Bird Read Online Free

her boy jumped from and broke his arm on the first day of school. The rope bends in the wind, moves toward her. Swallows bicker in the eaves.
    Hello, love, she thinks.
    Hello, Mickey.
    She lays her leg across her husband’s knees, the seam in back where he is stitched together; she draws a knuckle up the groove of his spine. Feels the life in him and, reaching, reaches for everyone at once: her girl, and the boy who Mickey was. For Charlie and Jack and Vladimir, she reaches, Virginia and Horace and Fred.
    A dozen years they have passed together. He is a book she once read. A dying painter. A woman waving goodbye in the street.
    Goodbye, love , Bird thinks.
    She feels her lung clap shut. That old sneak cat.
    â€œMama, stay awake with me, Mama. I’m afraid to close my eyes.”
    â€œI can’t sleep, Bird. I’m sorry to wake you.”
    Trouble: she had seen him coming: come here.
    He put his cigarette out in her layered drink and brought her to bed, too jangly to sleep.
    â€œI keep thinking if I close my eyes I will never open them again. I’m sorry to wake you. I can’t help it. I want to make you proud of me. I want to fuck you until you can’t bear it anymore until you wear down and cry. I should let you sleep, Bird. Little sparrow. I’m sorry to wake you. Ikeep dreaming you are up on the bridge in the rain and the city is wet and blue. A boat is passing. I can’t see your face. Everything is blue. You’re all blue. It’s beautiful. You are. And I’m in you. I’m in you and the boat is like a ghost of a boat and the stars are like snow but frantic and burning out in your hair.”
    Later, months, weeks, she didn’t know, Mickey gouged at himself with a penknife.
    Asked, “When do I get to kill you?”
    â€œSoon, won’t be long.”
    How they felt it. He meant it and she did too.
    Lunacy, yes, stupid—but it had them by the throat, this idea, some spangly shock of narcotic they made, oblivion—out of nothing.
    â€œWhen do I get to kill you?”
    â€œWhat do I get to use?”
    The answers came to them in the bedroom, sprung from the heat of fucking—bed talk, potty talk, not a plan so much as a feeling, needling, the watery sloppy hum and drift a grief in her, unhelpable. Something had to give. They would fly off a bridge, dusk coming down; they would slam the car into a wall. Nothing lasting. A moment’s impulse, three.
    Still an impulse: wasn’t it as good most days, any old day, as intention?
    The long grown list of intention, the hope of how to be.
    Bird keeps grades on herself, the future school marm: aB day, a D day, details her insufficiencies: too late, too late, forgot. Nice try! The costume hung together with straight pins, the sneakers at the bottom of the pool.
    She tries the PTP, the LEC, the LCC—tries service, attagirl —all the ad hoc this and that. Nurses a tree in the churchyard. Nothing pure about it. She is balancing deed with the failure to do, hoping for a wash. She brokers her little mercies, pre-pays against calamity, the F and D minus days—thinks in averages, bigger pictures, the solid and sustainable C.
    Oiled rusty bike chain
    +
    played guitar at All School
    -
    boy sears chin on cookie sheet
    -
    pup breaks neck on stairs
    Bird wants to be caught. Flung out.
    Her husband moans in his sleep, he twitches—a dog chasing squirrels in a dream.
    Bird resorts to a different tally, to the one she keeps against him. For dreaming, for instance, when she isn’t. Fordrinking the last drop of coffee. He never lets her use his toothbrush, or his 25-cent comb.
    She wants all of it.
    He tells her nothing. Tells her everything. Tells a good joke, his same good joke, and everybody laughs but her. Goofball, high school stories. Mellow man, man of good cheer. Easy to love, happy even asleep—but anything can be wielded. I was happy and look what you did.
    â€œDid you see what I did? I