Noy Holland - What begins with bird

Such a world. The sun sails past, warm to the touch. His body tethered, flown.

Now the moon.

What of the sea, the barn adrift? The fallen, throbbing stars?

Try crying, cry out: a shade appears, a dolorous tide, darkens the window, swallows the sky. A mothering heat, a shadow bent.

Feed and she will vanish; cry and she appears. Not a rib, not a bang. Only whimper. Small god.

I am emptied out.

Shaken loose, how swiftly — George is coming to me down the hall.

He smells of Naugahyde, of ready food, the distant rude perfumey press and beery lure of airports, of bodies on the move. He drops into bed beside me, emits a gassy sibilant conciliatory whisper.

Then he is on me. The baby jostled awake, watching up, hairy papa, pleased.

I pinch my eyes shut, not to laugh at them, at how they must look to each other, how they look to me. George is wrestling my pilly nightgown free, rolls me, hurried, dogged, gone — but that Sister is screaming: “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING, HEY?”

George stops a beat and we listen: she drags the dog back into the tub.

Two beats, three, another. Sister sings. The dog sputters and coughs.

Poor panicked hound, slipped free, hauled back. A dog devoted, briefly loved, gone to the Post Everlasting .

Yes. Tell it, Sister. The gods shine down.

She is a Miracle, soon to be, a gospel girl in ribbons and pearls: a Miracle in Training. Cheerful Helper. Much Improved. Miracle in Training.

George rolls off me: he has remembered — where he is, and who.

Husband, father, suitor, son.

Resolute, a man in need. Thinks: give it a go. Hup, boy.

He takes his time for a time, he is easy, he is breaking softly into me.

I would stop it. Send him off down the hall, down the hill, Sister in tow and the dog behind and every last goodly neighbor, everyone else who means well, everything else that needs.

Just the one, I want — shoeless, a girl, her tongue cut out — to slip food under our door. Not a peep. Leave me to molt and heal. I have bones again, I’d forgotten — joints gristle, sinew, glassy balls drifting in their pockets. The lifted blue of my veins recedes. A man-sized thumb in my belly unmoors — a nudge at the hull, a nosing; a ghoulie, a ghostie, a bump in some fattened tube.

Buck up.

George turns me away, not to see, should I weep. “Stay with me.”

Say mine again. Gimmit, do .

The rest of life before us.

Sit tight. Lie back. Lucky you, you feel it.

I have kept to my chair to feel it what hook is set, what press desists, what frightened, woozy, ravening love bends its back against us.

“Where are you?” George says. “Stay with me.”

Our boy bats at us, god of us — his blessed farce.

I say, “I am right here.”

Here to please. A girl, a mark, caught again, my wrists cuffed above my head. George is working up to it, working slowly in.

I give in, gave in. It is my habit, my dodge.

He had me pinned, this George, another, pricked, Andy Petie Billy Bob, the way into me dry and narrow.

“All your little friends,” he said.

Pig-eyed boy, he smelled of hay.

“It’s a matter of time,” he insisted.

What isn’t?

Soon —a plea, a girl spliced in: virgin girl on a spongy pier, how you? what’s your name? hardly matters, fly right, it’s a phase, call it that, a passage, christ, what’s it for if not? — little vestibule, shrunken, bloody, windswept maw and why fuss after all — it will knit, tell her that. Little whisperings: sing, why not — something plangent, try, to ease her: the cranes flown south, the murmuring flocks; her name, something sweet, hang the sheet out: his: that’s his flag in my yard, his hand at my mouth, my brash little lollipop of blood, and I am fifteen, the wind in the leaves, the brackish, lurid face of the pond, the birds circling. The dead horse gnawing the barn. Girly, look. There there there there . Say mine again, our little sweetnee hushed, hooked on a tit, he swipes at me— and yours and yours , keep your eyes snapped shut, your back to the door, thar she blows, hip hey, girly, look. All your little friends, girl, look, you think you’re what? — all your life, because it’s nothing, hey, we got babies — red ones yellow brown, four of everything they are making, lord, scissors knife staple string, a nurse in the wings, hup up. The dogs panted, frenzied, dodging him, a boot to the snout, he kept his boots on, shy, he was kind, tell them that, he meant to be kind, conciliatory, pig-eyed boy, and what? this was what? half your life since, bet, half your silly life ago, and he is going, gentle, cautious, gone, husband, father, suitor, son. Christ, the stink of it, the tedium, the final blind obliterating rut, and the dog cries out, the dog breaks free, hysteric. She would drag the boy out by the scruff of his neck, paw a hole for him in the yard, half a chance; and Sister, here she comes, Sister blunders in, weeping, she is naked, “YOU,” wet from the tub, hot on the trail, like the time, like the time, our little tribe, what a sight, little sweetnee boy, buckaroo, will you look? — buckareno, pleased: heat; teat and maw. The muscled sack, galactic. A mind blown out, the shimmering hoard. I am cellular, moldered, spall. Moss and stump, silt, a stream. Dewfall, a pebble turned. Viscera and brine. Oocyte, fiber, hindmilk, fore. The body’s yield and issue.

He cries: my milk springs forth. George laps it up in a rapture and the dog dives under the bed.

They are restored to their places when I wake again, the room hushed. Nothing to hear but the baby, the jubilant, garrulous moon.

I fetch the basket from the foot of our bed. A little something. I think it is something a sister might do: bring a basket — grass of tinselled plastic, a few wrapped chocolate eggs.

The light is still on in the bathroom, the water still in the tub. A streak of her blood on the toilet seat, Sister’s fingerprints on the wall. And in the hallway: something soft underfoot, a lump, then two, another. I think I am finding animals, deer mice come out to forage at night and caught, our bird dog’s habit. I pick them up by their tails, hold them up in the bathroom light.

It is surprising how little you can tell. But I can smell them, a mineral stink, the legendary filth of menses.

The dog has worked at them to leech the blood, to grind the swollen cotton loose. They ride in her stomach, glossed and turned, grown slick before she spits them up the color of tarnished silver.

I creep the door to Sister’s room open.

She has her foot out. Our mother used to sleep with her foot out.

I pull the sheet back. The dog’s lip twitches; she yips in her sleep. Sister has a hand hooked in her collar.

“Go outside?” I whisper.

I draw the curtain back, the sky in the trees a weak boy-blue, light enough to sec by. I see she has a pile of the cotton pads I keep in my bra to sop the milk. The pads are shredded. She has found a bra the dog tore up and a plastic diaper cover too.

She has my gown on. On her pillow is the mangled snapshot I have learned to expect to see: the newly loved, the newly dead, a name in her hand across the back, the boy’s name: Joe Young. She will pull it from her pocket and speak to it when George ferries her back to the airport: I’m coming home, Joe Young .

Her duffel’s open. Two spores. Socks: one pair. The raggedy peel of an orange. She has brought her makeup case, my kaboodle , she calls it, locking, big enough for shoes. Cowboy music and a hymnal — so she can practice: make the cut, the bus.

They go by bus, the Miracles, mouths pressed against the windowglass, plying the river towns. They wear their leather bracelets, tooled: W.W.J.D.?