Birds and Birthdays Read online

  Conversation Pieces

  A Small Paperback Series from Aqueduct Press

  Subscriptions available: www.aqueductpress.com

  1. The Grand Conversation

  Essays by L. Timmel Duchamp

  2. With Her Body

  Short Fiction by Nicola Griffith

  3. Changeling

  A Novella by Nancy Jane Moore

  4. Counting on Wildflowers

  An Entanglement by Kim Antieau

  5. The Traveling Tide

  Short Fiction by Rosaleen Love

  6. The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor

  A Narrative Poem by Anne Sheldon

  7. Ordinary People

  A Collection by Eleanor Arnason

  8. Writing the Other

  A Practical Approach

  by Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward

  9. Alien Bootlegger

  A Novella by Rebecca Ore

  10. The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)

  A Short Novel by L. Timmel Duchamp

  11. Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies

  edited by L. Timmel Duchamp

  12. Absolute Uncertainty

  Short Fiction by Lucy Sussex

  13. Candle in a Bottle

  A Novella by Carolyn Ives Gilman

  14. Knots

  Short Fiction by Wendy Walker

  15. Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work

  A Monograph by Lesley A. Hall

  16. We, Robots

  A Novella by Sue Lange

  17. Making Love in Madrid

  A Novella by Kimberly Todd Wade

  18. Of Love and Other Monsters

  A Novella by Vandana Singh

  19. Aliens of the Heart

  Short Fiction by Carolyn Ives Gilman

  20. Voices From Fairyland:

  The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Edited and With Poems by Theodora Goss

  21. My Death

  A Novella by Lisa Tuttle

  22. De Secretis Mulierum

  A Novella by L. Timmel Duchamp

  23. Distances

  A Novella by Vandana Singh

  24. Three Observations and a Dialogue:

  Round and About SF

  Essays by Sylvia Kelso and a correspondence

  with Lois McMaster Bujold

  25. The Buonarotti Quartet

  Short Fiction by Gwyneth Jones

  26. Slightly Behind and to the Left

  Four Stories & Three Drabbles by Claire Light

  27. Through the Drowsy Dark

  Short Fiction and Poetry

  by Rachel Swirsky

  28. Shotgun Lullabies

  Stories and Poems by Sheree Renée Thomas

  29. A Brood of Foxes

  A Novella by Kristin Livdahl

  30. The Bone Spindle

  Poems and Short Fiction by Anne Sheldon

  31. The Last Letter

  A Novella by Fiona Lehn

  32. We Wuz Pushed

  On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling

  by Brit Mandelo

  33. The Receptionist and Other Tales

  Poems by Lesley Wheeler

  34. Birds and Birthdays

  Stories by Christopher Barzak

  Many now available as e-books.

  About the Aqueduct Press

  Conversation Pieces Series

  The feminist engaged with sf is passionately interested in challenging the way things are, passionately determined to understand how everything works. It is my constant sense of our feminist-sf present as a grand conversation that enables me to trace its existence into the past and from there see its trajectory extending into our future. A genealogy for feminist sf would not constitute a chart depicting direct lineages but would offer us an ever-shifting, fluid mosaic, the individual tiles of which we will probably only ever partially access. What could be more in the spirit of feminist sf than to conceptualize a genealogy that explicitly manifests our own communities across not only space but also time?

  Aqueduct’s small paperback series, Conversation Pieces, aims to both document and facilitate the “grand conversation.” The Conversation Pieces series presents a wide variety of texts, including short fiction (which may not always be sf and may not necessarily even be feminist), essays, speeches, manifestoes, poetry, interviews, correspondence, and group discussions. Many of the texts are reprinted material, but some are new. The grand conversation reaches at least as far back as Mary Shelley and extends, in our speculations and visions, into the continually-created future. In Jonathan Goldberg’s words, “To look forward to the history that will be, one must look at and retell the history that has been told.” And that is what Conversation Pieces is all about.

  L. Timmel Duchamp

  Jonathan Goldberg, “The History That Will Be” in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1996)

  Published by Aqueduct Press

  PO Box 95787

  Seattle, WA 98145-2787

  www.aqueductpress.com

  Digital Copyright © 2012 Christopher Barzak

  All rights reserved. First Edition, August 2012

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61976-015-8

  “The Creation of Birds” first appeared in Twenty Epics, eds. Susan Groppi and David Moles. All-Star Stories, Berkeley CA, 2006.

  “The Guardian of the Egg” first appeared in Salon Fantastique, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 2006.

  Cover illustration, Birds Are Not the Target

  Courtesy kristine campbell

  http://kristinecampbell.webs.com/

  Book Design by Kathryn Wilham

  Original Block Print of Mary Shelley by Justin Kempton:

  www.writersmugs.com

  Conversation Pieces

  Volume 34

  Birds and Birthdays

  by

  Christopher Barzak

  For Richard Bowes

  Contents

  The Creation of Birds

  The Guardian of the Egg

  Birthday

  Re-Membering the Body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism

  Acknowledgments

  Author Biography

  The Creation of Birds

  The Bird Woman sits at her table with a long strip of parchment stretched out before her. She holds a quill between her thumb and forefinger, plucked earlier in the night from her own head. She has drawn the outline of a sparrow, has shaded in its curves and hollows. It has two beady black eyes that stare out from the page. This sparrow has spunk, thinks the Bird Woman. She licks her thumb, smudges a section of tail feathers to make them look fuller than usual, then nods, satisfied with the exaggeration.

