Bird Body, Girl Soul

“I’d do it for her,” I said.

Percy had a noise he could make that said ‘okay’, as well as ‘this might not be true tomorrow’.

“I could really make it work for her.”

“I don’t doubt you Corin. You’re capable of a lot. I just,” he waved off and grinned, “is that what you want?”

“I think I really love her.”

“Alright – well,” he looked out over the bay and I did too. It was a blue cut gem; sharp white caps feathered up and vanished. The sun was caught in momentary blinding sparkles on every ripple that rose up.

I breathed in and exhaled. I was emptied for a moment of doubt. I really could love her. The future, normally a fragile thing, seemed robust, even able to care for itself. I could smell her – not her smell laying in bed after sex, but as she smelled when we swam in the river and stood a distance apart from me, waving, then turning on the sun-baked rocks to watch the hawk pull its body up and out of the tall trees along the far bank.

“I can do it for her,” I said and breathed in again, not even tempted by the cigarette I’d stolen from Sal.

“I know,” Percy said and made his little noise.

“I really could. Like Jesus did,” I laughed.

Percy chuckled, “Well, if anyone could do it like Jesus it would be you Corin.”

“He didn’t care she was a prostitute.”

“Who?”

“Jesus.”

“Hmm,” Percy nodded slowly, “Oh, I see. So you’re saying you could forgive?”

I nodded, though the breaths felt more careful now. The bay retreated again to a background behind thought. The smell I tried to conjure up again came to my nose but changed. I smelled her again but in sweat – a sweet delicious sweat, beading down her back and I breathed in again, desperate for that expansiveness even as the sweat became claustrophobic and pressed close towards my heart and I pictured her on him again. My feeble imagination – decrepit and incapable of anything worthwhile – can always create exquisit shapes of skin and caressing forms of him on her, her touching him, at his use.

I lit the cigarette, “Fuck Percy. I can’t do it.”

“You couldn’t do it like Jesus did.”

“Not for her. Not after what she did. She’s ruined it all. She’s ruined it”

Percy was silent and I focused ahead on the sidewalk as we walked. An old couple sat on the bench and I could feel them stare at me. I knit my brow and smoked, inhaling the whole time I passed. I didn’t need to say anything.

Percy stopped walking. I stopped ahead and smoked while I waited.

“Corin,” he said.

I turned around. He was holding something and facing the bay.

“What?”

“Come here,” his pink arms were against his black t-shirt and his hands were cupped. His head was dipped over them and his hair hung in his face, “look.”

When I got up close I saw he held a bird on its back. I thought I saw its eye close from a black to nothing right as I came up.

“Where did you find this?”

“Right here by the tree.”

It was soft brown and gray and was just less than the cup of Percy’s hand. It was limp. I put a finger to its chest to feel a pulse or something, but my own hand was pulsing so much that when I touched it the small body began to move with mine.

Percy said we ought to bury it. I said it felt wrong to bury a bird. We had touched it now though, so it if got eaten off the ground by a dog it was almost like it was our fault.

“Well, if we can’t bury it and you wont leave it, where should we put it?” Percy said.

I still had my cigarette so I quickly stubbed it and put it in the trash and then proposed we find a bush for it.

We found a bush. I got on my stomach and cleared the leaves and sticks from the protected patch of ground deep in the center of it. Percy squatted next to me in his baggy black jeans and his pink hands rested, cupping the bird, on his knees. He watched patiently. I gathered green leaves and a small pink flower that was growing with the white clover flowers on the promenade grass. I made a bed and Percy handed the small body to me. I cupped my hands around it and pushed it into the bush and lay it down. Its neck rolled and looked tweaked so I moved it onto the flower with my index finger.

I wanted to go. I wanted to cry or something. I knew I should say a prayer but I felt lazy and I knew it would feel fake coming out. I looked at the body and realized there was nothing of substance in it anymore. I was fetishized the death by honoring the body. What is a body really? Why not just throw this in the trash and say a prayer to the sky? If the soul is all that’s true, and it dwells somewhere separate from teh body, why worship the body at all? I still put it with the flower and covered it in leaves. Then I looked up over the bay, at the sky where the bird must be now, and said my prayer,

“Dear Lord whoo art in heaven, take the soul that was once in this small body and bring it into your warm embrace, full of the light that erases all worry. Amen.”

Percy said Amen too.

I was worried as we walked back that I’d think of Estelle’s body and smell it again. But when it came it meant nothing to me, I shrugged it off.

“Percy. I could do it for her, like Jesus. I could love her. I really could.”

He patted my back and made that little noise of his.