Dan Keohane: Free Short Story

FEED THE BIRDS

no portion herein may be reproduced or distributed without the direct consent of the author.

originally published in

Christmas Trees and Monkeys, Collected Stories Volume One, December 2002

Introduction:

I can't say a lot about this story without giving too much away, except that I came up with it while standing in the kitchen looking across the house to the bird feeders we'd established outside the windows. Seeing the happy birdies flutter about, I wondered... well, when you read the story you'll know what I wondered. No, I don't know why I think these things sometimes. I really don't. But, between you and me, I'm really glad I do.

Feed The Birds

As usual for a Friday, Doctor John and Doctor Regina arrive home within minutes of each other.

Regina waits beside the garage, tries to concentrate. John ducks below the lowering door and embraces his wife. Regina pulls away, pecks her husband's cheek. The weight of the past five days wears her down. He knows it, feels it himself. Both see in the other's eyes their lassitude reflected. They turn, hands loosely clasped, and walk into the Tudor's side entrance.

Regina whispers, "We have to feed the birds."

Empty plastic bird feeders swing in the breeze beside the row of hemlock lining the driveway. Some knock lightly against the house front, calling those inside, wanting to be filled. In the green of the trees beyond, one or two birds have alighted, lost from sight among the leaves. They sing songs and wait. It is not yet time.

The kitchen is large. Dark wood beams over contrasting white walls. As Regina walks across the room her eyes scan the counter, toaster, microwave, never resting long on any object. She is distracted and tired. Her briefcase stands on the breakfast table. The coffeemaker hisses and coughs. Half decaf, half regular, the timer set that morning to be ready when they arrived home. Black steam teases senses which are crinkling at the edges, chipping like old paint. Regina leans in towards the pot and inhales deeply, knowing she cannot drink, even when it is done.

Minutes later, husband and wife hold coffee mugs with both hands as if warming fingers on a cold day. John lifts the cup to his face. Steam fills his nostrils. He wants to drink its hot, cleansing pain. Not yet. The birds need to be fed, and he isn't yet hungry. The coffee mug is lowered. John stares across the kitchen and sees the past week's faces - crying, screaming, laughing, silent. They parade by, revolving on an invisible spindle.

Eight Years Old, remembers Doctor John. What had the boy seen? Parents whispering, muffled crying, when Eight Year Old pushed open their door, "but my head was being pulled back," he says, "down the hall, like a rope coming out of my neck." The boy was describing his instincts taking over as he opened the door, knowing at a base level what he'd see in his parents' room. Something monstrous before him. "Wet and splashy," Eight Year Old says. The boy occasionally devises alternative words to describe the contents of that room. When this happens, John usually finds himself wishing for "wet and splashy".

In every session John takes upon himself the images, holds them close until they no longer threaten the child. Eight Year Old always feels better, while John's stomach burns with their pain. The heat fades, only to flare again on Friday afternoons.

Husband and wife, now lost in their memories, sit at the table. The kitchen is silent save an occasional sigh of a shoe against tile.

In memory, feeling all the empathy of the week solidify inside her, Regina hears the whispered confessions of Brad Renelle, 10:15 appointment, Tuesday. Renelle's hands droop between thighs, fingers interlocked then loosened, chasing each other in the chasm of his legs. His eyes downcast, staring at his shoes, one foot half-out of its loafer, lips wet. Brad Renelle, large imposing man, whispers an obscene confession, his latest fantasy, occasionally glancing to see if Regina acknowledges his insanity. Is this sudden, seeming clarity in thought, she would wonder, something good rather than depraved? Always careful is Regina, never flinching. Never knowing what might set him off. Set any of them off.

"We need to fill the bird feeders," Regina now whispers to her husband in a paper voice. She licks her lips, tries to swallow. "Before it gets dark."

John lifts his head. Outside the day is still bright with the sideways slant of early summer evening. A dinner appointment tonight with Merrimack Hospital's director of psychology, written on the refrigerator calendar. An Important Man is going to try to pull an Important Couple from the warm shadows of their practices. Imprison them in a menagerie of brick and pensions. Plug them in, harness the talent they possess: Doctor John's success rate with children who have been deemed lost, his ability to pull them out of the pit - if only a little higher than anyone one else has been able. Doctor Regina for her papers on adult sexual discord, her radical approaches to violent patients. Men and women excessive in their debauchery, serving extended jail sentences, held far from the community's reaching hands. Her ability to understand the darkness inside, then extract it. Change them. Sometimes forever. Sometimes for only a week.

The successful couple trudge outside, slowly like penitent monks with gazes lowered, heading for the feeders out front. Husband and wife who take upon themselves the filth and pain of children and violent screamers and monsters-who-once-were-human. They help their patients secrete from deep within themselves every nightmare and fantasy, tapped like sap into the dented tin buckets of the doctors' souls.

Come unto me all who are weak and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, reads the sign on the wall, in a corner of her office no one ever looks at. She is beaten, stray dog skittish. But her patients are again brighter and clearer of mind.

