She was the destroyer. The brown paper caught immediately and the
whole contraption was ablaze within seconds. She had placed that
apparition of my lost magnificence on the fire so gently. The
oils bubbled and crackled and made a light so intense she had to turn
away.
Murderer. Demon.
That
fourth night I begged the tide once more to take me home, though I
knew I was lost. I had been caught between this world and another.
There was no escape. I simply preferred the kissing nibbles of fish
to the raking of crows and the shit of seagulls. I wanted to fade
with some small dignity.
The
winds were my friends, once. The tide and I, we were strangers and it
had other business. It approached me but did not touch, its probing
fingers teasing. It knew my journey was over.
After
I mourned I drifted from my body, now a hive of maggots, to a beach
that flowed into willows and pines. Countless stars illuminated an
ocean that was perfectly still.
I
was not alone. A young girl with long black hair and staring green
eyes watched me.
Hello, Noemi,
I said. My voice was the wind and it encompassed her and she heard
me.
“Hello,”
she replied. “You're an angel.”
I
looked down at my body, tall and muscled and sexless. My hands were
smooth and sharp, like her face. I stretched my wings and found them
black bespeckled with white. Yes,
I said.
She
took my hand and we walked along the beach. Though there was no wind
but for my voice, the trees swayed. The water remained still. Cranes
stood in the tidepools, ducks floated along and made no ripples. We
walked along until we crested the bay and faced south. The islands
disintegrated and we looked out into the endless ocean.
I need my feather back.
“I
don't have it,” the girl replied, fidgeting.
You do.
It
was in her hand the next instant. She glared at it guiltily. It was
my turn to play a role I knew perfectly, though I couldn't remember
learning it.
“Here,”
she said, trying to give it to me.
Put it in the water,
I told her.
She
did so. It floated there, the frayed feather that broke my grace.
When she stood back it grew, white becoming brown, into a rowboat.
Thank you. I
knelt in the sand and put my long arms around her. She began crying;
I held her for a long, long moment until she was through and my
shoulder glistened. I stood and said again, Thank you, Noemi. Be wise.
The
rowboat, instead of rocking, eased more deeply into the water with my
weight. I sat and faced her and bent my great wings forward until I
could grasp one in each hand. They transformed into black and white
oars, beautifully carved with feathers. I rowed once and knew that
that was all I needed, so I shipped the oars in front of me and
waited. Noemi and I watched one another as I drifted onwards until
the she merged with the land and I with the ocean.
The
next evening Noemi returned to the beach with her thermos. All that
was left of the osprey was feathers and bones and beak.
