The tawny brown filter fits like a key to its lock in the perfect slot of his beak. The ideal shape of it, the precise seal, nothing lost to the inbreath. He holds up one wing to shield his face, the wind slipping and sputtering against the soft blunt of his feathers and, with a filed talon, sparks the lighter after a few clicks. Brings the Promethean flame to the paper tip and, rather than watching it catch, presses the lids of his eyes closed and breathes in. The stinging tickle in the back of his throat. Tilts his head back against the mottled brick. Holds the awful smoke in his lungs for a spell then releases it to the encroaching evening.
There is, for the briefest moment, the nicotine flood to the brain like so many layers of reality sliding into focus so that every consequence is worth the action for just a breath of contained freedom, wide and blue–and then it all slips away again and the only relief is in the act itself. The skinny cigarette dangling with a certain femininity between two talons at his hip; mechanically, but fluidly, he lifts the stick of habit, slots it into the perfect hollow at the tip of his beak, takes a drag, then returns it to his hip. Thinks to himself he must look like one of those slightly offensive lawn ornaments, the slim wooden bird with a top hat that tips over to dip its beak into a birdbath or a pond or vacant space, then is returned to an upright position by gravity, just to be pulled back down by the same force over and over into eternity. And still, there must be some comfort in that—knowing the pattern a body follows never has to change.
“Bum?” asks Mike, his appearance sudden enough that the comfort is dislodged.
Dar ruffles. “It’s my last one,” he says as if he means ‘no’ but anyway slides the nearly hollow pack from the pocket of his apron and offers it to Mike, makes him reach for it. Makes sure he takes the whole pack just for the one cigarette, he can toss the empty box out himself.
Deadbeat doesn’t have his own lighter either so Dar lights it for him, keeping his distance. They lapse into a series of quiet, lonely drags. The sound of their purposeful breaths almost containing a rhythm. Beneath the smell of the smoke and the tobacco clinging to their clothes is the scent of the garbage fermenting in the imperfectly sealed dumpster, the mysterious muck lining the contours of the alley, the sweat beneath their arms that has burned through the day’s allotment of deodorant, the meat and onions sizzling through the open door. This discordant olfactory chorus, too, offers its strange, ugly comfort.
“You on tomorrow?” Mike asks. The day’s light is fleeting and being replaced by harsh white streetlight pooling only at either end of the alley, offering little clarity where they recline.
Dar considers this for longer than he should have to. The sequence of days has escaped him. Did he put the trash out this morning? Or was that yesterday? There’s a call he needs to make, isn’t there? Something important lost. The landlord was banging on his door on Thursday, he knows this, always knows when the first of the month is looming, but already has buried its temporal place in the past beneath the crackling anxiety, waiting for his bank account to overdraw. Every time his phone purrs, he expects it to be the banking app with a cheeky little notification pretending to be a real person who cares about him. It hasn’t happened yet but it is happening over and over again on loop in his mind’s eye. This happening at the top of his head to block his line of sight to all stirring in the depths.
Finally, he exhales and flicks some ash to the ground, watches the cinders sputter out on the uneven asphalt. “Yeah, obviously,” he says, unsure if this is true. “I don’t take fucking days off, man.”
Mike shrugs. “Alright, damn. How the hell would I know, I don’t pay attention to other people’s shit.”
“Maybe you should,” Dar mutters, shakes his head. A sharp breeze rounds the corner and rustles his feathers, pale brown and russet red, into momentary applause. Someone calls out something incoherent from inside, the words chopped up by the clang and bustle.
“Fuck you,” Mike says without conviction. “You know, actually I ask because I have been paying attention. You’ve been weird, man. I haven’t seen you like this in a while.”
The cigarette is burning low, the smoldering fire inching closer to the place between his talons where the filter seems to fit perfectly into the hard, worn grooves there. He’s already wishing he hadn’t given Mike his last smoke.
“Cool,” Dar says. “Kinda sounds like none of your business is what I’m hearing. Like, it’s my business and that’s why I haven’t said shit about it.”
