Cornell
I found a broken bird on the bed but thought, That’s someone’s daughter.
There were bottles and glasses and cans, a bong, the room in utter disarray, as the sheets were, blood smeared, scrunched or ripped in places.
The bird could have been my sister, could have been yours. Frail and wounded. Her ear lobes twitched.
She held her arm up as if waving an imaginary flag. She could barely say, “Help me.”
I heard the guys laughing down the hall, punching each other in the chest. “Fuck yeah, dude. So awesome!”
The bird’s lips were blood encrusted and dried saliva stuck to one side of her cheek, partially flaked off. Her eyes looked ancient and wary, like my grandmother’s would when Grandpa Hal came back from a long haul across state.
I knelt down by the side of the bed in a puddle of vomit without realizing it. It seemed as if I should pray. But why? To whom?
She mumbled, “Help me,” again, her eyes blurred like two scuffed pearls.
Down the hall they were saying things like, “Fucking A, dude!”
I helped the bird with the broken wings stand up. She wobbled. She threw up again, a hot stream, but mostly choked air. She wept.
“Take my hand,” I whispered. “Don’t be afraid.”
“But I am,” she whispered back.
It took forever to make our way down the other side of the hall.
One of the guys saw and said, “Fuck man, whadda you think you’re doing?”
Someone hurled beer cans at my head or at the broken bird and they clanged off the wall. She and we flinched together, but the bird just clamped my arm harder, shuddering like a sheet in the wind.
It took both our lifetimes to get there, as if we were plodding through hot lava or feet of snow or sand dunes.
At the clinic place, I said I’d wait as long as she wanted and the bird collapsed in the receptionist’s arms, almost smashing her jaw into the computer screen. There wasn’t enough air for the bird, or the right kind of air, and she kept gasping.
I wanted to heal the bird, or change places with the bird but I was too frightened, thinking ahead, thinking about tomorrow, thinking of what would happen to me if I went back to the fraternity. And then I felt a ripple of shame run through my blood stream, as if disgrace had always been swimming there and just now some strange force stirred it up to torment me, to show the vile parts that lived dormant inside of me.
While a soft-spoken nurse led the bird to a room, I thought: This is her story, not mine. But then I thought again and realized I was a part of it, whether I knew it or not, whether I had been in that room or not.
Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of seven books, most recently, CEMETERY KIDS out in 2027 from Roadside Press. You can find more of his writing at https://lenkuntz.blogspot.com
