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This writing was accepted for publication in the 96 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Too Many Miles” Down in the Dirt (v130) (the July/Aug. 2015 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book the Intersection the Down in the Dirt July - Dec. 2015 collection book		get the 318 page July - Dec. 2015 Down in the Dirt issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Fly, Little Birdie

Jennifer Green

    Their bodies were falling from the cloudless sky like an unholy rain.
    If she stopped on Vesey and turned her face up to the burning sky, the devil would have blessed her with his tears. But she can’t stop. Instead she runs, Vesey to Broadway and then north. North until...don’t inhale...them. That jarring thought nearly sends her legs out from under her.
    Just keep running, Birdie.
    She runs six miles a day so this is not necessarily difficult, but finding an easy pace when every cell screams out to stop, when the lungs drink in panic instead of air, when the throat tightens to resist ingesting more of them, that easy pace is a pipe dream.
    Finally, at Reade, she cuts right and drops to her knees. To do what? To pray to the God she gave up years ago? She sags against a glass storefront, but the ash cloud finds her. It works its way over top of the building, around it, and if she imagines hard enough, it even percolates up through the pavement.
    Their bodies were falling...
    Finally, the cloud settles on her like a thick, wet blanket on a hot August day. It blurs her vision, erases all sound. She wonders what new and terrible world will greet her when it finally lifts. The only thing she can hear is the blood rushing around in her head and her heart beating in her ears. The silence around her is obnoxious. Cities have no business being this quiet.
    Tim’s voice begins to cut through the hazy muck. It is soft at first but it gets louder as the pounding in her head begins to ease. He’s calling her name. It’s definitely him. It’s that unmistakable high-pitched lilt that took her forever to get used to. The only thing that saved him was male arousal dropping that aggravating falsetto a few octaves. She opens her mouth to laugh at this but snaps it shut when acrid grit coats her tongue. Her stomach lurches and she fights the urge to gag.
    “I didn’t call you,” he says from somewhere in the ether. She knows this, but the awful truth is...Dear God, it was raining bodies.
    The cold, hard truth that dances in her head like the macabre vapor that envelopes her now is that she hates him.

***

    What are you thinking just before you fall asleep?
    Tim stirred in her bed, murmuring something about the trees in Rockland. He got this far away look on his face whenever he told her about the way the trees crowded together so thick you’d never know a rocky drop-off lurks just on the other side. “You could push your way through that brush but never see the water until you’re practically in it. You could hear it of course, but see it? Not until it’s too late,” he said once. He said the trees in Maine seemed to hide the ocean away like a dark secret. He promised her that there was nothing like that coastline anywhere else in the world. She hasn’t been many places, so she had to take his word for it.
    He swore he would take her to Rockland, of course, but they would have to wait until the divorce was finalized. Everything with him was always after the divorce. We’ll go to Turks and Caicos after the divorce. I’ll make a reservation at Manje after the divorce. At first she thought this was quaint. He was talking about them in the future tense and that had to mean he was serious. But the longer she waited for this mythical After to show up, the more grays she had to cover, the more lines she counted on her face.
    He awakened as she left the bathroom, pulling up her running shorts.
    “It’s early,” he said in a voice that swirled with sleep.
    “That’s the point,” she said and sat on the edge of the bed. A purple dawn was just beginning to burn the eastern sky and it blazed a pale stream of light through the window. It wasn’t enough to see by but Birdie managed to find her favorite pair of socks in the top drawer. Those hot pink ankle socks had a thin cuff with zig zag stitching which gave them an unmistakable feel, like running her fingers over tightly braided hair. The heels of both socks were so emaciated though, and she knew their days were numbered. Her heart sank at the thought as she slipped on her old faithfuls.
    “My little early Birdie,” Tim said and rolled over. He never could understand her crippling desire to run in the wee hours of the morning. She figured not many people did. The only ones who understood were the ones who nodded or smiled as they ran past each other in the burgeoning daylight. They never felt compelled to speak. There was no need for that. They simply knew why the other was there and that was simply enough.
    Birdie pulled open another drawer and her hands immediately went to the shirt that lay on top. She had placed it there the night before so she knew it was the right one. The hazards of living in a New York studio apartment are many, one of which is not being able to turn on a light out of fear of waking your sleeping companion. But Birdie managed just fine. Running at dawn had honed her eyesight and given her the ability to see all manner of things in such low light.
    She finished dressing and went to the door.
    “Jakey, the trees,” Tim said just before sleep overtook him and Birdie slipped into the welcoming embrace of the waking city.

