You’re sitting at the kitchen table when the bird hits the window. See yourself there, propped up on your knees so you can reach your bowl. Feel the cereal mashed between your molars, the rough scars of the spoon—caught too many times in the spinning blade of the garbage disposal—drag against the inside of your lip.
You feel the sound at the base of your throat. The sharp thwack. You jolt and then freeze as if your stillness can erase what’s happened. Even before you look, you know there is a body.
It’s a small bird. Brown-breasted. The size of a fist. Its wings are tucked close to its body without lying all the way flat. This looks much worse than death—the bird’s body lacks the soft tensionless quality of a corpse. Instead its feet are curled, its legs stiff, its skeleton somehow pulled too taut.
You slide open the door. Maybe the bird’s glassy black eye follows you, but maybe not. Its beak is sharp, closed, its head turned to the side. The feathers around its neck are slightly puffed.
You know you should not touch it. Birds carry disease. Plus it is a wild thing. You know there is danger, but you can feel the inevitability in your fingertips. You still believe in magic.
The bird’s belly feels like an underinflated balloon. You touch it with the back of your hand first, as if it might burn you. Its stillness feels like permission so you slide your fingers up to the soft cave under its wing. Feel the fragile bones give under the weight of your hand.
That’s when the bird slips inside you.
As it happens your brain is wondering, how? how? how? But your body understands right away. A ghost has found its way in. Feel the drag of its feathers on the underside of your skin, feel the beak slice through the soft meat of your organs. Then the tap and settle, tap and settle as the bird makes its home behind your heart.
* * *
Three days after the bird hits the window, you drop into the sweaty petals of a fever. Still you can feel the bird inside of you, the lump of its body wedged into the folds of your chest.
You’re sure the illness is part of the haunting. The ghost trying to smoke you out of your own body. You stay home from school and fall asleep in your clothes. When you wake, your pillow smells like boiled meat. Your parents trade off staying home to heat cans of soup on the stovetop. They press their hands to your face to test your temperature. You want to ask them not to pull away, to stand there for a while with their palm flush against your forehead, but you don’t.
You can’t tell your parents about the bird. They wouldn’t believe you. You wouldn’t believe it either, except that you never stop feeling it—the twitch and bob of its head, the opening and closing of its claws as it adjusts its grip around your ribs.
The TV murmurs. Your fever spikes. You think you might die. If you do, no one will know what killed you. You wonder if the bird will die too, or if it will be able to carve its way out of your body.
The bird stretches out its wings. Feel the hinge of its hollow bones. Feel the point of its beak reach up, up, up to the base of your throat, and dig into the flesh. It feels like your mouth will collapse into itself. The bird is asking for your silence, demanding it. You understand now—if you do not name the bird, it will let you live. You agree. You don’t have to say it aloud, only think it. Silence.
By midnight, the fever breaks.
* * *
When you return to school, you get that small burst of celebrity from your absence. You’ve been out for three days. Worksheets have piled up on your desk. Kids gather around you as if you have something they might want, but the attention fades quickly.
Someone else is absent today—their chair still upside down on the desk, its legs sticking up into the air like a spider trapped on its back.
You look around the room, watch the other kids dig into their backpacks, hunch over their papers. Someone shoves a pencil into the electric pencil sharpener. The motor whirs and the sound startles you. Inside you the bird jolts, tipping forward as if readying to launch into flight. Your whole body tenses. You’ve heard the sound a half dozen times a day since the start of the school year, but now for the first time you hear the blade spinning, you hear the violence as the pencil sinks deeper and deeper, narrowing until its tip could draw blood.
When finally the noise stops, you look down to find that you’ve crumpled the edge of your paper in your fist.
* * *
You’re sure that the bird will leave. It cannot stay in the cramped cavity of your chest. During recess you run across the dead grass between the playground and gravel. Listen to the rhythmic squeals of swing set’s metal chains, a ball thwacking against the asphalt, the dull thud of feet landing in the sand.
When you reach the edge of the grass, you don’t touch the light pole by the fence. Everyone knows not to. You’ve made the mistake before—leaned against it, felt the tiny shards of fiberglass lodge themselves in your skin. Your arm stayed red and inflamed for days, little flecks of blood working up to the surface. It didn’t occur to you to mention the rash to your parents, to ask for some relief. What were you doing rubbing against a light pole? they would ask. Instead you wore long sleeves and waited for the evidence of your thoughtlessness to heal.
* * *
In the afternoon you walk home alone. The bird preens. You can feel the gentle rustle of its head as it digs its beak into its own feathers.
