T.J. Antley

And A Bird Shall Carry You Away



Christened by the dark springs of elysian nightmare, a trick of light describing ashen bindings to earth bound, Paradise grew darker within the pall. Passion passed in elemental obscurity, outside of law, and the center of emotion became a pointed, sickened whelp; a meager courtesy. Something hoped forever fell.

Jane found a dead bird beneath her window on a Tuesday morning, the sad result of the carelessness of flight meeting a large, streak-free window. She wept large heaving sobs, tears hot on her cheeks and falling in fat drops to the ground beside the poor bird. It was a small bird with speckled brown and black and white feathers, little black legs and feet and a little yellowish beak. The poor thing’s eyes were already closed and Jane considered that for a moment. In every movie she’d ever seen people seemed to die with their eyes wide open and someone needed to close them, to pull the lids down. She’d even heard that there once was a time when pennies were placed on the eyes, superstitiously to pay for some transit in the “otherworld” but practically to keep the damn eyes shut. But this little bird had its eyes shut tightly on its own. Nothing to see at the end, little bird? What final thing do dead human eyes see that keeps them looking until the very end? Jane quickly decided that she did not care. Humans were nothing sacred; they were their own sin and sickness and quite a foul plague to be sure. This little bird, however, was an innocent victim of Jane’s own human desire to have a house with a lovely window in which to sit and read and watch the rain and enjoy the flowers; to enjoy the outside while remaining safe inside.

She lifted the bird in her two hands, its little body slack across her fingers, and resumed crying with vigor. She was such a horrible creature to even be a part of this lost life. Jane took the bird inside and kicked her back door shut. Her bare feet were slightly soiled from the walk outside and so a faint out- line of her foot remained on the door.

She did not know what to do. Could she just throw the bird away like so much trash? No, she could not. Grief played through her mind and Jane imagined a world that would no longer hear this little bird’s song. It would no longer grace the sky as it darted through the air; no longer pick a seed from a stalk of grass or dance on a tree branch. The body before her, now lovingly laid on a plaid kitchen towel on her sink counter, was a totem of finality. Had this same bird eaten from the seed that Jane often tossed outside with the best of intentions? Had it come to trust her, to look to her as a source of nourishment? Had it endured one stark moment of betrayal and bewilderment as it hit the glass? Her mind seemed to be building the case against her, as if in desire that her grief be paid in kind for the bird’s life. And yet she knew that no amount of remorse or quantity of tears would ever return flight to those small, feathered wings. The agony became a weight on her chest and Jane fell to the floor gasping. But, unlike the small bird, she lived on. How unfair, how very unfair that she might continue on, sorry as she was, while that innocent creature lay still and dead. It was an unbearable injustice; quite intolerable.

The water tower had always seemed so very high up to Jane; impossibly so and much taller than all of the trees. But now, however, standing on the little walk-way which surrounded its big rounded dome the height was absolutely overwhelming to she who had always been quite terrified of even the top step of her three-foot step stool. Great waves of icy sweat seemed to encase her body and Jane’s bottom lip quivered much as an aggrieved toddler’s might. In each hand she held three feathers from the sparrow. Wing feathers, they were, from the very tips of his wings.

Oh, how Jane had winced to pluck them; it had been a terrible chore. But she’d known that the little bird was as far away from that pain as he could be. So she had plucked them, care- fully laying them on her counter-top before having returned back outside to bury the rest of the tiny sparrow who had, through his own tragedy, delivered such morose regret. Jane’s tears had fallen solidly to the top of the little dirt mound under which she had placed him. Empathy and agony a storm within her, she had risen to return to the kitchen, retrieve the feathers and make the short drive to the pale blue water tower upon which she now stood.

Palms sweaty and breath unsteady, Jane stepped onto the first rust-speckled railing of the small cat-walk and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Legs shaking and threatening to throw her down ahead of her decision to do the same she stepped to the second of the three railings, some loose paint chips falling below her. Her thighs just above her knees pressed hard against the top railing and they were all which braced her. Jane felt her body sway slightly and she tightened her stomach, flexed her core and made herself stick-stiff as she stood, now shaking all over, and continued to weep. She felt nervous sweat drip from her fingertips which still held tightly to the small wing-feathers. The question of why had no place here, only when, and that answer came swiftly enough. Swallowing hard against the knot in her throat, Jane thrust her right foot up onto and pushed off of the top rail, sailing out beyond it and falling, it seemed, remarkably slowly. The little feathers whipped in the breeze, her hair fell straight above her and the ground rose to meet her like a long-missed friend running to complete an embrace. She hardly made a sound as her body shattered on the ground below.

