“This is my house too,” she says. “You can’t order me out of the kitchen.”
“I wasn’t,” I say, cringing that she’s about to comment on what she almost walked in on.
“You were about to try to,” she says, psychic, and sits down at the table. “It’s not happening. I’m hungry.”
I leave Eli and Jason to eat éclairs. I go coughing into my freezing room.
There are eleven hours until my procedure. I’m not counting them. I don’t need to count them because I’m totally not dying tomorrow.
I take the piece of paper Jason gave me out of my pocket and stare at it. He’s not allowed to make me want to stay alive this way. I { } you more than [[[{{{(( ))}}}]]].
and I’m both grinning and stupidly kind of crying—
When the window opens. I put the note back, weirdly embarrassed.
My mom was cleaning in futility, and didn’t latch it, maybe.
I look out. It’s starting to snow, completely wrongly, right after that rain; it’s only November. The back lawn is covered already, a thin dusting of it, and it’s the kind of glowing darkish afternoon that snow makes happen. Like the snow is the surface of the moon. Like we’re here, and at the same time, in outer space. Which of course, we are. We’re all untethered, all flying around in the dark, the same as Mars and Venus, the same as the stars.
I’m definitely not going to cry.
The window creaks.
I think about celestial junk. Maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash.
A robin picks its red-breasted finicky way across the yard, considering the blades of grass sticking up out of the white. It cocks its head and looks at me for a long time.
I turn forcibly away and rummage in my closet, packing my hospital bag. I can hear Jason and Eli blithering on in the kitchen, something about a hailstorm where the hail turned out to be, actually, a rain of frogs, each one frozen into a ball of ice. A rain of frogsicles is so Jason’s kind of thing.
I hear a chirp much closer than it should be. When I turn around to close the window, the lawn is covered with birds. Maybe fifty of them. Robins, crows, and blue jays, seagulls, chickadees, and swallows.
On my windowsill, there’s a bright yellow bird with a black beak and wings spread like it’s wearing a cape made of marigold petals.
This is the one chirping.
Here, it says. She is ready.
No, it definitely does not say that. It’s a bird. It opens its beak and shrills, and the other birds look expectant. I try to shoo it off the sill. I have my fingers on the sash when all the birds turn their heads and look at me.
Not just in the direction of me. No, there’s a flock of birds, out of season, sitting patiently in the snow, watching me. A hawk lands. An owl. None of the rest of the birds even look at them.
And it’s insanity, right there, rain of frogs insanity, except that it’s rain of birds, and I’m shaking with cold and also with something else. The bird on the sill doesn’t move. It just looks at me.
“Fly away!” I yell, coughing, freezing, but none of them move. They start to sing.
To speak.
All of them.
Aza Ray.
Inside my chest, I feel a weird rattle and then there’s something I can’t explain, a giant gap, inside my lungs. The little yellow bird looks me in the eyes. I cough.
And then, out of fucking nowhere, the bird flies into my mouth.
I can feel its tough little bones, its claws scratching at my teeth. I’m trying to scream but my mouth’s full of feathers. It’s pushing and its wings are opening in my mouth and then in my throat and I can’t breathe, and then it’s down my windpipe and speaking from inside my chest.
Got her, sings the yellow bird. I can feel it in my left lung. Got her. I’m in. We’re ready.
I scream. I can feel it whistling, beating its wings, and I think feather-feather-feather.
Bird in my lung? BIRD IN MY LUNG? I’m hyperventilating.
Out the window, in the clouds, I’m seeing—
Oh my god, sails over the tree line, and rigging—dark figures on a deck. I’m crying and holding my chest and I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know what to do.
Readyreadyreadygo the bird in my chest whistles and out on the lawn the rest of the birds look at me as though I have a clue what’s happening, and I’m thinking this is it this is dying and why didn’t anyone in any of the near-death books ever say there’d be a crowd of birds seeing you off? Where’s the white light? Where’s the peace and calm? Where’s the voice of God and the angelic-ness and the—
A rope loops down, down, down out of the clouds and clearly I’m dreaming. It’s swinging through the sky outside my window, and there’s no air in here, no air anywhere—
Readyreadyready my chest sings. The sky is full of hail and snow and wind. The birds on the lawn are taking flight, and they have the rope in their talons. I’m dizzy. I’m gasping. I’m—
I come to in redwhiteandblue emergency lights, wrapped in heat blankets, snow coming down hard outside the windows. I’m in the back of the ambulance with my dad, Jason, and Eli.
I try to sit up but I’m strapped down. I have a mask on my face. I want to cough. I want to talk. I want to tear it off.
“You had a seizure,” the paramedic tells me, speaking slowly, as though I’m not me, as though I don’t know everything about this already. I’m a professional patient, even if I have no idea how I got here, no idea who this paramedic is, no idea where the ambulance is taking me, or why.