Birds of the Air Tyler Sones

Birds of the Air

Tyler Sones

Matt knows better than to count time by years. If they weren’t the standard unit of measure, he might have quit using them altogether. So many substitutes add up to the same thing but don’t leave him dizzy with panic—ten places of residence; six shitty cars; one missing tooth; three DUIs; five non-consecutive nights in jail; twenty-two sexual partners; two tours of duty; fourteen dead enemy combatants; one male child named Logan, who he hasn’t seen since the kid was a new pink baby, freshly extracted from the womb of the meanest woman he’s ever met, who’s now eleven and supposed to visit for the first time today. Even the heftier numbers feel more manageable—thirty thousand beers, a hundred thousand cigarettes, ten thousand private orgasms— because he can round them up or down. All those zeroes make them sort of negotiable. Matt knows how old he is, obviously, but he doesn’t like to think about it. Thirty-two is a hard, concrete number, and he doesn’t have shit to show for it except scars, debt and the kind of insomnia that would make a lesser man lose his marbles.

Since the DUI last winter, he’s been trying to make up for lost time. Squaring accounts and making amends. All that twelve-step redemption bullshit that Brian, his probation officer, is always talking about. For every time Matt has to blow into the state-mandated contraption in his car, his car that checks his breath for alcohol, he gives a handful of change to the first homeless person he finds. Like balancing the books. He works sixty hours a week at two different jobs and sells his blood plasma at BioLife. Last month he sent Logan’s mom a check for fifteen hundred dollars, the first drop in what a judge decreed will one day be an ocean. He paid off his Discover card in March and now he’s paying down a different one. The walls in his dreams are graffitied with money math. It helps to focus on one thing at a time.

Like right now. He has his tools arranged on a dish towel in the backyard weeds and he’s thinking about nothing but changing the tubes on the three-speed kid’s mountain bike he bought this morning off a craigslist guy. Air up the tires, lube the chain, true the wheels. The kid’s supposed to get here at two. But Matt is trying to focus on now, which is way harder than it should be.

Grackles are screaming in the hackberry tree like burglar alarms, mating, picking fights with squirrels. Matt is two and a half beers deep because it’s Saturday and his nerves are frayed. Even mouthwash on his breath means his car won’t start, but that’s okay—they’ll ride bikes anywhere they need to go. The beer can is spotted with dirty fingerprints. His nail beds are caked in grease. There’s a smear of it, too, across the bridge of his nose. He flips the bicycle upside down and pedals with his hand, running the chain through each gear, slowly, forward and back, counting the links as they pass. The chain lube smells like banana Laffy Taffy. He drips one drop into each link and gives the pedal a final hard crank that sends everything spinning in a slick freewheel whir like flying downhill with his legs splayed out and fuck whatever’s waiting at the bottom.

With the shower going full blast, Matt listens for car doors slamming. There’s nothing more substantial standing between him and the kid’s arrival than a shower. The mirror steams up and he scrapes at his chin with a disposable lady’s razor. Esther, in their time, had been a door slammer. No door has been invented she couldn’t slam loud enough to wake the neighbors or set Matt’s teeth grinding. Screen door, trap door, revolving door. Coming in, going out. That fact is one of maybe a dozen Matt has retained about her. Other facts he’s gleaned from sleepless nights spent stalking her on his phone: she doesn’t have dreadlocks anymore; she still doesn’t smile in pictures; her brand of bisexuality has followed a roughly seventy-thirty split over the last decade, favoring women, the latest of whom is Sherry. Sherry doesn’t smile in pictures either.

A shower isn’t substantial enough. It’s an activity performed in the background and Matt needs foreground activity to keep him distracted from that old familiar feeling that he hates himself, hates the outlook and would rather do just about anything than spend twenty-four hours trying to manufacture conversation with a child he’s never met before. One part of him feels that way.

Tail Feathers Spread By Paul Garson

He checks to see if the water is hot enough to scald the chain grease from his hands. Maybe cauterize his nerve endings. He’s washed his hands twice already, and if anything, the grease has only spread itself around more evenly. Thirty-four minutes before they’re supposed to arrive. Wrapped in a bleached-out Aladdin towel, swiping at the mirror steam, he practices saying dad things. What’s your favorite subject. What kind of books, movies, games. Which one’s your favorite president.