John and Regina move by instinct and routine. They smell the aroma of fresh coffee from the open windows, pushing them on with promises of sharpness and taste. One or the other repeats that they have to feed the birds. Zombies in elegantly disheveled business suits, stepping up the driveway onto the clipped grass lawn.

The birds chitter loudly. There are more of them, monochromatic, reds and blues, greens and yellows. Their excitement is audible, watching the couple arrive.

John thinks about Lisa who turned eleven last week. Freckled and tousle-haired, she fights her right arm which creeps up on her at night, crawling spider-like to her throat whenever she dares fall asleep.

The low sun hits him in the face. John cannot see the birds but hears them. They gossip and worry. He takes one tube-shaped feeder into uncertain hands. Flashes of blue among the leaves. John fumbles to open the top, sees reds bouncing in the corner of his vision. He remembers angry-eyed Michela who kills every pet her parents bring home, and now her mother is pregnant. John's stomach burns with their fear.

Regina lifts the second feeder from the pole. Tiny screams fall from the trees as if Autumn is early and the leaves have found a voice. The sound tightens her skin. Intense are the creatures' wants and needs, like the bleached woman yesterday who sat in silence for twenty minutes only to skulk to the display case by the window and slam her fist through the glass. In a blink the patient had dragged the underside of one arm sideways, filling the small case with blood. Regina's stomach cramps with the ice of such blind rage, their rage, all of them. The birdsong among the green tree shade loops through her head. Chirping, screaming, laughing. Her stomach is a bag of frozen slush.

John doubles over. Fire in his stomach and throat, liquid molten pain. The new boy who started sessions Monday, curled up on the couch and slowly gnawing his fingertips off. John feels the boy in him, struggling to be set free. His mouth closes over the top of the feeder, as does his wife's over the other. He sees her crying, but she is blurred from his vision. The boy on the couch had pulled small chunks of flesh free before John realized what he was up to. Now, the boy leaps forward from within him, clawing higher, shouting Let me out.

The ice cracks into jagged spikes in Regina's stomach. It constricts and conforms to the shape of her esophagus. Like a gush of coagulated oil, black bile curls from her mouth and into the plastic tube. I am heavy laden, she thinks. Regina cannot breathe. it is like when she was young and had the flu, locked in dry heaves, certain she would never breathe again. It's like that again, waiting to die, feeling the man on Wednesday who had shoved a steak knife into his lover's eye. He pours out of her in a surreal birth.

To John it is a tongue of magma burning from his throat. Then it's out. Cooling. He can breath again. The boy curled on the couch in his office fades away. The torment, sin and disease of the week passes as the few remnant pieces are spit into the tube.

Regina does not think any more about the people who should be burned alive, who leave her office feeling freer than before, freer than they should ever have the right to feel. For her, there is only this joyous moment of breathing. So much air inside her, around her, all for the taking.

The black tar stretches the limits of the plastic housings - frosting one feeder, steaming to translucence the other. Above them the screams in the trees soar to a deafening crescendo. Greens, blues, yellows dart among the branches. High-pitched whistles drop suddenly to deep-throated impatience. The tiny demons take flight.

John is caught unprepared and sees them clearly. He wishes he hadn't, feels close to dying at the consideration of their existence. He pulls his wife away with quick steps and firm grip. She does not resist, taking the summer evening coolness into her lungs. The sky above and around them is fraught with the wings of small bodies, asexual and naked, chittering in hunger and anger. Out of my way, John muses the sounds are saying to them. Let us feed on what you have given back to us.

John and Regina walk unsteadily along the driveway. In the moment before the corner of the house blocks her view Regina gives in to temptation and looks over her husband's shoulder. The feeders are covered in swarming colors. She focuses on one, a small blue, with narrow face. Its wings spread and flutter as it eats. A shorter, yellow demon knocks the blue aside. Above them, gripping one of the protruding metal bars with curved talons, a green man-shape holds in its fist a wad of steaming mucus. It buries its face into some child's sin.

Before the house obscures her view Regina wonders what human blemish it is devouring.

* * *

They are inside now. Stillness becomes calm.

The kitchen is darkened from the drawn window shade, the feeding outside dancing shadows upon it. John succumbs to the thick coffee smell and lifts the cup to his lips. Though he is shaken, he feels a welcome lightness and tries to recall the details of the past week. All of it remembered, but when he searches for empathy, the pain built with every confession and diverted stare, there is nothing.

Standing in the dim-lighted kitchen sipping from his mug, John knows he is free.

Eventually the shadows outside flutter away. Regina is also empty, free to be only herself. For the weekend. Until Monday, when it will start over again. Their patients shall pour their pain and sins into the vessels that the couple have always become. The world expects nothing less of its caretakers. Nor do the demons, which always return. They will alight upon the trees even when the leaves have gone and the snow contrasts their skin, dimmed in the cold to subtle pastels and gray. But they will come, expecting to be fed.

End