Mike shrugs off the hostility, water off a duck’s back. He’s frustratingly unaffected. “Alright, well, as your friend or the closest thing you’ve got to a friend, I know that the breakup was fucked–”
“You think this is about Charlotte?” Dar actually turns to face Mike now, the perfect O of his beak cleaved in two by bewilderment. “That was months ago, dude. I don’t give a fuck about her.”
Mike sucks hard on his cigarette and the fire creeps like vines toward his calloused fingers. “Okay,” he says. “Definitely sounding like a guy who’s over his ex.”
Can hardly remember why he came out to smoke in the first place, the original reason now overridden by wanting to smoke Mike’s presence into cinders. He presses the meager stub into the brick then crushes it beneath his shoe for good measure. Another mild sedative of a ritual. “It’s not about her,” Dar reaffirms, untying and retying the strings of his apron. “When I say you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I mean you’re a fucking idiot and I don’t respect you.”
He marches past Mike and through the door into the heat of the kitchen with something like a ghost dovetailing the breeze behind him.
Through the front door, he shakes the cold from his feathers, watches one dislodge from his wing and fight gravity all the way down to the floor where it comes to rest next to the folded up piece of paper. One the landlord had forced through the crack under the door after it became clear that his banging and shouting and you can’t ignore my calls and I know you’re in there’s were not going to be answered. Dar had simply waited for the noise to stop, the heavy footsteps to recede down the stairs, then plodded over to the desk where he scribbled out a hasty check, purposefully writing in near chicken scratch in the hopes that it might take the check longer to process or maybe bounce entirely. Dropped it in the landlord’s mailbox four days late, better than usual. Easy to prolong the inevitable. Inevitable can always be postponed, just gotta stay on the move.
But left the letter on the floor, unread. Didn’t care, or cared too much. Kicks it deeper into the corner now.
He slips his wide jacket over his shoulders, hangs it up on the coat rack. Fishes the fresh pack from the pocket and takes it straight to the back deck. Keeps the light off in case the landlord is home three floors down (he’s got eyes like a hawk.) Settles into the deck chair with its worn cushion giving off a faint mustiness and the hint of tobacco as if in expectation.
Cigarette gripped in the grooves. Wing to the face, spark up, long drag, eyes closed, head back, the flood and then the empty. Exhale.
It’s quiet out on Dar’s deck. Comparatively, at least. The city screams and scrabbles and invents emergency at every corner, but it’s subdued, basically nothing like the day to day of the kitchen which is seemingly a factory of sensation. Always harsh white light bright enough for inspecting the food coming down the line but always someone barking in his ear to keep it moving, faster, behind with knife, going for a smoke, faster, I need some fucking pussy, behind with hot, faster. Always scent rising like heat, every pungent particle swimming across his vision. Relentless pace, anger the baseline. Sweat pooling, apron too tight, ding of the bell, pots clanging, behind with knife, order up, I mean it I really need some fucking pussy, dude, are you listening, dude, can’t you talk and work at the same time? All a dull roar in his ears. Keeps him from thinking too hard.
His phone begins shaking then and he realizes he’s been staring at the drawn-curtains-window of the adjacent building for what could have been truly any amount of time. The phone keeps vibrating, indicating a call. Landlord? He peers over the edge of the deck as though he’d be down there with one hand on his hip and the phone against his ear, glaring up at his despised tenant. But it’s just the dark, lonely alley, empty.
Slides the phone from his pocket. On the screen: Mom. Knowing she would call today but not really, forgot on purpose, he thinks. The realization that he’d been holding the date in the back of his head releases a knot in his chest. Sucks in a parcel of smoke before answering.
“Hey, ma.”
“Darwin,” she says tightly, almost cordially. Then clicks her beak a few times, swallows, and he can tell she’s trying. Can almost envision her where she must be perched on the porch, all folded in on herself, beak big and round and strong, not at all like his. “How are you?” she tries out. “Today, I mean.”
Stubbing out the current cigarette in the ashtray, a crooked ceramic thing, a gift he should probably get rid of. Lighting another. “I’m okay,” he says with some effort. “I didn’t notice the date. Or tried really hard not to, I guess.” He unfocuses then refocuses his eyes. The detail too intricate, too loud. He takes another drag. “You doing okay?”
