When I’m getting high on the back stoop, I’ll sink into a kind of cavern, where real life seems both out of reach and stifling, like I’m trapped beneath it. And then I’ll start to panic about how I’m just a heartbeat away from nothing. And I’ll remember that one time I stood at an intersection, just off the BQE, and watched a man on a Vespa slam into a minivan and how mid-air his neck folded in half and his body went limp.
That’s what I’m thinking about when I see the bird, in the corner of the yard next to an empty Coors Light, yanking bugs and trash out of the dirt. It stares at me when I crouch down and point my phone. A reptilian cunning behind the hard black eyes.
Babe, what the fuck bird is this? I text Lara a picture of its black and white striped plumage.
Holy shit baby, Lara says. Maybe it’s a partridge.
I say the word out loud and find it has a pleasant crunch. Partridge. It sounds like a make-believe animal, like a centaur or a griffin, like it walked out of a fable and found itself on Knickerbocker Ave.
When I was eight, a flock of green parrots settled in the tree near the front gate of my elementary school, whipping the children into a frenzy. Jungle birds, amid the strip mall sprawl of our Los Angeles suburb, screeching and swooping through the branches of a towering eucalyptus.
In the morning, in Brooklyn, in a room where I’m 34-years-old, I wake to a commotion outdoors, something being knocked over, scraped against, some audible undercurrent of non-verbal stress beneath the white noise machine. I peer through the window and see the three animals in a stand off: the two cats crouching about ten feet apart, and squatting on the arm of the folding chair, between the two predators and set back against the wall, the bird—puffing his chest, sticking his neck out. I open the door; the cats run, and the bird just sits there, staring.
I text Lara a video.
I scared away the cats for Hector, I say, smiling as I imagine her reaction to my casual naming of the bird, the way her eyes get big and she looks almost hungry, like she doesn’t know what to do with me. A buzzy warmth radiates from my chest down my arms.
You’re daddy, Lara responds.
I heart the text, and the act seems dwarfed by the extent of my emotion, this flood of affection lifting me skyward.
The parrots stayed for a week, and then one day they left, and you could tell because it was quiet enough again to stand below the eucalyptus and hear the lazy drone of the airplanes heading toward LAX. But even with the parrots gone, and that oppressive stillness of late spring locking the whole valley in a sort of jelly-like mold, there remained among my classmates and I a quiet giddiness, our expectant, searching eyes trained toward the future, which was malleable and multiple. The parrots had cut a rift in normal life, like our dreams might just stumble through into reality.
When Hector disappears suddenly, it’s like a weight falling back into place. I spend some time poking around the yard, peering into the adjacent lots. There’s a moment when I sit down on the stoop to smoke, and I think I hear a cluck, so I walk to the fence. But nothing’s there.
I replay the collision at the intersection off the BQE. The tape always gets stuck at the moment the man goes airborne, flies over his handlebars. Across his face, a flash of…what—surprise, regret? It’s right before his neck jerks, carrying on the delayed momentum of the strike, and his eyelids slack, and he’s suddenly vacant. It’s the moment that he disappears.
Lara and I get dinner at the place nearby with a rotating menu and pictures in the bathroom of women fucking each other with strapons. You have to get up and walk to the large chalkboard to see what they have, and when I do, there’s a quail egg on the burger, and that’s enough to make me want to leave.
Is everything okay? Lara asks, staring into her martini.
I fidget with the napkin, annoyed that I’m here, at a restaurant without table menus. I tell her I don’t want the burger, that everything’s fine, I just don’t want the burger.
Later, when we’re in bed, and we’ve hit the moment that precedes sex, the moment after the show ends and the computer closes and we lie there feeling the tension gather, I get heavy, and I don’t make a move.
Lara touches my waist and there’s a faint, involuntary flicker of the tendons. But the covers weigh on my torso, pin me down.
The back of my eyelids blossom into a muted sketch: Hector leaping through the world’s chain-link partitions, emerging onto some glimmering avenue. The image only holds for a second, and then it gets lost in the dark.
Sam Rappaport is a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. He runs a monthly variety series called Words and Music. website: https://www.samrappaport.me/writing