***

    She found her cruising speed early and lengthened her stride. Normally that didn’t happen until sometime around Battery Park but today, she was clearly in the favor of the running gods. The air was crisp and hinted at the coming season. Dawn was now a technicolor show of pinks and blues and oranges. She breathed it in, the delightful air energized every cell. She had passed more than a dozen others already. Days like this brought even the weekend warriors out of their hidey holes for a weekday jaunt.
    On Henry Street, she waved to Mister Lin and his brother Chuy as they keyed the lock to the restaurant’s front door. She’s certain their food is the best Chinese food in the world. She’s never been to China, but she thinks their food is at least as good as anything you can get over there. Mister Lin is tall and lean and Chuy is short and fat. Mister Lin speaks near perfect English and Chuy stutters and grunts his way through short sentences in some kind of Chinese-English hybrid language. The two brothers could not be more different, yet they’ve managed to figure out how to work side by side through a large expanse of their adult lives. Their brains have probably merged synapses by now so they can easily read each other’s thoughts. She’s certain if you cut off the arm of one, the other is bound to howl in pain.
    She wondered how often Tim dreamed of Jake. Tim told her more about the way the trees looked that day rather than address the grim details of the event. Trauma has a way of muting us, she supposed.
    “He couldn’t see the ocean through the trees,” is all Tim said about it. They were young when it happened and children don’t possess enough good sense to be truly worried about what they can’t see through the trees on a glorious summer day.
    Tim never talked much about Jake at all, which she found odd. Distressing, actually. The only time he really talked about him was in his sleep. It’s like Jake never existed. But she had glimpsed a picture of the two brothers once, so she knew Jake had been real at one point. The photograph was in Tim’s wallet which was open in his hands that night a few months ago at Mister Lin’s. Tim had just pulled out his Amex and handed it to the waitress when Mister Lin slammed a fist down on the empty table next to the kitchen door. He was talking with Chuy and Chuy had obviously said the wrong thing. Birdie was afraid they would come to blows but then Chuy said something that Mister Lin found hilarious. They were brothers in good standing once again.
    Tim watched the whole thing with a curious expression on his face. Birdie couldn’t identify it. Was it amusement? Curiosity? Anger? There was a flash of something, just underneath it. Barely perceptible, but she caught it. The corners of his mouth twitched the way they sometimes did when something unpleasant invaded his senses. He had a death grip on his wallet and this drew her eye down. The faded snapshot revealed the two boys standing next to a sporty looking Schwinn, one on either side of it. Tim, the older and thus taller one, wore a menacing grimace on his face. His expression touched off a chill in her lower spine. Her eyes traveled to the younger Jake. He was beaming. His smile took over his whole face. Maybe the bike was his and Tim was forced to give up his baseball practice to teach him? Yes, that was the reason for Tim’s sour expression. Nothing more.
    That’s what Birdie was telling herself when Tim realized she was staring at the photograph. He closed the wallet in a hurry and nodded toward Mister Lin and Chuy. “Wonder how often they think about killing each other?” Tim’s expression told her he was quite serious. Birdie was an only child and had no grasp of the petty annoyances wrought by siblings. She imagined they vacillated between apocalyptic and good-natured joshing. Sometimes she wondered what she was missing.
    “Probably not as often as you think,” she said with a smile. Tim didn’t smile back.
    Market Street dumped her out onto FDR Drive, between the two bridges. Soon, the sun would rise and glint off the East River and the steel and glass monoliths around it, sending blinding sheets of light into the clear sky. She forgot her sunglasses but thought if she hurried she could reach Battery Park and head north before the sun had a chance to do its damage.
    At the Brooklyn Bridge, with dawn still curling itself around the edges of horizon, Birdie decided today was the day. The only way she would know her future was to ask the man with the crystal ball.