And of course, as soon as he drops his towel and steps into the shower spray, the doorbell rings. Hardass, unreasonable men trained Matt to be good with surprises, always ready to drop whatever and hurl himself into action. He lets the water wet his hair and turns it off, pulls on the same mesh shorts he always wears on the weekends and a fresh plain t-shirt. Hurriedly molds his hair into something that looks purposeful.

To the door in his bare feet, he practices his smile versus his grin, how he’s going to open the door wide to show the kid he’s been welcome here for eleven years, that it’s only been circumstances that have made an actual visit impossible.

He opens the door and there stands Esther alone. There’s a car parked on the street and the woman Matt recognizes from the internet photos is leaning on its hood, smoking, wearing only black, with one forearm tattooed entirely green. This would be Sherry.

Across the street, a Mexican grandkid bounces a basketball on her porch to the beat of the song she’s singing. There’s ranchero music in the air, too. If you listen closely, there always is, accordions and corazons. In this neighborhood, Matt’s pretty sure even the dogs bark in Spanish. He considers warning Sherry about the mockingbird whose territory she’s invading, but Sherry looks like birds don’t fuck with her. The boy must be still in the car. Like he’s a mob boss or an elder statesman, and his moms are his goons.

“Hey there,” Matt says. He goes with the grin. “Y’all are early.”

“Traffic was stupid.” She looks past his body into the house. “We’re running super late. You going to let me in?”

He makes a little inviting gesture, just shy of a bow. Even with her huge-ass sunglasses on, it’s clear he’s aged better than she has. Matt has recognizable abs, a jawline and a glimmer of boyishness, but her body has gone fleshy and loose. Through the shirt she’s wearing, he can see the cavern of her belly button. He can smell stale menthol smoke as she brushes past him, patchouli oil, but only faintly. He imagines her sharing a late-night cigarette with Sherry on the porch after they put the boy to bed. Lesbians, he feels like, must be pretty conscientious moms. But also, Logan is going to need a manly influence to balance it all out. For a speck of time almost too insignificant to remark upon, Matt feels okay about things. To the door in his bare feet, he practices his smile versus his grin, how he’s going to open the door wide to show the kid he’s been welcome here for eleven years, that it’s only been circumstances that have made an actual visit impossible.

“She can come in, too,” he says, “and the kid.”

“Don’t worry about them.” Esther’s already on the move, appraising his lack of decor—Matt’s rusty bicycle, the amber condensation weeping down the wall beneath the AC vent. She wears that kind of scowl old lady smokers can get, faint wrinkles pleated on her upper lip. He tries to suppress his grin.

She says, “Can I see the bathroom, please?”

A shotgun hall leads past the closed bedroom doors of his two roommates, Coy and Dylan—he paid both of them fifty bucks to make themselves scarce—through the room that might as well be a dining room, with a scuffed oak table and mismatched chairs, and into the kitchen. She seems suspicious of everything she sees and before they make it to the bathroom, she detours to the kitchen sink, where she hunches down, opens the cabinet doors and starts pulling out bottles of cleaner. She stands and sets a jar of Ajax and a bottle of bleach on the counter.

“You need child locks,” she says.

“All right. You didn’t mention that.”

“We’re in a hurry, Matt.”

“Right, you did mention that. Like just a second ago. Isn’t eleven kind of old for child locks?”

“Look, I don’t have time for this. He sleepwalks, so all this poison shit has to be kept out of reach. You got a gun?”

“Boy drinks bleach in his sleep?”

“I asked if you got a gun?”

“I do,” he said, “but it’s locked up.”

“You got pistachios or goat milk?”

“No ma’am.”

“Good, he can’t eat that. No goat cheese either.”

Matt makes a face like he’s recording this to memory. He’s never eaten goat cheese in his life.

She holds out the Ajax and bleach. “I want to watch you put this shit out of reach.”

He takes them from her and moves them to the top of the refrigerator, all the way to the back, behind a three-pound sack of potatoes and Coy’s jar of whey protein.

“You don’t got nothing to worry about,” Matt says. “We’re both going to be sleeping in my room, and everything wakes

Eye Bomb By Anastasia Kirages

me up. If he sleepwalks, I’ll follow him around and make sure he’s safe. I won’t wake him up or anything. Waking him up is bad, right?”