  The Bird Woman is not a realist. She has no time for that. She believes sparrows should have fans for tail feathers, that parrots appear more exotic when they hold silence as a virtue, rather than the prattle for which they are known. The one bird her imagination has left untouched is the hummingbird. Who would dare attempt to better such a creature with wings that flutter a hundred times with each beat of its heart? That’s art, simple and evocative. It doesn’t get better than that.

  Beside her parchment sit two teacups. She cracks open a fresh egg, shuffles the white from the yolk, one shell to the other, then places a half in each cup. She licks her quill then, dips it into the yolk, and draws a small golden circle within the sparrow’s breast. A moment later the sparrow opens its beak to emit a warble, but only silence comes out. The golden circle trembles and begins to spin slowly, like a water wheel, within the sparrow’s breast.

  She paints each feather with egg white in long lazy strokes. The sparrow s
tretches its wings a little, clenching and unclenching its tiny claws, testing. “Tut, tut,” whispers the Bird Woman. “Not yet, little one. I haven’t even given you your colors. What would you want the world to mistake you for? A dove?”

  The Bird Woman smiles down at the sparrow. In the next room, the cries and chirps of her most recent creations grow louder as the sun begins to rise. Today she will be taking them to the market. Usually she gives her birds away as gifts or as barter, but she’s nearly out of money, and soon her landlord will demand what she owes him, which he’s been kind enough to ignore for the past two months.

  The Bird Woman hasn’t been able to make birds for a long time. Nearly four months have passed without one new bird. The birds in the next room were the last to receive the required teaspoon of moon and starlight needed to give them life. The stars and moons, a lot of them have been disappearing. It’s because of the Star Catcher — he’s been out there again, in the night sky, taking them down, so many of them, as if they were mere ornaments or lanterns. Without them, the Bird Woman won’t be able to complete even this sparrow, small and slight as it is. There isn’t enough available light to make it live. Why do I try, she wonders. Habit, she thinks. Wishful thinking, she decides.

  She tries not to attribute anything to hope.

  A swan strolls into the workshop, sidling up beside the Bird Woman’s leg, attempting to view the parchment, but its neck isn’t long enough to stretch that high. “Shoo,” the Bird Woman scolds it. “Back with the others, silly swan. We’ll be leaving soon for the market.”

  She strokes the top of its head before it turns to leave the room. Her fingers come away damp, sticky with ivory.

  It is a good day at the market — there are people everywhere, buying, selling, their voices clamoring in the dusty street. Love potions, jewelry, charms, braided rugs, velvet robes. Food from a thousand worlds, some still living, some long dead. The Bird Woman thinks she might sell a lot of birds in all of this din. A difficult feat, though, considering the Star Catcher has returned from another long absence. His booth sits directly across from the Bird Woman’s stall. Even while customers crowd around his table, trying to haggle, he stares over their heads at the Bird Woman, his eyes cold as stone.

  The Star Catcher is whisper thin, and his forehead is filled with creases. He sweats a lot for someone so skinny. He’s covered in robes the color of night. On his table he displays an array of moons and stars kept in brass and silver cages. Half Moons, Crescents, Harvest Moons, and a Blue Moon as well. His stars are small and sickly. They wink and blink, but they are known to die quickly after a sale. The Star Catcher never sits. He stands behind his table, arms folded, and waits for buyers to realize no amount of haggling will force his prices down.

  The Bird Woman pretends not to see him. She inhales a deep breath of the dry market air and avoids his stare. It’s been several months since she last spoke to him, and though time and distance has made her days easier, he has not stopped taking down the stars. It is his way of punishing her, she thinks, for leaving. And yet…and yet, she thinks, he’d been taking them down before she even made the decision to leave him.

  A long time ago, the Bird Woman tried to be his lover. She had tried to understand him like no one else before. But the Star Catcher, she soon discovered, didn’t know how to love something he couldn’t own. Her memory of their time together is like walking through thick forest, suddenly falling into a pit that’s been covered over with sticks and brush to hide the hole. She tries not to wander through those memories. He kept her in that hole for long enough. He shouldn’t still have that power over her, she knows.

  And yet there had been moments that had come close to love and, yes, also passion. These memories the Bird Woman tries to leave pure and untouched. She keeps this one beautiful still: his eyes holding her gaze steady as he moved above her, the feel and smell of his skin, grainy and sweet like sugar, his breath fanning her feathers. “I love your eyes,” he told her, tracing their contours with his finger, two perfect circles in an owl-like face. “I love your everything,” he told her, and his hands moved down the length of her body as she sang, sang, sang, blinking profusely.