You walk the same route as always, along the tall fence near the school. You pass by the slope in the yard where the grass turns wild at the back, cut along the footpath near the creek. Everything is the same—the breeze coming through the trees, the chemical smell of the water, the sudsy bubbles that gather in the reeds. But now the bird is here and that gives each sensation a new weight.
Sometimes in the summer you come out here, tie a piece of lunch meat to the end of a stick, and fish for crawdads. You watch their alien bodies drift up from the murk and reach out their claws. That’s the moment you love—just before you can feel the tug at the end of the stick. When they are not yet yours, but you know they will be. One time you put the crawdads in a plastic bucket and carried them home. But when you showed your parents, your dad clicked his tongue and said it was a cruel thing to do, to trap them like that. Now when you catch them, you put them in the bucket, but you don’t take them home. You just watch them claw at the sides for a while as they reach up toward the sky, then you dump them back into the water.
* * *
When you get home, you lay on your bedroom floor. You rock your body back and forth and the bird sways inside of you, bracing itself against your momentum. It’s like a piece of ice bobbing in a glass of water. That gives you an idea. You go to the kitchen sink and fill up a glass. You chug the whole thing, fill it up again. Maybe you can drown the bird.
You drink until your belly is round and distended, until you cannot feel the bird at all. You feel only the heaviness of the water, the pressure against your lungs, at the base of your throat. While you watch TV, you imagine a lake inside of your body; you see the bird floating, dead, its feathers waterlogged.
Feel the stitch of hope as you hurry to the bathroom. Listen to the angry hiss of pee and think maybe, maybe, maybe. You don’t look into the toilet. You flush, picture the bird swirling down, down, down to nothing.
You’re eating dinner when you feel the bird flick its head. You have to work to keep your face neutral, to hide the way the heat drains from your cheeks. Maybe your parents notice the way you go quiet, but they don’t say anything.
All through dinner the bird shakes and shakes inside of you, like a dog that can’t get itself dry. Feel the blades of its feathers fan out each time, the tips slicing into the soft meat of your insides.
* * *
Every afternoon before your parents get home from work, you come up with a new tactic. You hold your breath until it feels like your lungs will burst. You hang upside down from the bed. You sit in front of a bowl of milk with your mouth open. You close yourself in the basement bathroom and you flip the lights off and on, watching your pupils dilate in the mirror. You spend ten minutes lying so still you’re barely even breathing, then you leap up and sprint across the yard. You eat so much ice your throat goes numb. You punch yourself in the chest. You put on your winter parka and do jumping jacks until the sweat pours down your face. You stand over a boiling pot of water with a towel over your head. You press the tip of a knife into the skin over your heart.
Nothing works. You go to bed every night feeling that fist of its body like a rock wedged under your sternum.
* * *
You don’t tell any of your friends about the bird. But they smell it on you. They hold their bodies different than they used to, as if they might need to defend themselves against you. Conversations with them become stilted and strained. You lose the natural back-and-forth rhythm. You smile on the wrong beats. You forget to listen because you’re too busy trying to come up with your next line. Sometimes you stumble into a prickly silence and you’re not sure how to get out of it.
Your parents aren’t suspicious. They believe it’s natural for you to forget how to talk to people as you edge closer to being a teenager. Sometimes you catch them rolling their eyes at each other. Inside you the bird pecks and dips, unfolds and refolds its wings.
* * *
You’re invited to a sleepover at a friend’s house. A half dozen girls. Someone pulls out a Ouija board and you take turns pretending to let a spirit guide your hands. Maybe this is the night you’ll tell someone. You can turn it into a ghost story. You can pretend the haunting does not belong to you.
But then, while you’re watching someone’s hands slide around the board, a girl named Liza slides up to you.
“Are you boy crazy?” she asks, grinning.
“No,” you say.
“Let me test,” she says and reaches over and squeezes your thigh. When her fingertips dig into your flesh, your hands automatically reach for something to swat her away. You grab your overnight bag and swing it toward her. You mean it to come off playfully. But you forget that this is the bag you take to the public pool, that there’s a padlock at the bottom of it.
You can feel the sound in your jaw—the crack of Liza’s skull. And then blood is pouring out of her forehead and the other girls are screaming. “Oh my god, oh my god.” You want everyone to pause so you can explain yourself. But the girls are grabbing towels, holding them to Liza’s face. Someone starts yelling for a parent. They move toward the stairs, the five of them like one single being. And you are separate from them.
As they stumble up the stairs, you feel the thrum of the bird’s heartbeat as if it is your own.
Once Liza’s in the car to the hospital, the rest of the girls call their parents to get picked up. They don’t say anything to you. They just keep telling the story to each other. “That was so crazy,” they say over and over.