She makes a small noise he can’t quite identify, then says, “I’d feel better if I knew you were coming home sometime soon.”
Scoffs, then regrets it. “I can’t, ma. I have work and, you know, it’s like a long ass flight.”
“Nothing like the flight your grandfather made from the island when he was little,” she says, a usual line of hers. When he doesn’t engage, she adds, “And you were just like him, you loved flying when you were littler.”
He laughs but it comes out hoarse. “I loved a lot of things when I was little. I’m big now…bigness changes shit.”
Dar’s mother is quiet for some time and he fears he’s said something too big for her to handle. This is a line he’s been walking for a long time. What to say and how to say it and probably shouldn’t and so holds onto it.
Then she says, hesitantly, as if stepping over hot coals, “He loved music, you know? Used to play it endlessly when you were just a chick and he’d sing along if he thought no one else was listening. I don’t know a chorus from a verse but he knew songs and bands I’d never have heard otherwise. It was my favorite thing, to hear him sing to you.”
She pauses as though waiting for Dar to stop her and when he says nothing, she continues. “He said his own father was a gorgeous singer, it was how he’d woo the ladies, with his pretty tunes. But he stopped singing when your father was very young. Couldn’t seem to explain why, only got quieter if you’d ask him about it. Took up all kinds of vices instead, got very far away. Your father, he didn’t want it to be like that, he really didn’t. Said when you were born that this great fear grew in him and it felt like his own father’s wing over his beak, smothering all the goodness he wanted to make.”
Dar is on his third cigarette. He listens and does not listen and then listens again.
“He tried. But the fear took his songs, too. Never could quite say what he was scared of. Himself, I think.” She clears her throat and Dar can tell she’s growing self-conscious. She’s shared too much.
“I remember,” Dar says. “Or, I remember him stopping at least. There’s a, uh, before and after, I guess. The sound though, I don’t know. I can’t really hear it, his singing. It’s just a feeling I’ve got. A warm one.”
This cigarette is dwindling and still he believes, as if praying to a God he’ll never meet, that the next one will deliver a rush that lingers a little bit longer than the last one. He taps away the ashes in the tray. “Mom?” he asks.
She startles. “Right. I’d say the same. The memory is…too far, I think. Just a feeling, yes, that sounds right.”
“It’s good that we’ve got that feeling,” he replies, quietly. “That’s him, I think.”
Stubs out his cigarette, slots the fourth one into his beak. The perfect shape for it. Remembers when he hated the smell of cigs, the way it clung to everything like a dirty lining. The ugly brown of the butts littering the lawn like weeds. That the act hinged on a particular silence. Hated that the lighting of one meant his father was leaving the room again, going somewhere only he could go. Darwin couldn’t come.
Swore to himself he’d never pick up the humble addiction. And then he got hired in the kitchen when he first moved to the city, thinking himself capable of anything, first man to ever jump from the nest. One week was all it took for his feathers to start molting from the stress, the low or maybe high grade anxiety nesting beneath his wings. Mike, with a calm hand on his shoulder, offering him a smoke out back, that first time he found purpose in his perfect O. The world opening wide like his beak—how had he avoided this nauseating bliss for so long! He felt close to his father then who was already concealing the illness they’d been holding their breath to stave off. Couldn’t bring himself to make the long flight home and see the man shrink, but the smoke. The smoke was calm and close.
It’s perfect, he has to admit. The habit fits like a tailored coat. He’s grown into it like he was meant to. Struggles to light the fourth with the wind stirring and all his limbs occupied, but finally it catches and all is well for the moment.
Dar’s mother clicks her beak. “Are you smoking again?”
The sound of the lighter catching. Smart lady, she always has been. “I’m trying to quit,” he says, almost believing himself for a moment.
His mother sighs and there’s a pretty quality to it, a simplicity like the cadence of the wind. “I know it’s a difficult thing,” she says. “But as long as you’re trying. And as long as you make time to come home, okay? Your mother misses you.”
Dar laughs. “Okay, ma. Yeah. I’ll see tomorrow if I can request some time off.”
