Fear of Lovebirds

The Basement Door

To Mother, her pets were “Velcro birds” sticking to her fingers and shoulders, fully bonded to her, never wanting to let go whenever she allowed them out of their cages.

Les inséparables, she whispered to me. Under the right conditions, they could bond to humans as well as they bonded to each other. Mother had a talent for socializing her masked and peach-faced lovebirds, pets so colorful and so tame they could be sold for top dollar.

“For ten to fifteen years of companionship,” she used to say to her buyers, “it’s a cheap price.”

The man who kidnapped her in her childhood, wanting ten years of companionship, kept her in his basement until she became a woman, then set her free. He was a tiny, wiry man who wore short-sleeved shirts to reveal my mother’s name, Beth, tattooed on his left bicep. 

Once she was no longer a child, he wanted nothing to do with her. By then, she had been caged so long, she didn’t remember how to be free. She only wanted to go back into the cage, but he evicted her from the basement, banishing her into the world he had stolen her from when she was a little child. 

Freed, she still wanted to sleep in a basement or a coop. She could only sleep in a room with no windows. Or, that’s what my father told me when I asked him why my mother was the way my mother was. My father understood her history. He was a retired police officer who had worked her case since she first went missing and could never forget her, even after all his years of searching ended when an elderly farmer discovered my mother attempting to crawl into her chicken coop. 

My father couldn’t believe it until he saw my mother’s face washed clean of dirt and feathers. Only nineteen, she could speak but didn’t like to talk. She was pregnant and couldn’t stand to be alone or in open spaces. She needed to be in a basement full of bird cages to feel comfortable. Because no one else would be responsible for her, my father filled his basement with cages so she could sleep.

Eventually, as her family of lovebirds grew, my mother had less time for me, even less for my father. She devoted hours to her birds, moving them in and out of cages, allowing her favorites to snuggle against her cheek and toy with her chandelier earrings. In the morning, she carried the cages to a room with windows, and the birds dove into the caged light.

When I was a teenager, I did the math and always regretted doing the math, thinking about who my biological father really was and why in her last days she rarely left the basement.

“Are you really my father?” I said to the man I had been told was my father.

“I don’t know why they call them a lovebird,” he said to me. “They’re just an affectionate parrot.”

My father—or the man I had been told was my father, the man who raised me, the retired police officer—began to sleep alone in the little guest room above the basement stairs. Soon, my mother rarely visited the rest of the house, confining herself to the makeshift aviary where she ate and slept, no longer bothering to put the birds back into their cages since the entire basement had been transformed into a cage. The birds cried shrilly whenever she left the basement, and my father didn’t seem to care for the sound.

I suspect my father was secretly afraid of the lovebirds. He could never admit to his phobia and seemed ashamed of the way Mother’s pets made him cringe. Helpless in the presence of the birds she adored, he leapt when she opened the basement door. 

Freedom

Because I couldn’t fly like Mother’s birds, I wanted to swim.

I almost drowned after watching the movies Mother’s kidnapper made of her.

When I grew older, decades after her death, I began to wonder why. I realized it was strange that after having been kidnapped as a girl and held in a basement against her will, she married a man who looked so much like her kidnapper and moved into his basement. 

It was almost as if she never knew how to be free.

Mother’s soul escaped the cage of her body when I was still a young girl. A petite woman who adored large earrings as well as lovebirds, Mother died too soon, leaving me with questions about her death as well as memories of the birds she fed by hand.

Turning Colors

In the movies, her skin changes colors in dark light.

In the movies, a girl with my eyes does what the man says.

In the movies, my mother doesn’t look like my mother. She is too young. She looks like me.

I have the man’s silly grin.

My father, discovering me watching the movies in the attic, kept saying, “What did you see? What do you think you’ve seen?”

His eyes are why I ran to the neighbor’s pool to fly away through the night-dark water as if it were sky.

