don’tflydarling

by NINA GEORGE

It’s no easier as a bird. The man might have disagreed before the child, but now he knows this is true. He also knows that he would have reached this conclusion sooner if he had had more time to think. Now with the child here, he has no time and nowhere to expend the anger he feels. The man’s anger doesn’t have or need a reason to be; a woman’s might but that is not of his concern.  It isn’t precisely anger though, but a suspicion slowly stirring to a thick, sticky truth inside him—a truth that told him that he had been lied to.

He met the woman when she bent her back for him to mount her. They didn’t speak before, but he liked the way she bucked below him and decided that he liked her. The second time they met they didn’t speak again. She left an egg in an ugly beige shell and the man felt something in him wilt and crumple. He thought if he spoke to her, he could stop it from dying, but she left before he could and the egg didn’t let him think more about her or what he could do to stop her from leaving.

The man sat on the egg because it took all the room and thought about what to do. Like all great thinkers, he is sure that with enough time he can solve any and every mystery in the world. For ten days the man sat on the egg, alternating between examining every thought stacked inside him and admiring each thought, its every nook and corner. It was only on the eleventh day, with the first crack of daybreak and the first tremor, that he felt his nest shake, and it struck him: he still didn’t know what to do.

The child and the man were never safe. Fear, a kind he never felt before, now weighed on his mind; every move they made, every hole they sought and made safe place, he obsessed, jumping over every sound, every creaking branch, every snapping twig. Two nights ago, when a caterwauling tomcat got a whiff of their trail, stopped his song, and took chase, the man froze, relief mixed with fear, and removed all thought except one blaring alarm that this was it, this was his time; but the girl the cat was serenading started following the tom and then their trail, he unfroze and shrunk to his foot, the child slept on behind him; when someone somewhere close threw water at the cats, the man’s moment of impending death passed over without a mark on him. The child woke up and cried till he fed it. He wished it showed some joy in seeing him alive but it seemed the same as always: hungry and sleepy once done.  

Three days that feel more like a year later: the child opens its eyes. It is less red and more pink with dusty white fluff appearing at its ears and armpits. The child looks at the man as if the only sun it knows is him. It unsettles the man at first; he even tries to teach it different, but it grows on him, this feeling so big it could hold a world in it. He forgets how he wanted to leave it and wanted more time to think everything through. The man is concerned only with teaching the child now. He likes to think about how little it might think without him. It wouldn’t wonder if the sky is a field or a sea or if death colored life, or was it the other way around? No one would teach you all this, he tells the child. It doesn’t understand what he means, no one, someone, everyone, us, alone, it doesn’t understand the difference, but the man persists. He is a good man who understands what’s important, and like other good men, teaches that which is important through examples of his own goodness. The child is lucky to have a man like him looking out for it.

Five days that feel more like a lifetime later: the child’s world is growing in every blink, but the man’s is not; he is not aware of this, but he seems to be trying to fit his life into a keyhole sized to the child’s. Does he hope it will open him to a new life, clean of scars or sadness of any kind? He does. The man fears the day when the child will shift its light from him. He likes being its sun and dreads returning to when he pondered like a stone. He hates the child for making him feel this way and yet he craves its eyes to keep staring at him, no don’t look away, at me, at me, he coaxes and pleads, but it looks and soon enough, leaves.