BIRDS OF PARADISE BY: TINA MITCHELL
A
t first I was annoyed a couple of mockingbirds built their nest in one of the six ferns hanging from my porch. I noticed the construction in the early morning, when Louisiana’s mild temperatures lured me outside to write. I sat in the shade of the cascading asparagus fern and beside the cat palm with column-tall fronds, but I hardly wrote because a lively liturgy was unfolding. The lemon blossoms flared like the mouths of hungry birds. The anoles, chameleon-like lizards that appeared drunk on chartreuse, rained from the evergreen billow of the loquat tree that had branched passed the pediment. The mockingbirds, industrious scavengers of sticks and string, squawked and swooped and constructed their nest in the rabbit foot fern hanging on the southwest corner of the porch. Although I enjoyed watching the birds, I hoped they’d relocate when the automatic irrigation switched on. These many-tongued mimics favored the grating languages of blue jays and yowling tom cats. I also expected the birds would become messy—would eat the berries of the Virginia Creeper that had snaked up the rotting chicken tree complicating the property line, and polka-dot the porch with purple scat. But the birds didn’t relocate, and I wasn’t going to shoo them away, so I resigned myself to their company and was glad I did after I peeked at their speckled eggs. Soon enough I’d see baby birds, all down and mouth, hungry for the world. * * * One night, the female nested in the haze of the green porch light while I drank red wine and rocked in my chair beside a citronella candle. The sky was like wet asphalt in the heat-anchored air, and cicadas zinged like the power lines stretched across the oil-blue horizon. The streetlights beamed satsuma orange, and roach wings flickered in the fresh clipped grass and in the Japanese boxwood that hedged the front of the house. Then I saw a pulse of a silhouette neither roach nor palmetto. It took the uncanny form of ancestral dreams—a figure portended in DNA. Using my phone’s flashlight, I saw it was a snake, mottled moss and taupe, flexing up the giant bird of paradise that stretched past the roof like a cluster of champagne flutes. The snake was hunting mockingbird. Its forked tongue mimicked fire as it licked the air and tasted the humid, gamey scent of feather, flesh and bone. The female was spring-loaded in her nest—her scapulars tensed ready for flight. The snake moved as though patience were sport, silently muscling from stalk to broad leaf, giving me time to snap and text pictures to a biologist friend. He identified the serpent as a rat snake and said I could safely move it to another tree, but I didn’t have the nerve. I imagined its cold fear flexed in my trembling hands and its primal response to danger. I’d hesitate when going for the grab, and the snake would lunge—cause me to catch its middle and give it the length needed to whip around and bite. I imagined the fiery sting vividly enough to almost feel it, so I asked my friend to help, not realizing he was two hours away at work. The snake continued upward, slithering like velvet and leather—a slow hunt that caused a strange urgency to hiss in my gut. The snake levitated to the leaf nearest the porch, as if Newton’s laws had never been written. Magus Serpentinus was a loose thread pulled from the scripture of space, a fleshy rope stretched across an invisible current, rising his brawny scales like an unholy spire. The snake floated into the asparagus fern adjacent to the nest, and the male mockingbird sprang onto the chain-linked fence and squawked. I snapped pictures to strobe the flash of the camera, but the snake lifted its head and leaned into a mock strike—a startling warning that caused me to laugh and back away, feeling the static charge of a bedsheet-clung-sock fresh from the dryer. Now, with only the soft glow of candle and green porch light, the snake retreated into the fern nearest the house and waited for the birds to forget the danger lurking in the porch canopy. Still buzzed on adrenaline and wine, I sat in the rocking chair but knew I wasn’t ready for another serpen-
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