“Yes, Matt. That’s bad.” Everything she says is sarcastic, exasperated. She comes close and looks him in the face. “You’re not like a fucking child molester, are you?”

“No, dude. Definitely not.” His face is reflected in each oilslick lens of her sunglasses. He laughs because he doesn’t know what else to do. He says, “Don’t worry.”

“Y’all going to sleep in the same bed together?”

“He gets the bed,” Matt says, “and I get the couch.” He hadn’t given it any thought but that seems like the answer she wants.

She looks in a few more cabinets before she’s done with the kitchen, looks in the refrigerator and sees nothing wrong. His beer is in a cooler on the back porch.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

He makes a little flourish like right this way, and she follows him through his bedroom. It’s cleaner than it’s ever been, hospital corners on his bed, all the DVDs alphabetized underneath the TV, the mini blinds dusted and open to let the sunshine in.

He enters his bathroom, spins, and takes a seat on the counter. “En suite.”

She follows him in, cocks her head at her reflection in the mirror steam, and says “Can I please piss in private?”

Outside the door, he hears her cough and the shiny hiss of her urine striking the toilet water. There was a point in the irretrievable past when he loved this woman, or said he did. He remembers, faintly, her nipples and the feeling of domestic satisfaction when he had to use the bathroom after her and caught the odor of shit she’d produced in private, how he smiled and thought, my girl shits, and felt like he was doing the right thing, convincing himself to be kind and steady. Even if it had been the right thing, it hadn’t held for even a month. Plus, he’s spent so much time and energy undoing the right things, doing them backward, that now, when his work is finally ready for inspection, it feels so small and tawdry, the little effort he’s made. There’s barely anything standing between him and the kind of perfect mess he could create, total destruction, except for his own halfass vigilance. This little light of mine. The effort to keep it lit is doomed to fail. When she flushes the toilet, he prepares his grin again. She hands him a bottle of Windex and a roach motel.

She writes Sherry’s cell phone number on a Post-it from her purse and sticks it to the fridge, gets both his roommates’ numbers just in case. Under Sherry’s number, she writes pistachios and goat milk. Matt follows her to the door. He observes the jiggle of her current ass and compares it to the memory of the one that’s gone forever.

Matt hangs back on the front porch. Esther confers with Sherry before opening the rear door of the car. The boy emerges. Pale and blonde-headed. He shoots Matt an appraising look and a little wave, twists his arms into a denim backpack. Matt feels a funny tenderness for the skin exposed between the waistband of the boy’s shorts and his t-shirt. Meager blond fuzz glinting in the sun. The kid goes back in the car, emerges again with a white cube in tow, a cage. A white-barred cage with a plastic blue bottom, nearly too big for him to carry. Esther puts her hand on his head and speaks directly into his ear. Neither of his mothers escorts him up the sidewalk. Inside the cage, a small green bird clings to a perch.

“Hey there, bud.” Matt meets him halfway and takes the birdcage and uses his body to hustle the boy inside. “Let’s put this guy down somewhere so we can shake hands with each other.”

He waves over his shoulder at the departing car, which is already gone. He shuts the door behind him.

Every dream Matt has is a recurring dream. He fails a piss test or sees police car lights in the rearview. He runs into an army buddy at a place he’s never been in real life, a dream bar or a food court at a dream mall, and that buddy has ideas about big violence that he wants Matt to help him with—paranoid vengeance on Jews or the Illuminati, ideas Matt wouldn’t entertain for a second in real life. Some detail of the plan requires Matt as a sharpshooter. And he can’t say no. Because that’s what he is, or was, or always will be.

Or else he’s done something bad, like criminal bad, and he spends the whole duration of the dream failing to figure out how to get away unpunished.

But most often he dreams about ghosts. At his end of the scope, they had all looked the same. Insurgents or plotters. Bad guys. None of his friends died over there, which supposedly makes him lucky. His friends started dying once they got home. The ghosts, though, are ones he made. Not that he’d chosen his own targets. All fourteen of them were elected to die by some misty counsel far up the chain of command. Orders came down.

