She touched the center of his chest. “Your heart.” Her voice was a whisper. “You’ve kept it closed for so long — even the ones you loved, you wouldn’t let in. So now, know that it is safe. Know that it will never open again for another. It is mine for eternity.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “You will remember me, Enrico. I will be there in your dreams. You will see me in every storm. ‘The only peace you know, you shall find in my eyes.’”
He watched transfixed as she lifted her hand and a fine red streak of light danced between her palm and his chest. Her hand touched his skin again and went deeper, as if she held his beating heart in her hand.
“ ‘I set my seal upon thy heart,’ ” she whispered.
He reached for her, but the owl’s wing brushed the length of his body, closing his eyes once again. He felt her lips press against his.
“ ‘Turn to me, my beloved.’ Now you will always turn toward me.”
He opened his eyes, tried to do as she had asked, but she was gone. He was alone in the garden. A shrill cry called his gaze to the sky. Above him a black screech owl flew west, away from the dawn.
Bird Count
Jane Yolen
IT WAS HIS WINGS I fell in love with first: feathers soft, wimpling; the strong pinions flexing. They weren’t white or yellow, but somewhere in between, like piano keys after years in a dark room. I dreamed those wings around me. I dreamed them against my breasts.
I dreamed them between my legs. But I never dreamed they could hurt so, the shafts scraping against my shoulders and back, leaving a deep imprint on my skin, as if I — and not he — had worn the wings.
When I saw him first, he was only a speck against the sky. I was by the fire tower at Mount Tom, one of the early risers for the annual hawk watch. I was there because my lover, Lewis, was an obsessive birder who thought nothing of spending hours in the field making lists that only he would ever care about or actually see.
Trying to hold on to a relationship that had nothing to recommend it but inertia and obsession, I had bought myself a pair of vastly-too-expensive field glasses. I would rise each weekend morning before dawn to accompany Lewis on his passionate activity — he saved his passion for birds alone. I had become a martyr to ornithology, a bird widow, even though I knew little about the birds we watched and cared less. I only wanted to get Lewis’s attention. He wasn’t much, but he was all I had at the time. And at thirty-two, time was the operative word.
My biologic clock wasn’t just ticking; it was sounding like a Geiger counter in an old sci-fi movie.
The thing about Lewis was that even when we were together I was alone. Or rather Lewis was alone and I was just some thing that happened to be occupying space near him. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice me; he didn’t notice anyone. If he was hungry, he ate whatever food appeared before him. If his laundry needed doing, he knew that the universe would somehow, mysteriously and wonderfully, get it cleaned. Before me there had been Lewis’s mother to deal with the mundane world.
I was the intern on call when his mother had coughed gently, said “Take care of my boy,” and died. Thinking she was talking about a minor child, I worried as I went out to the waiting room, afraid who I would find there. I was quite unprepared for Lewis, but relieved to find him an adult.
“Mr. Snowden,” I said, “I am afraid that your mother has just passed away.”
He seemed less shocked then confused, saying simply “She can’t have.” But his tone was not one of denial; rather he seemed put out with her, as if she had just gone on a trip without telling him.
And then he smiled a dazzling smile at me, and in all seriousness added, “I’ll need a white shirt for the funeral and I don’t know how to iron.”
So when my shift was over, I went home with him, did his shirts, and stayed. He was quite simply the most beautiful man I had ever seen and I, while not technically a virgin, was so focused on my medical career I hadn’t had much experience with men. Beauty in a man shook me, entangled me in a way for which I was unprepared.
When I say beautiful, there is no other word for it. He had a shock of dark hair that fell uncut — unless I cut it — over a clear, broad forehead. His eyes were like dark almonds and about as readable. He had a straight, perfect nose, skin that had the kind of ermine edging that is on a blackberry leaf — soft and slightly fuzzy to the touch. His ears, shell-like, were velvety and made to be touched, caressed, blown into. He was lean and well-muscled, but never had to work at it, so he did not have that false sculpting that men have who only develop their tone in a gym. And most important, he was totally unaware of his beauty. It was like his clothing — there for covering. I must have tried to write dozens of poems about him those first weeks with him, which was odd because I had never written anything before other than critical essays for school.
Even when his beauty lost its power over me, I stayed — and this will sound bizarre and slightly shocking, but is true nonetheless — because he smelled like summer, moist and hot and beckoning. He was not in fact any of those things. He was more winter than summer, arctic really. But he smelled as if he could be cultivated and might even blossom in time if only I could find the right tools.
So I stayed.
Which is how I found myself frequently on birding expeditions: tracking down errant wheatears along the stone abutments at the Quabbin Reservoir, chasing after odd rarities at feeders in Hadley and Montague, looking through snowstorms for an elusive snowy owl, spending a whole day and night driving Lewis around the Northampton meadows on the Christmas bird count. Of course he did not know how to drive. The universe supplied drivers.
As for why he stayed with me, there is no mystery in that. I was as comfortable for him as his furniture. He did not expect his furniture to up and move away. Nor did I.
Until.
Until the hawk watch when something extraordinary happened. And only I seemed to have noticed it.
A bird as big as a man, a man with wings, came down from the sky and took me in a feathery embrace. And only then, after I had been well and truly fucked by some otherworldly fowl, did I begin to understand real beauty.
I do not expect you to believe me. I expect you will say I had been drinking. Or smoking funny cigarettes. I expect you to say I was hallucinating or dreaming or having an out of body experience. I expect you to say the words “alien abduction” with a breathy laugh, and suggest I was having a breakdown.
I was not. I was awake that day as I am at this moment. The morning was still and chill. I had dressed warmly, but evidently not warmly enough for I could feel the cold through my chinos, like a light coating of ice on my thighs. My earlobes were numb.
Lewis was with the ardent birders high up on the fire tower. I was down below, my field glasses in my hand, thinking about my caseload and praying that my beeper would signal me to make an early and unanticipated visit to the hospital. My relationship with Lewis had reached the point where I could not just leave without a summons, but I spent a lot of time praying that one thing or another would demand my time away from his side.
I heard a noise. Not my beeper, but a kind of insistent high pitched cry. When I looked up, I saw this speck in the sky hurtling toward me. I put my glasses to my eyes, twisted the focus, and then dropped the glasses on the ground. $2,500 worth of Zeiss and I simply let it fall from my hand without thinking. But I was too shocked to notice. What I had seen was not possible. How quickly it moved was not possible. I scarcely had time to raise my hands to ward off the thing when it was hovering over me, the wind from its wings literally taking my breath away so that I could not have screamed if I wanted to.