***

    “Now?” Tim asked. He poured a second cup of coffee - her coffee, the expensive kind from Whole Foods, and it was in her pot, the expensive digital one she ordered online. She resisted the urge to take inventory and tally up how much of her food he had consumed during his three-day sleep over.
    Instead, Birdie pulled her wet hair up into a ponytail and secured it with the elastic that was around her wrist. She noticed more hair in the drain cover after her shower, a reminder that she’s lived half her life and the next half is about as clear as her head the day after this year’s St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl. Tim lured her into that one. He somehow managed to convince her they could drink like they were barely a blush above twenty-one, but that experience taught them a very important, vomit-soaked lesson that forty is not the new twenty, despite media reports.
    She was so caught up in her thoughts she didn’t hear his question. She blinked a few times as she watched him drink her coffee. “Yes now.” A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation told her he’s drunk $532.17 worth of coffee today.
    “I’m going to be late,” he said. Just put it on my tab, Birdie, he would say to her request for repayment.
    “It’s not even eight,” she said and nodded toward the clock on the microwave. “Have you even asked Julia for a divorce yet?”
    “I told you, when the time is right, we’ll move forward with this,” he said in a tone that sounded more like he was trying to convince himself.
    She popped open the freezer door and took out a breakfast burrito. Tim frowned.
    “We have oatmeal.” He moved to the cabinet and took down the box of rolled oats. She looked at him, unblinking, as she unwrapped the frozen hunk of food. He shook his head.
    “I bought the oatmeal for you. I bought this for me,” she said and swiped a paper towel off the roll, wrapped it around the burrito and tossed it into the micro.
    “That stuff will kill you,” he said under his breath. Tim believed processed food to be evidence for the existence of the devil, a point of much contention between them. Grocery shopping now was an extreme exercise in patience, not to mention expense. It was like shopping for a baby. Everything had to be fresh. Frozen fruit and veggies were fine, but it had to be consumed within two weeks. If they lingered much beyond that, he was convinced the nutritional value of the food would mysteriously disappear. And the cooking. Good God, she has never done so much cooking in her life. But he somehow managed to make exceptions for those restaurants he liked, despite her teasing that he was probably being served something that came out of a can or a box while being charged triple for that privilege.
    “So when are you going to file the papers? You’ve been saying the same thing for a year now.” She kept her eyes fixed on the spinning plate of food in the micro. He surprised her when he wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed her neck.
    “Soon. I promise,” he whispered. She shivered as he spoke the words right into her ear. “But I am going to be late.”
    “I’m tired of ‘soon’,” she said, not really caring if he was late today, or tomorrow, or next week. “It’s either today or never.”
    He swiped his keys off the hook by the door and stopped, his hand on the knob. “Are you giving me an ultimatum?”
    “Looks like.” Watch that food go round and round, she thought. Round and round. The counter told her she had twenty more seconds to go. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen.
    Tim exhaled sharply. “Not exactly good timing, Birdie.”
    “It never is with you, is it?” Sixteen, fifteen.
    The silence told her he might be considering her offer. Or figuring out an escape plan. “There’s stuff going on with Julia. I can’t get into it now.”
    “That’s not all.” Thirteen, twelve.
    “What now?” His voice turned sour and his tone reminded her of the way a parent might sound after a day spent at the zoo, carting around a gaggle of fighting, whining five year olds.
    Nine, eight, seven. “How did Jake die?” Six, five.
    She pulled her gaze off her food and squared it on Tim, who had turned a ghastly shade of white. Four, three.
    “Why do you want to know that?” His voice was low and she barely heard him over the hum of the microwave.
    Two.
    “No secrets anymore. You hide him away like he’s just that.”
    One.
    He left without saying anything. The last she saw of him was the back of his head with its ring of thinning hair that would probably have him considering a hair transplant in five years. His slacks hung loosely around his buttocks, a testament to the weight loss that began when they started dating.
    It was like he had been disappearing the whole time they had been together.