“Good.” She hums. “Oh, and I transferred some money to your account. Just in case. Thought you might need it.”
In the alley out back the next day, holding the cigarette firmly against his hip. Trying or not trying but it is trying, more than he’s ever tried anything before, it feels. The shouts from inside, the din and clamor, the smells and sirens, people laughing on the sidewalk, bodies soaring overhead in the evening light. Pressure on his hip. Perfect grooves in his talons. Ultimately, slots the cigarette into his beak.
Searches for the lighter in his pocket, feels the blunted corner of the folded up piece of paper. Going to the bank later to sort some shit out. Responsible, he thinks. Distracted, he ends up pulling his phone out instead. Clicks his beak a few times before unlocking it. Goes to his messages and scrolls way down. Taps on her name. Charlotte with some cute emojis, can’t believe he was ever the sort of person to add them, can’t bring himself to erase them. The final text he received from her many, many months ago still hanging in its liminal space. Couldn’t reply even if he tried, but really he didn’t try.
The message looks lonely, says: What are you so afraid of?
Mike slips through the doorway. “Bum?” he asks. Gravity.
Dar is awash then with a jarring sense of having the asphalt beneath his feet and the whole unending sky above, the volume of the wide open space. He takes the whole pack from his apron, still half full and hands over the whole thing, digs for his lighter and hands that over as well. Mike’s eyes widen but he minds his business.
Dar leans against the brick like always. Takes the unlit cigarette from the space between his beak and returns it to his hip with less insistence than before. Closes his beak into that perfect O, sees his father with his head out the window resisting the call of that same O, seeing his own father and on and on. The shape things take over time.
Dar closes his eyes. Hears something like a train whistle above the din. “My dad always used to tell me this thing when I was little,” he says, not really to Mike, but knowing that Mike is listening. “I’d have these really, like, fucking brave moments where I’d fly up really high, high enough to touch the clouds. Feel the cold vapor bead on my feathers. And then there’d be other moments where this…fear would, like, clip my wings and I felt my feet stuck in all the shit that keeps you on the ground. Stuck or, like, immovable. And my dad, he’d kneel down and toss a wing around my shoulder, look me right in the eye and say: We’re finches, Dar. Our shapes are always changing. We do what we can when the changes grip us. We adapt.” He snivels a bit, taps his hip anxiously. “I don’t know if I can. Adapt. I don’t feel…fit for anything.”
Mike is quiet. One of the guys shouts a slur in the kitchen and another guy shouts a different slur in retribution. There’s laughter and they never once stop working. Mike releases a sigh from a deep pit. “No one ever said adapting is a good thing. Sometimes in a shitty situation, you adapt in a shitty way. Then shit changes and you adapt again. Things change. Something good comes eventually. Then, guess what? Things change. New stuff coming down the line. Adapt again. That’s all this is, I think. You know, life.”
Dar smiles for some reason, the feeling of it unnatural but he lets it happen. “Things change,” he mutters in reply.
Pulls a deep breath in through his beak as though taking a drag. Holds the untarnished air in his chest for just an echo.
Darwin exhales and a note sputters out, uncertain and uneven. He blinks at himself. Feels Mike look at him sideways. Feels the clipping fear then, the way it anchors. Then he looks back up toward the sky where limits are shattered with a single breath. Breathes deep, in in in, and then out with purpose. A sound spills from that one shape meant for its one thing. The sound is wild, off-kilter and lilting, maybe even pretty. A pretty sound from his beak. Like the egg of a song.
Mike drags on the cigarette pinched between his concealed grin and Darwin sings.
Pretty much perfect, James - the smoking, flight and the absurdist phasing between human and bird, all to give it some strange force to knock it in to the reader's mind. Excellent stuff, really enjoyed it. Really outstanding prose too.
beautiful. loved the anthropomorphism. loved all the bird wirds...maybe i missed some before i realised you were doing it. feels like it came out pretty quick this one. You really got the human condition yet shaped around a bird body and the relevance of finches to evolution and then the evolution of spirit. great work James. uplifting. blue skies breaking through clouds. 🐦⬛🌞