At night these dead men arrive like members of a community, as individuals. Mostly they only look sideways at him, seated on the floor or on the foot of his bed. He knows he’s dreaming, which means he won’t wake rested. Often, he ends up fucking them, the ghosts. Upon being touched, their bodies transform into women’s bodies. The faces stay the same. Without moving their mouths, they whisper and moan in the language of currencies. Disarming amounts of dollars, dinars, riyals, euros, piastres, shekels, and pesos. Adding vast sums to other sums until the

amounts more nearly resemble first world GDPs than anything Matt can ever pay back in a lifetime. The numbers flash like bar neon on the ceiling of the dream. Still, he aims for maximum, selfless pleasure, theirs, but wakes up before arrival.

Once he knows that he’s dreaming, and he always does, he knows, too, that he’s going to wake up before whatever plot he’s conjured is accomplished. And then there’s no way he’s going back to sleep.

Like his dad, Matt’s two uncles are dead, but when they were alive they were hunters. Every summer his dad would drive him to East Texas or southern Louisiana for these family hunting trips. He killed scores of deer and ducks before he ever kissed one single girl. He hadn’t hunted since he was fourteen or fifteen, but in the army, he could shoot the cherry off a cigarette from a hundred yards, just for the fuck of it. In boot camp, he scored an excellent on his rifle proficiency, only because perfect wasn’t a score. The zebibah is the mark made on a Muslim man’s forehead from friction with his prayer mat. Nine of the fourteen men he’d killed didn’t have one of those anymore.

Brian, the probation officer, says Matt has a guilty conscience. Once, Brian, according to Brian, was a teenage evangelist. After that, he was a drug addict and petty criminal. Now, he’s a freak about aphorisms, a lot of them gleaned from AA pamphlets. One of his favorite ones involves the word sticktuitive. Last week, for some reason, he made Matt close his eyes and listen to the entirety of “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley. Brian’s lesser aphorisms are about Bible animals. Consider the birds of the air, Matt, he says, how they toileth not. Deer of the meadow, fish of the sea, prairie dogs of the goddamn prairie. Depends on what you consider toil, Matt does not say. But it also depends on this dumb notion of birds as innocents, as harmless cutie-pie creatures in God’s zoo. In the real world, birds are vicious, and all they do is toil.

If he’s ever dreamed about the little boy whose hand is in the birdcage, stroking the bird’s green throat with his index finger, they aren’t the dreams he remembers.

“He got a name?”

“It’s a she,” Logan says, “and her name’s Puff.”

“How come?”

“Because watch her,” he says. He extends his finger, and the bird hops on. “She puffs up. She does it all the time.”

“She don’t fly off?”

“Only if you scare her.” But most often he dreams about ghosts. At his end of the scope, they had all looked the same. Insurgents or plotters. Bad guys. None of his friends died over there, which supposedly makes him lucky. His friends started dying once they got home.

They skid out in the gravel of the alley where trees have melted into the fences, their roots mulched by paper trash and malt wine bottles.

Carefully, Logan raises the bird between their faces. The bird has a green chest, zebra wings, a yellow face with a pattern of blue ink stains under its beak. The eyes are black beads that make Matt unnervingly aware of how little he knows about eyesight. Like, what even are eyes? Logan is standing and Matt is on his knees. He can feel his hand wanting to touch Logan. The shoulder blade seems like the best spot, with the boy’s shirt as a barrier between skin and skin. Instead he grips the edge of the coffee table. And then the bird does it. She puffs. That’s the only word for it. Puffs and kind of shakes herself out of it.

“Oh man,” Matt says. “It’s just like how dogs do.”

“Dogs don’t do that.”

“Are you kidding me? Dogs will tense up all their muscles and explode all a sudden into shakes. Especially when they’re wet. You ain’t never seen that?”

“No, because it’s not true.”

He’s laughing now, but Matt can’t tell what kind of laughter.

“You ever have a dog?”

Logan shakes his head side to side.

“Then how do you know what’s true or not true?”

They’re looking one another in the face now. Matt hasn’t talked to a kid since he was a kid, and he doesn’t know what you’re supposed to say. He hopes maybe it’s something just to make an effort.

“You like birds better than dogs?” he asks.

“I guess.”

“You know how to ride a bike?”

“Yeah, but my bike’s at home.”

“I bet I got one your size,” Matt says, “and I got some birds to show you. Come on.”

The backyard is an asphalt slab the size of a swimming pool. A two-car parking lot from back when the house was a duplex with front and rear entrances, but nobody parks there now. A couple pecan trees and mowed weeds make a border.