No longer breathing, for her body was quite beyond being able to do so any longer, Jane lay still with her eyes wide, watching the birds as they flew, dipping up and down, flitting here and there. Watching their wings rise and fall, watching the sparrow racing towards her, there was nothing else to see and little more to do. How long this, now, before nothing?

She soared with feathers
Stolen from the dead bird beneath her window But no one ever taught her
To fly
Or to land
Like a stone tossed into a well
Fell

A blossom on the pavement

Wishes wilt
Wasted on stars
All falling
Themselves

The rain will come down A mockery
By drop and drip
A rejection

From the sky that refused her

I Deserve To Be Happy

It’s happening again. It hasn’t happened for years but I feel it now. It’s like a fog crawls past my eyes and mists my mind and I start to remember things I had forgotten and I can’t not see them or think them or be them or know them. This is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write something so ethereal and mysterious and erudite; I wanted to write something to make you say, “Damn!” and then sit back, reflecting.

I wanted to impress you and gather your comments telling me how talented I am or how wonderfully terrifying my story is. I wanted to tell you about the unconscious girl with exhaust in her hair and three marbles in her pocket. But I couldn’t. So I thought maybe I’d tell about the woman who found the dead bird underneath her window and used its feathers to fly. But I was not able. I wanted to tell you about the faces in the trees at dusk and the tattooed woman with the square glass of bourbon and the shotgun trigger that reminded me of your finger and plum wine and roses. I wanted to burst, like a bloated tick, full with the stories. Stories that she made me start hearing again. I didn’t consider that by entertaining them I would once more feel this way. I had forgotten.

I feel like I did when I would sit with a bottle of whiskey and a fresh, new, single-edged razor blade just freed of its cardboard wrapping. My music would be so loud it hurt but it was never loud enough. It would tell me all about the hypomanic devastating loss of glory, the wine-torn sick ethereal beauty bruised. A sycophantic, angst-romantic lash black and batted. The glory of the echoed voice, the sliver of the sacrosanct symphony, running like bile from a torn lip, a troubled eye, a neoservile fix laced with sugar and cardamom. Or maybe it was just noise. I am frightened. My head is doing it again.

I want to pull ages of foolishness across the blank spot on my arm, rip open valleys of remorse and remember why I don’t want to be me. I want to drink to forget something I am dying to remember and recall each valid reason that I deserve what I get. I want to choke on fire and bleed on the carpet and scream until I taste my blood in the back of my throat. I want to and I do and I become as I am now. I am a contradiction in desire.

I feel like a machine that has been revved-up too high and now is just buzzing and not moving. I am an engine seized, a motor frozen. I am shaking too hard to notice. I am in a synched vibration with the room and the burn from each cut. A cut is a burn and the fire is a blade. I think that I may have remembered that the last time. Here I am, bloody and shaken and pushed too far and not a single story getting out. So what the hell did I mean to tell you then? Oh, yeah. It’s this.

Something true.

There is this place. I won’t tell you where or you might go there and I do not want you to go there. I want you, all of you, any of you who read this, to not go there. It is not a good place to go. But it is real and I found it just off of the road, maybe a half of a mile into the woods and maybe an hour from a very populated area. I don’t know why it still exists. I wish it would be paved into a parking lot or a store or a gas station or a hospital. It has not been. It is still there. The ground feels more solid there, harder like stone, as you get near to it. It’s just an old house and rather small too. My foot went through the rotten boards of the porch the first time that I went there. Yes, I have been there more than once. I had no good reason to be there but, then again, I suppose that it was the best reason of all. I told her that I thought I might love her. My roommate of one year, my friend of six years; two days before she moved to the opposite coast I told her that I loved her. And she said thank you.

