Where Do Songbirds Go to Die?
By Nico Sharma
Blue eyes. Dilated blue eyes. He carved a bird in between pages of the book he left at my flat. I heard it sing to me the next morning. And then every morning that followed. I had tried a few times to learn its song but it always seemed to change as soon as I caught up.
***
I came back to an empty house. Completely hollow except for the flowers I got to bring back. Even the air seemed vacant. Waiting for me to breathe. To fill it up. I heard his son play the song on the piano at the funeral earlier. I listened and listened wordlessly. It was a completely different key, tempo and melody but it was unmistakably the same. It was. I wondered if he left his son a book too and if the song ever changed for him. That night I had woken up and stumbled to the mirror. The corners of my eyes were red and my tongue black. I had been crying and I didn’t even remember it.
***
I felt aware of my hands, my cheekbones, my jaw. I stood by the brimming bathroom sink contemplating how cold the water could be. Maybe enough to let my eyes freeze over. Enough to let me melt when I climbed back out. I stood there in my consideration until I decided to just sit down on the tile floor instead. In line with an equally cold draft. Outside the little window the sky had turned a classic English grey. There were at least a hundred trees in my sight - most bare and skeletal. The world was in mourning.
***
I picked up the book from my bedside table. It was a thick hardcover book with a sturdy spine and endless words trapped inside. It weighed nothing. The bird didn’t sing to me again. I stayed up all night just to hear its song. Flipping through pages, fingers running along the etched lines. I prayed to hear his book sing all night and it never even let out a chirp.
Maybe it was just set free. Away from an empty house to wherever songbirds go to be free.
***
I picked apart each page carefully, and set it in gasoline. The fire spun pirouettes. Little dancers breaking off from the group and whisked away into the sky. I could hear whistling from the burning pile. It gave my body warmth. A real warmth I hadn’t felt since him. Since he had left me with this burdened body that wouldn’t fall asleep anymore. Since he had left me with nothing and everything and nowhere to hide it away.
***
I wouldn’t wake up for the next 12 hours, tucked away within myself. The duvet was undulating. Waxing and waning with every breath he took. Like waves crashing on the shore of my body. The bed was too small yet somehow he balanced himself on the opposite edge, like Moses parting sea. I laid in bed unmoving: a beached whale, waiting for an answer. I kept waiting until he rose and drifted away, a tidal breeze brushing past me, picking me up and tossing me about. Buffeting.
It was easier to pretend he wasn’t sitting at my breakfast table watching me eat cereal. He wasn’t there if I never heard him. If I closed my eyes, I couldn’t see him anymore. But when I opened my eyes again he would be there watching me. Always watching. Intently.
***
People had been blending in together. My mind had been slipping in and out of conversations, struggling to hear words said out loud. I was slipping away. Very conspicuously. Days were blending in together. The world churned around me. I felt dizzy, twisting myself into knots. But when I opened my eyes again he leaned towards me with his perfect blue eyes. Pupils so big you could barely see the floating atmosphere of an iris around it. A total eclipse. I reached over to touch his eyebrow but only let my fingers hover a few centimeters over. I was afraid. I was aware of my neck and my face and my eyes.
THE END
Author Bio: Nico Sharma is currently pursuing a course in BA (Hons) Fine Art and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Stuck in the perpetual flux of body, identity, and being, they write about the conventions of the world around them as an emerging writer. They have been published in Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, En*gendered Literary Magazine, Eunoia Review, as well as local student-led magazines.