Through the gaps in the trees and house tops, portions of downtown come into view. Matt points out the high-rise that looks like an owl from a certain angle. He isn’t going to take the kid up to the roof, but from the topmost eave, you can just make out the tower where Charles Whitman shot a bunch of UT stu-

dents in the sixties after killing his mother and his wife, because he fell prey to unusual and irrational thoughts.

When he presents the kid with his bike, he tries to be as unceremonious as possible. He tells him to see if it fits right and give it a spin around the slab. Hold tight while he gets his own bike from inside. He sneaks two tallboys from the cooler on the porch. Drinks one down in gulps while he’s still inside, and pours the other into a plastic sports bottle. He fills another bottle for the kid with tap water and nuggets of ice from the freezer. Wheeling his bike through the hall, he remembers something he should’ve already remembered. In his bedroom closet, he moves aside the hanging work pants and takes his .45 and his pellet rifle and moves them to the high shelf with his cowboy boots and his toolbox. He doesn’t even have ammo for the .45. Anyway, too high now for the kid to reach. Safe and secure.

They skid out in the gravel of the alley where trees have melted into the fences, their roots mulched by paper trash and malt wine bottles. Today, the only alley resident is the white-bearded Guatemalan man who traded in his old wheelchair for one with a battery. He hadn’t foreseen the impediment of gravel, or the fact that batteries need charging. A dozen plastic grocery bags hang from the chair like overripe fruit or goiters. Matt’s pretty sure his name is Sylvester, or Sylvestro. When Matt used to smoke, the old man would bang on his gate to beg a cigarette. Matt introduces Logan to Sylvester, and vice versa, and dismounts to push the wheelchair out to the sidewalk on Comal where its wheels can gain purchase. As he’s pushed, Sylvester rattles at the kid in Spanish, and when the kid responds, also in Spanish, the old man breaks down into a coughing fit that might be laughter.

When they’re riding again, side by side in the bike lane, Matt asks Logan how he knows Spanish.

“They teach it at school,” Logan says, “but I’m not very good at it.”

“Sounded pretty good to me, dude. I’m impressed.”

Matt rides on the outside and makes hand signals when they turn. He points out notable landmarks along the way—the taqueria where, for two dollars, they sell you a whole grilled beef tongue and a stack of corn tortillas; the city train that takes commuters to and from the suburbs; the corner store run by a Syrian man Matt once saw break a teenager’s finger for spitting on him.

They turn down a narrow neighborhood street, and in front of a vacant lot, they lean their bikes against a chain link fence and Matt retrieves the water bottles from his backpack. Makes sure to give Logan the one with actual water in it, and the kid takes a long drink.

“Hey, what did Sylvester say back there?” Matt asks.

Logan’s cheeks are pink. He has a mustache of sweat beads.

“He was just naming off family members.”

Mont St Michel By Austin Miller

“Like Jorge is my uncle?”

“Uh-huh, but everybody had like five names.”

“And what did you say to him?”

“I asked him how old his granddad was.”

Matt hiccups. Beer fills his sinuses and he laughs in earnest for the first time since the breathalyzer was installed in his car.

“Oh, you’re funny, bud. You made old Sylvester laugh, and that’s not an easy thing to do.”

Matt yanks his shirt up to wipe his face, takes a big suck from his bottle. It’s not clear yet what all the boy’s facial expressions mean, but he’s pretty sure this one’s the happiest yet.

“Look up there,” Matt says.

The boy shades his eyes and looks straight up—a telephone pole, topped by a gray transformer cylinder. Built against the underside of the transformer is a shaggy nest the size of a human head. Twigs woven to form a kind of ovoid container. Logan asks what it is.

“You know what it is.”

“It’s a bird nest, but what lives in it?”

“Wait a sec and I bet we’ll see.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Yeah, but listen. You hear that? They’re tweeting in there.”

The nest is complicated. If regular bird nests are houses, this is a cathedral. It wouldn’t shock Matt if there were rooms inside, a floorplan. Again, he considers touching the boy’s shoulder, but it’s too hot. They’re both sweating through their shirts. They watch in silence for a little while, and sure enough, one green head appears in the nest’s opening, followed by another.

“Parakeets? Is that what they are?”