Right away, you know the story will stick to you forever. The way Brett B. will always be the kid who ate rocks on the playground or Gabe will always be the one who peed himself at the winter concert. You’ll always be the girl who split Liza’s face open at a slumber party.
You call your house, ask your dad to come get you. You don’t tell him what happened. But someone calls your parents the next day and they sit you down and you have to tell them the story. When you mention the padlock at the bottom of the bag, their eyebrows go up and don’t come down. You’re not sure if your parents believe you when you say you forgot the lock was in there.
Your mom tells you to make a card for Liza. You think you’re going to put it in the mail, but then your mom drives you over to her house. You don’t even know where her house is and you don’t know how your mom knows. But there you are standing on her doorstep. Liza and her mom answer the door together. Liza has a bandage on her forehead, gauze wrapped around her head to hold it in place. You feel a surge of jealousy—everyone can see the exact location of her pain.
Neither Liza nor her mom invite you in. You hold out the card. Your mom says that of course they’ll pay for the trip to the ER, and Liza’s mom sniffs. “She’ll probably have a scar,” she says.
“We are both so sorry,” your mom says and she pinches your arm.
“I’m really sorry,” you say and the words feel like clumps of wet tissue in your mouth.
“Thanks,” Liza says, taking the card, never looking you in the face.
On the front of the card, you drew a bird, and the bird is saying Get Well Soon. Inside you, the bird opens its mouth like it’s trying to scream.
* * *
When you’re alone, you go back over that night again and again, feel the way your hand reached for the bag, try to suss out whether any part of you remembered the padlock. Every time you feel your arm swing, the bird pitches itself forward like it’s bracing for an impact. You can’t tell in the memory if the bird was readying itself for violence, if it knew the blood was coming. But the possibility needles you.
Now, even when the bird goes quiet, you never forget about it; you are always waiting for its movement. Some portion of your attention turns permanently inward. You are split in half—one part of you looking out, the other tending the bird, minding the way it rubs against the cage of your bones.
It’s there all the time. Anything can remind you of the frantic hammering of its heart—the sliver of confusion when you wake; the whoosh and bump of a car door closing; the way water gathers at your lips in the shower; a stranger leaning past you to grab something off a grocery store shelf; the clatter of a dropped cell phone; the sudden blindness when the sun catches your eyelids and blots out your vision; the whisper at an assembly about the vice principal’s cleavage; the way a chair dragged against the ground can sound almost like a scream; the thump of an elbow or shoulder pushing by in the hallway; the flicker of a street light; the sting of a papercut; the shock of reaching into a bag and finding some wetness you didn’t expect; a walk signal flipping to the flashing orange hand; a chair tipping over and crashing onto the linoleum; two boys running into each other during PE, blood bursting from one’s mouth; an unleashed dog charging at you; brakes screeching; a news story about a woman folded into a suitcase and left on the side of the highway; a glass slipping from your hands and shattering in the sink; the dark pause between a question and its answer.
Always you are reaching for the bird, feeling it before you feel anything else. The way it startles, the way its body curls, its weight sinking just barely as it readies to burst into flight.
* * *
Over time you and the bird become like the white and yolk of an egg. You don’t exist without one another. No longer does it feel like the bird has made a home inside of you. Now it is part of what makes your body a home—the same way your tongue lays just so against your teeth or the way your hands grab for each other.
The story inverts itself. Now you reach for the bird to remind yourself that you exist. Sometimes it feels like that’s the only thing keeping you tethered to your body.
You cannot remember what you felt like before the bird. Even your early memories are tinged with inevitability. The bird was always coming for you.
You think it’ll go on like this forever, your body a cage. Even as you get older and you stop believing in ghosts and monsters, you never doubt the bird’s existence. You never think it is anything other than what it is.
* * *
One night you go to a party at some house you’ve never been to. You’re in high school now. You have a part-time job as a hostess at a restaurant. One of the busboys invited you. His name is Oscar and he is always licking his teeth.
There are too many bodies in the rooms. A steady thump of music. Feel the wild in the air. A promise of something like rage. You hate it but you crave it. The sour smells, the way people steady themselves against the walls even if they’re not yet drunk. It’s like being in a fun house together. The rules are gone. Gravity isn’t gravity anymore.
A boy sleeps on the stairs. He has no shirt and there’s a bright red mark across his back. A hole in the drywall nearby.
“Holy shit,” someone says, a girl’s voice. You turn and there is Liza. Your stomach drops. You haven’t seen her in a few years. She moved after seventh grade. Her makeup is thick and her eyes are a little bit glassy. “It’s you.”