Our neighbor, the doctor, found me drowning in the kidney-shaped pool in his backyard and carried my body to Mother by wading into chlorinated water. She jumped into the pool, her yellow housecoat soaked and swelling. The doctor revived me, breathing into me and tapping on my chest with his fingers, cold and wet from the pool. By the time he smacked me, Mother was shivering, attempting to swim in her ruined housecoat. I started to breathe, again, screaming as the doctor handed me to Mother and then hoisted us out of his pool. Immediately after sending us away, he dove back into the water, never even allowing Mother to thank him. 

Her exquisite dark eyes wide and unblinking, Mother told me to remember the blueness of my flesh on a long-ago afternoon. “Turning colors,” Mother used to say. “Do you know what that means?” 

“No.”

“Another girl, one much older than you—a teenager—drowned in that pool a year before you.” Mother whispered, “She died there.”

“Why,” I whispered.

“Your soul tried to escape,” Mother used to tell me. “Your body was too quick and caught it just in time. Be grateful your soul is caged like my lovebirds.”

It was a strange idea, to be both caged and grateful, an idea that I came to embrace from a very young age. 

Loving a Dead Girl

Some nights Father left without warning. In the kitchen, Mother held an egg to the lamplight—candling, searching for the shadow chick developing inside the shell. Whenever I caught her candling, a part of me longed to break free, to go to where I was forbidden. The teenage girl who drowned in the doctor’s pool was a shadow silhouette gliding through my dreams. I was in love with the idea of the dead girl. Thoughts of the girl drowning became inseparable from my hopes and fears about the future. I kept trying to escape our house, our yard, and our family to run away past the trees to the doctor’s pool. 

By now, Mother was too busy hand-feeding the baby lovebirds that had been rejected by the hen, too busy to keep track of me as she disinfected the syringes, heated the formula, tested the temperature, and then lowered the syringe to the fragile beak of the chick resting in her steady hand. Because Mother could no longer depend on Father or watch me herself, she hired a babysitter named Martha, a bold teenage girl with intense watery eyes and distracting red streaks in her blue-black hair. 

“Please don’t,” I said the first time Martha tried to hold me. This angered her, as I had hoped.

The week before Mother died, Mother said she would have to fire Martha, and I was glad because I was beginning to dream the lovebirds escaping.

Sky Gazer

Sometimes a cloud moving over the moon seemed to take up the entire sky, so Martha and I thought the cloud was the sky. She became frightened, hiding with me in ditches or beneath trees. She said we could disappear. I believed her. Her lies were shifting clouds. 

“That’s the way words are,” Martha whispered. “Say what happened again and again, so that the truth is forgotten, and the details of what really happened seem strange.” 

“What is happening?” I was almost afraid to ask. She might lie. She might tell the truth.

“Your mother thinks I’m after your father. And maybe I am, but just for the hell of it?” She looked at me and had to know I saw the way he left the door to his room open in the night. “You’ll probably think it yourself,” she whispered. “You have to remember, no matter what happens, it was never about you.”

Glue

When the doctor’s pool had to be filled with dirt and leaves, I became a pack rat, saving stamps in a shoebox under my bed. Occasionally, I gave the stamps to Martha, as if they were money she could use to buy the things she wanted. 

In the days after Mother died, I kept finding the stamps all over the house—hidden in the closets, in dresser drawers, behind posters on the walls, inside pillows, beside the sewing machine, underneath the television, and on top of the radio. 

In her last days, Mother spent so many hours caring for her lovebirds that she was out of sorts after selling off her newly weaned brood. In the evenings and mornings, just before sleeping or after wakening, she kept candling eggs, her face illuminated by the promise of new life.

“No, Avie. No,” Mother used to say, gathering the stamps off the floor, exasperated as they stuck to her fingers. “This is a fire hazard. Throw this trash away!”

“But they’re Martha’s. I gave them to her,” I said.

“Trash,” Mother whispered, throwing stamps into the wastebasket.

I put my face to Mother’s hands. Her skin smelled sticky, minty, sweet like the glue the stamps left behind. 