“Yep. There’s thousands of them in Austin. And nests all over town, always on telephone poles, because they’re from Peru or somewhere and they like the heat those transformers give off.”

“No way.”

“Google it, dude.”

“Are they the same kind as Puff?”

“I don’t know. Might be a little bigger. Supposedly they’re all descended from pet birds that escaped or got let go.”

As if on cue, the birds dart from the nest.

“Cool, huh?” Matt suckles the last hot dregs of his beer. “I was thinking about building a fire in the backyard tonight and roasting hotdogs. How’s that sound?”

Logan yells, “Hotdogs.” He squirts himself in the face with water from the bottle.

At H-E-B, they split up. Each with a basket. Logan’s job is wieners and buns and ketchup, and Matt’s, for a minute, is pacing the dairy aisle, flapping his shirt to let the cold air in. Tonight, he decides, as soon as the kid’s in bed, he’s going to reward himself with a cigarette on the porch, which he hasn’t done in months. Because it’s the kind of a thing a parent should do.

They meet in the tortilla aisle. Logan chose Texas Red Hots, tubes of meat the color of dog erections with chile peppers and flames on the logo. The boy likes hot stuff, Matt guesses.

In line, Matt asks for a pack of Camel Blues and has to follow the teenage cashier to the glass case and show her which ones. He thinks about explaining to Logan how he quit smoking in April—how this is a one-time thing, how he’ll probably throw the pack away after he smokes a couple—but he doesn’t.

They ride back a different way, down Pleasant Valley on the sidewalk, across Caesar Chavez and down the gravel path that follows the river, lined with ball cypress and municipal signage. It’s too hot for joggers, and the only people they pass wear hats with neck flaps, dragged along by their exhausted dogs. Under a cottonwood tree, a homeless man appears to be making up tai chi from scratch.

“You as hot and sweaty as I am?”

“It’s super hot.”

“Here, pull off by that dock.”

They drop their bikes in the grass and Matt pulls a wet tallboy from his backpack, pulls his shirt off over his head, does a little dance to pull his shoes off. The dock is made of gray twoby-fours and there’s a swastika graffitied across it like a compass rose.

“One good thing about this city, there’s always some water to jump in.”

“The sign says you can’t swim.”

“Thing about signs,” Matt says. He jumps in. His wallet is in his pocket, and his house keys. He goes under, surfaces, treads water. “It’s just so if you drown you can’t sue the city. Jump in. I swear I won’t call the cops.”

The boy only hesitates for a moment. He jumps in with his

Logan looks back over his shoulder, grinning, but it’s already too late. The state bird swoops down from its lair with a shrill squawk, aimed straight at the boy’s head, where it attempts a landing.

t-shirt on, and they tread water together, splash each other. The bottom of the river is loamy and loose, and Logan squeals every time his feet touch. When they swim out to the middle, he dogpaddles. Matt floats on his back, watching ghost bacteria swarm in his vision against the backdrop of cloudless sky. To the west, four parallel bridges. Kayakers clustered around the bridge piles, soaking up the shade.

“Everybody calls it a lake,” Matt tells Logan, “but it’s obviously a river. If it was a lake, there wouldn’t be all these river snakes.”

Logan’s eyes go wide at the word. Matt chants, “Snakes, snakes, snakes,” and they haul ass back to the dock, hoist themselves up and bask starfished and panting against the hot wood. They talk about snakes—water snakes, land snakes, snakes that can fly—until their clothes dry crispy and the sun renders them speechless.

On the ride back home, the boy rides ahead. He tries to pop wheelies, swerving up driveways to ride on the sidewalk, hopping down off the curb. His tirelessness makes Matt tired.

They’ve only been gone a couple hours max, but in that time, Matt has forgotten about the mockingbird. For months now, he’s been using the alley to avoid it. From the front porch, Matt’s seen it torment cats, send old ladies running for their lives. More than a few times, it got him riding his bike home drunk from the bar and nearly made him crash. He’d forgotten about it entirely until he realizes they’re approaching the house from the front.

“Hey, bud,” he calls. “Hold up.”

Logan looks back over his shoulder, grinning, but it’s already too late. The state bird swoops down from its lair with a shrill squawk, aimed straight at the boy’s head, where it attempts a landing. Doesn’t land, but attempts it. The shadow of the bird and the air it displaces is enough to send the boy over his handlebars. Matt’s dad would’ve called it ass over teakettle.