***

    It was a trek from her apartment down to the Financial District, but the day was too nice and her mood too sour to go underground. She hoped the walk would let her cool off. She needed time to plan her attack. What exactly are you going to say to him, in the middle of his office, in front of all his co-workers? She mulled this over, crossed to Henry Street and stepped into a patch of bright sunshine that she was no longer in the mood for.
    By now, there were amazing smells coming from Mister Lin’s and she decided she would eat there every night this week. She almost stopped in just to see if they had any dumplings ready yet. Her breakfast burrito had come and gone in her stomach, and she needed something to keep her going. Keep her strength up and steel her nerves. Don’t you lose your nerve. This is too important.
    At Oliver, she turned right. Delivery trucks thundered by, shaking the ground beneath her. The sidewalks were thick with morning commuters. Tim always took a cab to work, a habit she found both ridiculous and unnecessary. She often thought he missed the point of living in this city.
    She passed a woman with an “I Voted” sticker on the lapel of her suit jacket. You can vote for Bloomberg after you tell Tim to fuck off, she thought. Or maybe you should vote first. Nothing funnier than a red-faced, screaming woman raising hell 95 floors above the earth with a declaration on her shirt that she’s just performed her patriotic duty. Yes, that’s right. I delayed my crazy long enough to vote, so what are you looking at?
    She arrived at Church Street much sooner than she expected. She slowed her pace. She fought the urge to turn and run. It was her nature to run.
    “Fly away, little Birdie,” Tim liked to say before she left for the starting line of a 10K race. It was his way of wishing her good luck. It was a nick name she hated but he loved. He thought he was so clever when he came up with it.
    But I’m not your Birdie. That isn’t even my name.
    I will start with that, she thought just as the sound pricked her ears. It was background noise at first, but at Park Place she looked up into the perfect cerulean sky. She only glimpsed snippets of the aluminum bird between the buildings.
    It’s too close.

***

    The only thing she could do was count, up from the sky lobby, 78^th floor. But the 78th floor was blotted out by smoke. She used her memory to find it instead. Seventy-eight, seventy- nine, eighty. All the way up to ninety-five.
    You told me you loved me on 9^th Avenue between 43^rd and 44^th. The rain had just stopped and you stood under the green neon sign and said you loved me. You looked young in that light.
    She stood there and watched, cell phone in hand. It didn’t ring.
    She didn’t run until she had to.

***

    “I didn’t call you, Birdie,” the amorphous Tim says again.
    “You called Julia,”“ she says aloud. The dust stabs her eyes like a thousand knives and they tear up like mad in an effort to rid themselves of the foreign matter. Of them. Him. “Why would you call me? I was never real to you, was I?”
    “I didn’t know what was real,” he says. He sounds farther away now, like he’s talking over his shoulder.
    “But do you now?”
    “Yes.” A pause. Then, “Jake’s here.”
    “Good,” she says as the strength finally returns to her legs. She pushes herself up and looks down. She wears the dust like a new outfit. It clings to every inch of her body, suffocating her with the weight of its ingredients.
    “I can see the trees now. Can hear the ocean, too. I want to see the ocean.”
    Sun light begins to peak through the execrable cloud.
    “Birdie, you there?” He’s deeper in that forest now. He sounds winded, like he’s running. She can see him in her mind’s eye, twiggy legs, flat butt and thinning hair hauling through the underbrush.
    “Yeah.” She attempts to rid herself of the dust but it doesn’t seem to want to leave her.
    “The trees look just how I remembered.” Deeper still. Almost gone.
    “Watch out for that drop-off,” she says. Legs shaking, she takes the first tentative steps toward home. “You know those trees hide a nasty secret.”

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