The Playhouse

My family’s home was a big wooden house with an identical miniature house, a playhouse, in the backyard. After Mother’s funeral, Father wouldn’t look at me anymore, wouldn’t talk to me. Loading up the cages covered in dark blankets, he drove away in his pickup and was gone for weeks at a time, supposedly delivering lovebirds to a breeder in Florida, a woman who would take the remaining birds and their cages while offering a handsome price for Mother’s precise notes on taming, feeding, and weaning.

Alone with Martha when Father went on his journeys, I used to tell Martha stories about Mother. Martha used a knife in the playhouse to make her drawings on my arms while I spoke. My body was her canvas. Sometimes I fainted while she drew the things I described. She covered me with designs until there was no skin left untouched except for the places clothing couldn’t hide. 

Designs, I used to love that word! I still do. Designs, designs! Her designs! 

The first time I ever heard the word I was standing in the bathroom near the vanity mirror and admiring Mother’s perfume bottles. The clear or yellow-tinged liquid misted out of blue and violet glass. While examining the lattice edges of the metal tray, I ran my fingers over the flowers and vines that were flowing into each other in a linked pattern that had no beginning or end. 

“What is this?” I asked Martha.

“What?” she asked.

“This. What is it called?”

“That’s a design, Avie.”

“What’s a design?”

“A decoration or a drawing. A big picture made up of a lot of little pictures that keep repeating.”

“Like these?” I wanted to ask, opening my shirt and unwinding the gauze that Martha had wound so snugly against my skin. We never spoke of Martha’s designs or even alluded to the drawings on my body.

The perfume stung the cuts on my skin, so I sprayed it on my hair until it was practically dripping from my forehead. I was the sweetest smelling girl in town. When the wind blew, people could smell me from half a block away. They knew I was coming long before I was there. The perfume was like those little bells that cats wear on their collars, some sort of warning and location device alerting those who were near me. 

Hero

My father was afraid to be alone with me because of what I might say. I could see through lies. I understood Martha’s words in ways he sometimes didn’t.

“There’s still at least one lovebird somewhere in the house,” I used to say to see him squirm. “At night, I hear it flying, calling through the vents.”

I had hidden one lovebird in my closet, Mother’s favorite, an old masked-face named Hero. Secretly, I kept Hero hidden in the house for years and fed him lettuce and fruit stolen from the kitchen as well as some food pellets I had tucked away.

I was seventeen when Aunt Sarah, who became my legal guardian, called the police after discovering Martha’s drawings on my body, but there was nothing the police could do but look for Father and Martha, who left in the night, abandoning me. 

I cradled Hero. In caring for him, I honored Mother. Remembering her small basement world, I imagined the way it kept getting smaller. Her world could never be small enough to make her feel safe. 

The world is too large and full of too many possibilities for people like Martha and Father to stay in one place for long. There is always someone else to meet, someplace else to see. There is always there, which is so much better than here. There is a way and away—another man and another woman, another mother and another father, another motel, another house, another city, another town, another life, another story, another you, and another me. 

After Mother’s funeral, I kept a tiny photograph of Hero on a locket on the silver chain around my neck. On several occasions, I caught Father staring at the locket when he wouldn’t look at my eyes. 

The Smoker

Now at nineteen, I’m still trapped inside this scarred body. Ever since I got my license and saved up enough money to buy a car, I’ve been driving around with my lovebird Hero while showing strangers photographs of Martha and Father.

After months of searching and dead-ends, I finally locate my father at a garage near a motel less than ten miles from the house where my mother died. My father looks old now, so much older than I remembered. 

Father seems frustrated, crouching on his hands and knees beside the broken Chevy. His long white hair is soaked, and his frayed jeans are wet with oil and rain. Assuming he doesn’t recognize me, I try to pass by without notice. He gazes up at me, his hammer held in mid-air.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” he asks, his face smeared with mud.

“Yes,” I say, not surprised by the request.

After all, he is a smoker, and cigarettes are swapped among strangers for conversation or companionship or various information. Even though I don’t smoke, I’ve carried almost every brand at one time or another and given them all away, one cigarette at a time while asking strangers if they have seen anyone like Martha or Father in their town. Marlboro Menthols, Camel Lights, Kools, Pall Malls, American Spirits, Lucky Strikes, Winstons, Dunhill Golds—I remember the months of searching by what brands of cigarettes I used to carry in my purse. 

