The Women of the Birds

Sarah Walcott ('22)

PROSE

After Gabriel García Márquez

From the moment she was born into this world to the day of her death, Elizabeth was lost in the water’s lily pad flowers. Her mother lay in the tub outside the cabin on that placid June day with the blue herons shrieking in the lake beside her, mimicking the excruciating bellows that accompany a woman in labor and simultaneously making a chorus with the mud frogs to welcome the baby to nature. The young mother had no doubt that her daughter would soon join them, the afterbirth was washed off of the girl in the lily pads and the baby’s first teetering steps took place in the thick mud. As a young child, Elizabeth would take slabs of charcoal and scrawl descriptions on the bottom of the table of each unique bird that disrupted the blue sky above her, and by her adolescence, she contained the entire sky on that rough wood. The barn swallow reminded Elizabeth most of her protective mother, as its small body with the orange scorched belly and trident-shaped tail weighed no more than a morning roll of bread and yet the scornful bird assailed any perceived intruder of its sacred nest.

The men in her life left as quickly as they came, starting with Elizabeth’s father jumping to the water from the big rock and never returning to the surface. She saw him with the frogs every time she washed in the lake, but her feelings of her father were that of the pesky fly that no one could ever catch. Elizabeth spent all of her time in the weeds outside, sleeping on the soft ground cushioned with pine needles while her excrement lived in the bushes behind the tree, eating on the same broken wooden table that contained every single bird. One day her to-be husband appeared, but they never fell in love because he refused to sleep below the stars and didn’t allow the rain to pound on his face. After their daughter was born, the only sight they saw of each other was through the window so thick that it could withstand a stabbing of deer antlers.

Elizabeth met her pregnancy with great indifference, inconvenienced by her body’s new tendency of turning all of her emotions into a tumultuous river that flooded over at the slightest provocation. She gave birth to a pink little girl, just as she expected. None of the women in her family had given birth to a boy, and if they did, the baby never made it past its first year. Her husband soon disappeared to the deep and unforgiving water as well and was missed as much as a blood-filled mosquito, so she decided to name the baby after herself and call her Beth.

When Beth was in this same position, sitting with her legs spread facing the lake to push out this new being, just as her mother and grandmother had before her, she looked out to the blue herons and realized they were not making their usual calls. Beth’s legs were thin and shaking from the baby pushing against her crying to come out, but she hobbled on her knees over to the wooden table covered in charcoal and read aloud the name of each and every one of the birds under the table. This took her hours, there were thousands of birds recorded and the strains of her labor made her voice quiver. She read the name of the last bird, the loud and whining nighttime loon, and every single one appeared in the sky above and the lake beside her. She smiled for the first time in her life, and the birds landed on her, filling every open space on her body, as her baby boy, the first in the family, was born.

The boy was a miracle, but Elizabeth could no longer look at her own daughter in the same way, this daughter that she had raised to be just like her, to sleep in the mud and sing in the trees, had created a man and the thought caused her to stop moving, slowly fading away into the nature surrounding her. Beth knew what to do, and placed her mother on top of the lily pads in the murky shallow water. The birds knew the day had come, so they surrounded Elizabeth with their somber call until her breath stopped and she sunk deep into the lily pads, lost in the blossoming flowers of early spring.