by Michael Brooks
With her binoculars Tula Loukas stares through her kitchen window at cardinals, finches, and crows. Their breasts are scarlet, marigold, and indigo. They sing in an opera. They dance at the tips of saplings. Only in her bathroom mirror does Tula see avian flaws: the ruffled plumage of her gray hair, the claws arthritis curls from her hands, the turkey wattle of her chin, her beak of a nose, lines scoring her stork-stick legs. She is an aging mockingbird, imitating through watercolor the shapes of flight. It is the only forgiving medium, the one in which her shaking hands birth swirls instead of misplaced specks, acrylic blunders.
Few birds thrive alone; she knows this. It is why she misses her mate, despite the squabbles of their marriage. It is why she pesters her children on the phone. It is why she dreams Bruce Kuipers down the road will find rest in the nest she’s built. And because neither the living nor the dead echo her calls, birds are Tula’s company. She lathes her skin in oil, to tan away the ashen reminder of her mortality, and sits on an Adirondack chair. When she grows quiet, when she learns to shoo the mosquitos away without a sound and savor the taste of humid air, they sing to her. The chorus of robins, the shrill shrieks of blue jays all weaving her a story. She listens, day by slow day, lost to avian tongues.
She has yet to paint a hummingbird. She watches them sip nectar from the hanging feeder, their wings a blur, the crimson splash of their chests zipping in ceaseless motion, powered by staccato hearts. To paint one, she needs near stop her own, to slow it until she can see every rise and fall of the piston wings, every turquoise feather suspended.
She fears her hands will fail before she learns how. She fears the day she cannot rise from her roost, the day Bruce Kuipers down the road will see her lined legs, the day her plumage will molt, the day the bathroom glass will show her a bald and haggard vulture, a creature lacking wings and song and hue.
Michael Brooks received his MFA from Pacific University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, Redivider, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Columbia Journal, EcoTheo Review, Qu Literary Magazine, Appalachian Review, and others.