I take my pack of Lucky Strikes from my purse and shake out a single cigarette, trying to shield it from the rain.

“Do you know of any place around here where I might purchase lovebirds?” I ask.

He smiles warily, gestures toward my oversized purse. “Lovebirds?” he asks.

As I remove my silver lighter with Beth etched on the side, Father whispers, shaking his hammer close to my face, “Give me all the cigarettes you’ve got. I’ll need that lighter, too.”

“Okay,” I whisper, shivering as I once again recall how little I know about him, how limited my understanding of him has always been. 

“What do you want with lovebirds?” he asks after lighting his cigarette and tucking the lighter into his pocket.

“What’s it to you?”

Glaring, he catches my hand and rubs something that feels like glass and mud against me, between our skins, an object placed on the hearts of our palms. I stuff whatever it is into my purse and stumble to the other side of the motel.

Motel Balconies

Martha looks down at the garage from one of the motel balconies, but she doesn’t see me watching her. She waves to my father, and he nods to her. When she turns away from the streetlight, her face disappears into shadow. The shadow makes her appealing to me. Her features fade into darkness. Without a face, she could be anyone. I have a sudden urge to go to her. Because I cannot see her eyes, it never occurs to me that she might not want to see me.

On the balcony stairs, I fall at Martha’s high heels. Instead of reaching down to help me, she holds her hands straight out in front of her, palms towards the streetlight. Splaying her fingers, she turns her hands slowly.

Her fingernails are extremely long, chipped and curling under, painted with a thick glossy topcoat with pale green glitter trapped inside. Underneath her nails, near the tips of her fingers, bright white lines are drawn with an ivory makeup pencil. It’s the oddest French manicure I have ever seen. In the white space, diamonds, ovals, and stars have been scraped as if etched with a scalpel or an X-Acto knife. 

The tip of each fingernail is pierced a little off center. Some of the holes are larger with rougher edges than others, as if the holes had been made with an ice pick. The holes have begun to crack, down the center to her cuticles.  

Through each hole, a tiny, silver jeweled charm is strung. The jewels are very small, amber and ice blue. The charms are shaped like sea creatures—octopus, whale, dolphin, seahorse, starfish, mermaid, shark, eel, turtle, and clown fish. They jangle like cattle bells in the distance. The jewels glint in the window light. Hair-thin, green curling ribbons are stranded through each of the holes, along with the charm catches, tangling her fingers.

“Can I touch your hands?” I ask.

“Don’t,” she says as I try to stand. 

I smile up at her while stumbling through the open door that leads to her room where the walls are chipped and painted a dull golden ivory clashing with bright blue-green paintings of the sea.

“Get out,” Martha says in monotone.

Ignoring her, I empty my purse onto her bed to see what Father gave me. The thing itself doesn’t explain anything. It’s just a small piece of soft blue clay full of red-glass shards.

“Where did you get that?” Martha asks, as if she has seen something like it before. “Who gave it to you?”

“My father,” I whisper, holding the blue clay to the lamp so the red glass turns to embers in the yellow light.

I lean closer to her face, almost too close, and I realize how beautiful and confusing her face is. Like an old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle of a woman’s face that has been taken apart too many times, her features are worn down so that the edges don’t quite fit together the right way, leaving gaps on the seams. 

“Who is he?” I ask because I am certain that she knows my father better than I do.

“Just an old man. He could be any old man.”

“Why did he give me this?”

“Did it look like this when he gave it to you?”

“Why?”

Touching my chin with a fingernail, she tries to turn my face back toward hers. There’s a dark ridge under her nose that is too deep and shadows on her face that don’t make sense—shadows that aren’t supposed to be there, cast by protrusions under her skin. Her cheekbones are too high, moon-shaped, one slightly lower than the other. Her lips are swollen, sensual yet unnatural, so that they move in delayed response, as if she were trying to shape the words just after she speaks them. Hair-thin scars like starbursts are hidden just under her earlobes. When she blinks, her eyes make a slight popping sound, but the lids don’t close all the way.