  The Bird Woman knows where the Star Catcher likes to be kissed — on his forehead, like a child. She used to kiss each of the wrinkles on his forehead before they went to sleep. He never attempted to learn her own skin though, or how to talk to her about her art. The Bird Woman learned so much about the stars and their placement and how the Star Catcher goes about displacing them, she could probably catch stars herself. For a while, she felt like one of his stars, clinging to his arm, on display for others. He never asked about her birds.

  The market is busy this morning, which makes it easier for her to ignore him. She hopes he will choose to ignore her as well.

  The swan goes first. Someone is here to buy it for a storybook for children. She wraps a blue bow around its neck before sending it off. Then her silent parrot is paid for by a young deaf man. His smile is soft and gentle. She imagines the two of them will keep a quiet house. There go the lovebirds as well as the cuckoo, which she notices is a little mad. It continually preens, stopping only to eat. Not a good sign. She is glad it found a home though. Soon it will be laying eggs in other birds’ nests, allowing them to raise its hatchlings. I’m a bit of a cuckoo myself, the Bird Woman thinks.

  She is busy tidying up her stall, sweeping out feathers and birdseed, when she hears his voice.

  “My dear. Jessica. Jess. How have you been?”

  The Bird Woman doesn’t stop sweeping; she doesn’t look up at all. She knows it is the Star Catcher by his deep, sonorous voice and by the name that he calls her. The Bird Woman doesn’t have a name like that. She is just the Bird Woman. Her mother never gave her a name like the humans have. She is her mother’s daughter. Her mother had been the Bird Woman also, and so she was called too, after her mother left this world for the next. But the Star Catcher calls her something human anyway. A name he thinks she should like. She decides not to answer. She has principles. She’s made a point of sticking to them for the past thirty years, after she finally gave him up. She will make a point of sticking to them still.

  “Jessica, Jess,” he says, trying again. “Why won’t you talk? It’s been so long. Look up, it’s me. Ivan. I have a gift for you. Really. No kidding.”

  The Bird Woman looks up. She is not immune to gifts, nor to a possible reconciliation, a possible peace. She likes to think people can change. The Star Catcher stands just outside her stall, holding a small silver cage. Inside its bars sits a blue star the size of a pearl earring. He holds the cage out and says, “For you.”

  “I don’t keep stars,” says the Bird Woman. She looks down and resumes sweeping her stall. Shaking her head wearily, she says, “I don’t keep anything.”

  “Keep this then,” he says. “Please. An offering. For all of our troubles.”

  She is skeptical at first, but finally decides to take it, nodding her hesitant assent. She cannot imagine this tiny star could have much of a life with the Star Catcher anyway, and besides, its light may help her sparrow live. Perhaps she can teach the star how to live on land, away from the sky, though not likely, considering she knows sky better than land.

  “How long are you back for?” she asks, head down, looking up at him from beneath her eyelashes.

  “A few days,” he says. “I need to go back out.”

  “Thank you,” the Bird Woman says, her hope flattened by his statement. She keeps her eyes fixed on the blue star in its cage. “Have a nice day,” she tells him, as if he is nothing more than another customer.

  On the Bird Woman’s island, all streets lead to the same place — the center. The roads are cobbled, and they travel ever inward, spirals, all of them, one after the other. The Bird Woman’s cottage sits near the center of the city, built on the riverside. The river here follows the same pathways as the roads: it moves inward, spiraling. Between each street are canals, roads made of water. From above
— and the Bird Woman has taken to the sky many times just to see this — the island looks like an orangey-pink seashell, floating in the blue ocean.

  The Bird Woman’s bones are hollow, and because of this her step is light. She moves through crowds quicker than others. She hops upon wagons and barrows as they wheel by, then wings her way to the other side of the street. Today, she needs to stop by the market, as well as the banker, to deposit the money from the sale of her birds. She also has an appointment with the psychoanalyst, that old man with the long white beard. He wears wizard caps, tall and pointy. For him, the mind is the same thing as magic. The Bird Woman has a friend who sees the psychoanalyst on a regular basis. This friend is an artist as well — a bit of a loon, really — but she swears the psychoanalyst is saving her life, little by little, one hour a week. She’s suggested the Bird Woman see him herself. For the sake of your art, if for nothing else, she’d explained.

  The Bird Woman is more than a little reluctant. She’s never needed therapy before. But lately she’s not been so sure of herself as she used to be. Perhaps, she thinks, an objective opinion is exactly what’s needed.

  These names are poetry: kookaburra, cardinal, cormorant, kestrel, nuthatch, warbler, flamingo, thrush. The Bird Woman keeps each name tucked under her tongue. Better than locking them inside her brain, where she might not be able to retrieve them, depending on her mood. When the Bird Woman is happy, she’ll make Phoenixes and Thunderbirds, which exist only in poetry and dreams. When she is merely content, she makes birds that are real and not imagined. When the Bird Woman is sad, she doesn’t make birds at all. She explains all of this within the first fifteen minutes of her session with the psychoanalyst.

  The psychoanalyst stares at the Bird Woman through round, foggy spectacles. He rubs his hands together like a fly. “This, my dear,” he says in his old man’s scratchy voice, “is why you can’t work. You’re depressed. Sorrow can make any of us stop in our tracks. Of course you can’t make birds.”