BIRD LADY NEIGHBOR
By Joyce Strong
Her feet grabbed my attention. I was having trouble making sense of what I was looking at. You know that feeling when you have seen something, and part of your brain knows what you saw and makes your body react, but the awake part of your brain has not yet come to understand why there are chills running down your spine.
Her husband was helping her down the steps made from railroad ties with walls on each side, like a box without a lid, my stairs that lead from my back yard to my driveway.
Her feet were not working the way feet are designed to work. Her ankles turned and she struggled to stand, sliding clumsily from his grasp. He pressed her against the railroad-tie walls to steady her and his grip. Finally, he swooped her up entirely with just one arm.
His other arm remained free to carry her dinner, not exactly a plate, but a half-moon tray of vegetables that gave off a whisp of steam like the last warm breath of autumn with the faint smell of simmering cabbage.
She wore a black cloak that made me think of the way an owl or hawk appears when perched, alert and eyeing its prey, wings closed against its body, ready to fling open in an instant to snatch up its prey.
I heard a squawk or a groan or both, guttural sounds coming from him or her and ran over to help.
“Here. Let me take her,” I said as I reached with both arms to cradle the woman, now suddenly much smaller than I’d remembered her from a distance. She was my neighbor and I saw her every day, getting in and out of her car and chasing her small children around the yard as they played.
“No,” he said. “She’s too heavy.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m strong. You carry the food.”
It was then I got a good look at her feet. They were not human feet at all but claws with talons, reaching for anything to grip on to and claw at. My eyes widened and fixed on the writhing feet that could have come from a dinosaur. They were like the feet of my roosters and chickens, but bigger because they had to support her, a grown woman. I tried to conceal my horror which only made it worse.
We reached the bottom of the steps and I leaned forward to place her feet near the ground, still pretending not to notice what by now I had clearly seen. I let go as soon as she took control to support herself.
She walked, or rather scurried the way chickens do, toward her house, not looking back.
He, on the other hand, locked eyes with me in half-smile awkwardness. I read his mind as he wished I had not offered to help them for now I know their secret and worse they have created a debt to help me some time in the future. I continued to hold his gaze until his half smile cracked so as to affirm his concerns.
She told me one day when we talked from a socially appropriate distance during the pandemic that she “had a thing about birds” and was afraid of them. She also told me she was a vegetarian. These are not uncommon idiosyncrasies and I thought of these traits only as just who she is, without judgment or value. Never in a million years had I seen this coming.
Then, without warning, the scene and people vanished.
I was frozen, unable to move.
Squawk. Cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck. Squawk. Cock-a-doodle-do!
My wrist thumped, with a rhythm but not a human heartbeat. I heard birds, so many birds, an orchestral performance in a steamy jungle with sun beams piercing the canopy.
I struggled to lift my half-dead arm to my face and remembered I could turn the jungle birds off by hitting a button on my Apple watch. There was no button to extinguish the incessant squawks, clucks and cock-a-doodles coming from the chicken coop outside my bedroom window.
Dreams are why I have trouble falling asleep at night. I am terrified to visit these strange places with unbelievable thoughts and crazy people, most often people I know, doing unthinkable things.
Unrelenting, my dreams appear under the shroud of darkness where I succumb to this unforgiving thought processing that bends my reality.
And so too it is with writing that I lose control and the thoughts just come, not always unpleasant, but raw, often magical with occasional hints of sorcery.
Writing is falling asleep with my eyes open in the light of day, and like dreaming, is an act of courage and faith. Writing is detached from outcome and warps time, a confluence of ideas with a bit of magic, where I can create something from nothing at all that sends chills down my spine and yours too.