“You have to remember,” she whispers.  “Try.”

“It looks a little twisted.” I lie to her while studying the clay. “Look. You can almost make out its eyes. Here.”

“It’s an insect or a bird?” She says, “Can I have it? You don’t want it anyway. It cut your hand, and it’s broken. Right?”

“Sure.” I’m not sure. I don’t know why she would want it. “Only I don’t feel right giving it away.”

“It’s ugly, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

I whisper Mother’s name into her ear: Beth.

“Go away,” Martha says, holding the clay to the light as if it’s a piece of jewelry. Then, as I back away from her, she says, “Wait! Don’t you see? This is supposed to be a lovebird.” 

No matter how long I stare, it’s just soft blue clay hiding jagged shards.

“A mingling of grasshopper and swan, a thing of insect and bird, shore and meadow, beautiful yet common . . . sky-bound yet earth-bound, malleable yet sharp,” she says. “I want to know if you’re who I think you are.”

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“Avie?”

She tugs at my shirt to examine the old scars, then removes her clothes, showing me her story scars for the first time. Studying her body, skin so rough and patchy and shiny pink and mauve and gray in its uneven tone, I realize we are the same.

She puts her fingers into my shirt, tracing my story scars with her fingernails, delicately following the designs. 

“Why?” I ask.

Her voice is low, soft, trailing away. I was you, I think she says. A long, long time ago. Her fingernails work fast over my chest and back and arms, making me shiver. 

“Why?” I ask, again.

Helping me remove the rest of my clothes, she whispers, “It tells a story.”

Carved

The story carved into me touches what she wasn’t supposed to touch: reasons Mother left this world with lost birds, a drowned girl, and Father holding Martha in the night. After the funeral, Martha borrowed the knife from my father, and she and I began hiding in the playhouse, holding secret meetings while he worked at the garage. 

Martha created openings—doors and windows, cups and bowls—for my blood to flow through, blood used to paint the trees and the giant flowers and stars Mother showed me in dreams. The rainbow perch Father caught in the lake, the chicken hawk and the sparrow hawk, the ducks and the dogs, the ants and the crickets and the tree frogs were carved into my body along with the lost birds. 

Martha wrapped me in tissues and paper and rags and white cloth, so tight, again and again, so the blood wouldn’t show. She began cleaning everything with bleach—my clothes and the floors of the little house and the big house. 

Every night before I went to sleep, she sat on my bed and whispered to me, so sweetly, that I wouldn’t tell anyone what she did, that I would quit reminding her of the way Mother cried in the movies clutching feathers in her trembling hands the same way that Father would later gather petals of the damp roses that were strewn across her grave.

“Why?” I asked her.

“You.”

Images scabbed over, darkened then lightened, building up mysterious textures over the years as my skin grew with me, stretching over my bones.

The textures grew and grew into one large drawing from my collarbone to my chest and arms, my back and my hips, my feet and legs—even the spaces behind my knees, in between my toes, under my arms. Then there was nothing left to scar, no skin left untouched besides my neck, my buttocks, my face and hands, which the knife would never touch. Martha told me as much. She promised me that.

“Can I touch your arms?” Martha asks.

I stare at our reflection in the dresser mirror. She runs her fingernails all over me. A blind woman could read me like Braille. Behind the television, she holds me close to her chest the way she did when I was a little girl, cigarette smoke drifting through our hair. 

“It must have been really painful for you.”

“Remember?”

“Why?”

“What was my mother’s name?”

She motions for me to come closer and lights a cigarette. Her hands are shaking.

Beth

“This is your daughter,” Martha whispers when Father finds us in the motel room. He begins to laugh as if we’re joking, holding the hammer in one hand and the knife in the other. I reach for my shirt on the floor. He spits into his hands then uses the spit to clean off dirt crusted on his knife. Reaching under his sleeves, I caress his arms, the scars that have erased the tattoos of Mother’s name. Beth, I whisper. Beth.

“Hold it right there,” he says. “Lay flat on your stomach.  Don’t move.”