I had no destination in mind, just a place that was not our home, soon to be my home alone. I was stone-cold sober too, which really hurt, and just rather wrecked inside. Perhaps if I had not stopped I would have made it to a bar somewhere and fallen into a more peaceful oblivion. But I did stop. I found it after I parked on the side of the empty road. Actually, off of the road in a small ditch since there was no shoulder. It didn’t matter since I had a truck but, honestly, the way I felt, I would have pulled off there regardless of what I may have been driving. I didn’t care. Not about a single thing. I walked a little way into the woods to take a leak. I couldn’t ignore that and the very fact that such a mundane need was so unavoidable, even in my grief, made me furious so that when I finished I then just started running into the woods. It was dark and I tripped a few times, took a few small branches across the face and that just made me angrier. I wanted to feel like granite, be immune to pain or any lack of perfect, violent rage. I saw the house and I knew immediately that I would go in. So I stepped onto the porch and my foot went through the boards. When I pulled my leg back out a nail must have caught it and gouged me all the way up my shin. I didn’t feel it then but I noticed it a moment later when I realized that my pants leg was wet.

This place is wrong. There is no sound in there. The woods are not the quiet place you might imagine if you don’t know better; there is a constant myriad of different noises and sounds. But all of those sounds were gone once I entered the house. I don’t mean to say that they were muted or diminished. It felt like I had just put in earplugs. I tried pinching my nose and puffing my cheeks to try to pop my ears but they weren’t the problem. It was the place. The rooms were all black mold and ruin from floor to ceiling. It smelled like roadkill, stagnant water and dirt. The floor felt more like walking on a firm mattress than over a wooden floor, which it was. I did not care. I moved to the center of the house and found a ruined armchair, the stuffing surely set aside by rats and mice. I sat, heavily, in the chair, anger and pain and sadness all still boiling within me. To be a failure my whole life I could blame on people just not getting to know me. She knew me better than anyone. “Thank you.” Not a good answer. Although I must admit in her defense that right before she left she gave me a very kind note and the “who knows what may happen when I come back” line at the end that I took for what it was; throwing the dog a bone. I felt the chair moving beneath me but I didn’t care.

The first bite hurt but after that it was all rather inconsequential really and it all happened without a single sound. I didn’t bother to look at what actually was biting me but I felt fur and little feet and was pretty sure it was whatever called my chair home. I deserved no better. While wondering if I might not indeed be able to die if bitten enough times the silence broke. I hadn’t noticed the soft hands which shooed the rats away and stroked each sore they had left behind. She kissed me on the ear and told me that it would be ok. Her voice was the only sound. I could not hear the rats or the movement of the chair or even the sound her lips should have made as they brushed my ear then moved down to my cheek. The lips which moved from my cheek to my mouth as she stepped around in front of me were ice cold but soft. I know that I saw her, I know that she was naked, I know that she was real, felt real, but I cannot recall her face in my mind. I never can recall, which may be why I have gone back so many times, as I start to miss her again and crave her and start to rage inside at the realization that I cannot remember what she looks like. With the need comes revulsion and disgust. This is not what I want. This is just what I have always sought.

I stayed there all night and she stayed with me on my chair, a frozen guardian. She kept the bugs and the rodents away, she kept my thoughts silent and I slept soundly and awoke feeling very much as if I were hung-over. I felt delicate and slightly fractured. Off-kilter. I break more each time, shatter that slight bit more each time. I cannot lie in that dirty chair bleeding and smell that death-smell and hear only her voice and return clean. She is an asylum like cutting yourself is an asylum or like drinking is or like doing drugs is. She is my suicide attempt each time I go and the relief I feel in the morning walking away is no comparison to the desire to go back in the evening.

Anyway, this is what I wanted to tell you. About this place. But I don’t want any of you to go there. Honestly, I don’t want to go there. But I need to. And when my head starts to hurt again and I start to remember and I cannot forget and I cannot say “no”, that is when I go back. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, I’m not sure. Don’t love anyone? Don’t care? Never admit it? I can’t say any of that because you will do all of those things no matter what I or anyone else says. Maybe I want to tell you to never let go of hope? I can’t say that either since this world was made for at least a little hopelessness. I guess what I intend to say in telling you about what I have gone through is just this: whatever you believe or don’t believe, pray with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind that you never, ever get what you deserve.

It’s not what you think.