“Hey,” you say.
“I still have a fucking scar,” she says, but she’s smiling like it’s some kind of inside joke between you.
“Yeah?” You lean close to her, squint.
“Here.” She grabs your hand and puts your fingertips on her forehead. It just feels like a forehead.
“I didn’t know the lock was in there,” you say.
“What?” she says.
“I didn’t know there was a padlock at the bottom of my bag. I thought it was just an empty bag.”
“Oh,” she says, like you’re trying to reshape her memory.
“How many stitches was it?” you ask.
“Twelve,” she says, touching the middle of her forehead lightly.
“Whoa.” You don’t know whether that’s a lot of stitches or not.
“Nothing like that had ever happened to me,” she says. Her brow furrows and maybe you can see the scar.
“Me neither,” you say. And she shoots you a dark look, like she’s caught you in a lie.
“I’d take it back if I could,” you say.
“You can’t,” she says. Not meanly, just matter of fact. She shrugs. “I’m going to go find a drink.”
“Good to see you,” you say, even though the phrase feels misshapen coming out of your mouth.
* * *
After that, you slip into the bathroom. The toilet is wobbly, a candle has melted onto the edge of the sink. Someone has added water to the bottle of hand soap to make it last.
That’s when it happens. Just before you leave the bathroom, you look in the mirror. It’s not intentional really. As you turn toward the door, you catch sight of yourself. The bird flutters. You don’t say anything out loud. But for the first time you hold the words in your head. A ghost bird lives inside of me.
Maybe it is the unfamiliar place, the stink of it, the strange shadows cast by the single bare bulb. But for the first time you look plainly at the truth. All at once you understand the absurdity, the impossibility. There is no bird.
* * *
A chasm opens up inside of you. The bird is gone. Without the weight of it, something else seeps in. Feel the jagged edges of a new memory. You cannot bring it into focus yet, but it’s there—the heaviness, another body trying to split you in half with a dull knife. Remember the panic in your chest, the sensation of being trapped. The sour taste of fear. There is no bird in this memory, it is only you and the damp breath of another mouth, your skin rubbed raw, the brutality of someone else’s want. Feel the tender flesh of your throat, the wound between your legs.
You wonder if maybe the bird sacrificed itself to spare you from this memory. You feel a sudden tenderness toward it. Sometimes in the dark you could see it, the glassy black globes of its eyes, its long, strange claws. All this time you wanted it gone, and now it is. Vanished. But you didn’t know what it was guarding against; you didn’t understand that one haunting could forestall another.
Before you have time to question whether a bird ever hit the window at all, you push out of the bathroom and down the hallway. Someone stumbles by, drops a plastic cup onto the carpet. You hustle to the front door, step out into the night.
Outside, the neighborhood is quiet. You walk around the side of the house to the alley. One half of the dumpster lid is thrown open. You can smell the rich stink of the garbage, so rotten it’s turned almost sweet.
The front door of the house swings open and someone steps out onto the porch. You can only see the outline of their body and the orange glow of their cigarette. Since you don’t announce yourself right away, you stay quiet, let the person think they are alone. You believe it is a kindness, not spoiling their illusion.
It’s hypnotizing almost, watching a stranger’s breath move through the ember of their cigarette. Let yourself be entranced by it. Let the whole world narrow to that tiny orange circle.
* * *
You will return to this night over and over again, wear the memory thin by handling it too much. Sometimes, in the murkiness between wake and sleep, you’ll remember the sensation of something solid inside you turning to ash. You’ll jerk awake, legs thrashing, heart beating wild, and you’ll wish the bird back to its cage.
Years from now, you’ll find yourself in this part of town for some errand. You’ll try to find this house again to prove it exists. But you’ll get turned around, lost in the one-way streets. It won’t matter. Even if you drive right by it, you won’t recognize it in the daylight, when everything monstrous can look so benign.
The truth is your brain will never stop playing the cat and mouse game of what’s real and what’s created. But that’s later. Now you are standing in the damp cold. Feel the give of weeds under your feet. Watch the cigarette arc back and forth from the invisible mouth.
The bird is gone, yes. But picture it overhead, swooping into flight. Feel its quivering body, curled inside you for so long, finally spreading out. The moonlight spilling off its feathers. See it rising, rising, rising until the city smears below it, until the only things with any borders are its body and the moon.
Laura Price Steele is a writer and editor who lives in Missoula, Montana with her wife and daughters. She has been the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest in nonfiction as well as the Montana Prize in Fiction. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming from Ploughshares, CutBank, The Sun, and The Iowa Review, among others. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.