He drops the knife to the carpet and puts the hammer down on top of the television. I fall on the bed and close my eyes. He rubs something dry and rough and cold against my arms and shoulders, all over my body. When I open my eyes, I see it’s just a big stick of charcoal.

“You missed a spot,” Martha says to him as she halfway sits up on the bed, watching him with her elbows resting on the pillow and her face in her hands. “Make sure you get it all.”

After he covers the back of me with charcoal, he says, “Now, roll over. Slowly.” 

I turn over, no longer afraid of him. His eyes are kind, the irises greenish-brown, flecked with blue and gold. They are the eyes of the man in the movies with Mother when she was a girl but also the eyes of the doctor who saved me long ago—or rather, the eyes I imagined the doctor had, as I never remember seeing his face. 

Father holds me higher above the bed, and I feel my soul flutter in the cage of my body, a prisoner dancing at the chance to be set free.

Martha smiles. Fluttering before skipping beats, my heart stops and then starts. Stops and starts. Avie, I think she whispers, I drown, waiting for you to swim with me.

His Large Arms

Perhaps Father doesn’t know what she’s saying. I’m hyperventilating. He lifts me higher and higher, cradling me in his large arms. Then he smiles at me, gesturing back toward the bed with his chin. 

When I turn away from him, Martha is no longer smiling but looking down at the space where I have lain. Father holds me tight. Gazing into Martha’s mercurial eyes, I wonder if we really are inseparables. 

Father releases me.

The distinct shapes between my raised scars, Martha’s drawings, reveal a silhouette of lovebirds on the charcoal-blackened sheets.

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Author’s Note: “Fear of Lovebirds” was published online in a digital journal that seemed to disappear without warning over a decade ago. Its name has been scrubbed from the internet and my mind. It is truly a ghost zombie story ripe for resurrection. 

In a Boat About to Drown: A Story by Robert Lopez

Boats don’t drown. People drown. Boats sink. Something happens, then boats take on water, then they sink. They sink right to the bottom. The people on the boat try to keep the boat from sinking. They take measures. They use words like bow, stern, starboard and port. These words mean front, rear, right, and left. They use these words all the time, even when the boat is not sinking. When the boat is sinking they take measures. They make calls. They might even bail water. Then they put on lifejackets. Then they float around until someone comes by to pick them up. The people who come by to pick them up are called rescuers. They know to come by because they have been signaled. They are signaled through direct radio contact or by Morse code. Morse code, in telegraphy, is a series of dots and dashes that indicate different letters of the alphabet. S.O.S is the most famous code sent, which means Save our Ship. People say it doesn’t actually mean Save our Ship but what do they know. Mayday means the same thing. Why is not clear. It might have something to do with French. Rescuers are given positions of longitude and latitude. They say that rats are the first ones off a sinking ship, but unless they are extraordinary swimmers it does them little good. The rats are neither here nor there. The people rescued are called survivors. They are called the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are called victims. These are the people who are subject to float around with no one coming by to pick them up. Sharks attack them or the sun beats down on them or else it is freezing cold and they get what is called hypothermia. Hypothermia is a state of reduced body temperature wherein all bodily functions are slowed. Then they freeze to death. Then they are recovered. People can either be rescued or recovered. Survivors or victims. However, there are victims who are never recovered, their bodies. These are the people lost at sea. There are songs written about them. Boats are lost at sea, too. They are mentioned in the same songs. Drowning is different. Drowning is for people who can’t swim or who can no longer swim due to injury or exhaustion, or people who choose not to swim. Something happens, then they take on water, then they drown. They sink right to the bottom. The water can be deep or shallow, rough or calm. There is little difference. Water fills the lungs making life at first difficult, then impossible to sustain.

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Author’s Note: This was one of my first stories that appeared in an internet journal, somewhere around 2002-2004, maybe. Otherwise, it was 1956. Taint Magazine was edited by Michael Kimball and someone else I can’t remember and it featured the sort of languaged up fiction I’ve always appreciated. I do remember when it went belly up there was a note on its homepage, Taint what it used to be.