Short Folk #4: House Sparrow

They were just lying there, close under a grey blanket on the front net that stretched between the two hulls of the catamaran. The boat lolled gently in the reef’s cove and moved in a slow curve around its anchor.

A finch, or it could have been a sparrow, something small and buffeted, flew in on the warm air and landed angled on the wire of a mast stanchion. They both watched it, close by them but too dark to make out its coloring. It started calling, a high-pitched plaintive chreep.  The woman was the first to speak, but hushed, so as not to scare away the bird.

-Funny, it’s almost like it has something to tell us.

-He’s the designated welcome committee. Seems like the natives are hostile.

-Something like that.

Then they were quiet for a bit just watching the bird. Silhouetted on the wire against the sky they could see all the askance feathers that windfluttered away from its compact body. The man was the next to speak, chuckling softly.

-Reminds me of the time at my grandfather’s house where the bird got down the chimney. Have I told you that story?

-I don’t think so

-I was in my twenties. I went back up to Canada to visit them. We had this big Sunday dinner with all my aunts and uncles, all the grandkids. They had this wood-burning stove in the old brick chimney, with a tall stovepipe that T’d at the top.  And this tiny house sparrow got down it and then couldn’t get out. The whole dinner we could hear it flying around in the pipe and making the same urgent sound that one’s making now.

-That has to be the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard.

-And over and over my grandpa keeps muttering that he put chicken wire up there and there’s no reason why the dumb bird should have got down there in the first place.  It was killing the dinner, and we didn’t know how to react to my grandfather because he was such a stern man. But then my grandmother says ‘Well it doesn’t quite sound like a chicken that’s down there, does it Heber’?

The man paused to see if the punch line would have any effect on her. It didn’t and he kept going.

-Anyway, we all looked at him to see how he would take it. But he just laughed and that set us all off laughing. Strange that a little bird could bring that memory back.

The woman waited a breath to see if he would continue, then she spoke,

            -And the bird? What happened to the bird?

            -After a while we just lit the stove. It seemed like the most humane thing to do.

She waited at his side just long enough that he wouldn’t guess at why she was leaving.  And when she rolled away and stood the boat rolled and the bird left the wire, flying hard towards land, darting on the vectors of the wind. Before she went below she turned and looked at him there in the milky dark, under the blanket on the white mesh net, something akin to disbelief in her eyes. It occurred to her that she didn’t know him. Ashy grey shape. Strange clotted mass. Inhuman form.