Matt performs a hero’s dismount. His bike circles a drain in the road. He rushes to the boy, picks him up by his arms.

“You okay, bud?”

“I think so.”

Matt dusts him off. Pebbles of asphalt are embedded in his palms and in the tender whites of his forearms. A couple scrapes, the kind you’re supposed to get daily at age eleven, right? He’s touching the kid for the first time and doesn’t realize it until later. Logan is fine. A little tumbled, but he’s laughing now. The bird, however. In Matt’s heart, the bird is already dead.

He was there when the baby was born. Physically there, in San Antonio, but elsewhere in all the other ways. Esther’s mother was there, too. She was Esther but louder and more direct, mean and protective, a mother-in-law from a sitcom. They wouldn’t let Matt in the delivery room before the baby was born, so he sat through the labor with Esther’s stepdad, a winded and sapless man who illustrated exactly what happens when you stay too long where you’re not wanted.

It was a Wednesday and his kid was two days old. Matt was back in Lacy Lakeview. Supposed to be at work, but he was smoking in his car outside of a strip mall, ashing in a Dr. Pepper can, making Venn diagrams in his mind. The army recruiter was alone behind a desk in an office next door to a consignment store for plus-size women called You’re a Big Girl Now. There were posters everywhere inside with the word respect in all capitals. The recruiter was a black man with a spray of freckles across his cheeks and a chin you could tenderize meat with, and he didn’t ask if Matt was a brand-new father or what he was running away from, only seemed a little curious that it had taken him so long after 9/11 to join up. Enlistment sort of fell off, Matt remembers him saying.

Matt called home with the intention of telling his folks they were grandparents and that he was shipping off—that was the phrase he planned to use—as an act of spite. That’s how he learned his dad had been dead nearly as long as his son had been incubating. The dust had settled enough that his mother wasn’t nearly as hysterical or bereft as he wanted her to be. Matt called her names, hung up, got drunk, and went to war.

And did he consider—has he considered since—the lilies of the field who, same as the birds, supposedly toileth not? Sure, of course he has. If you consider the birds, you consider the lilies. But his conclusion is about the same. Birds build nests, lay eggs, fend off predators. What about this is not toil? Lilies erupt from bulbs, stretch out into the air, blossom, absorb moisture and light. The only difference is scale. It’s all fucking toil.

The trouble for Matt is that toil is relentless, and it doesn’t lead to anything he’s especially interested in. Digging himself out of the various holes he’s dug—why is that noble? Once he’s out, what then?

He knows that he can’t do this shit forever. Pay off credit cards, make amends, toil at respectability. He could get his teeth fixed, move into a place alone, without roommates. Make a brand-new family, how about that. And after he checked off those boxes, more would appear, and the longer he worked at it, the more progress he made, the bigger the break would be. The dam is going to break. He’s going to break. He has no idea what that might look like, the breach, but he can feel it coming, building like something he’s supposed to pretend away.

Even after Matt cleans the kid’s cuts with hydrogen peroxide and tweezes out the pieces of street, it’s still too hot out to light a fire, way too hot to eat. The sun won’t set for a couple more hours. They put on dry clothes and play Xbox in Matt’s bedroom, taking turns back and forth at some fighting game because Matt only has the one controller. When it’s Logan’s turn the sixth time, Matt finds him sleeping, tucked into a couch pillow with his mouth open. Sleeping like only kids can sleep after swimming in a river.

He cracks a beer on the porch and asks his phone what the punishment is for killing the state bird. (Class C misdemeanor, five hundred dollar fine.) Thou shalt not kill a songbird or a hawk or an owl. Nothing about parakeets. The information comes from the Texas Audubon Society page, and there’s an italicized quote from the Harper Lee book. How mockingbirds don’t do anything but sing, which is clearly false. Maybe they have fancy mockingbirds in Alabama or wherever, but the Texas ones are violent harpies and they can’t sing for shit.

The chinaberry tree in the neighbor’s yard—he’s pretty sure that’s where the mockingbird nests. Best he can figure, he’s got two options. If he goes out in the street and lures the mockingbird, he’s going to have to shoot as it swoops at him. Better, he can climb up to the roof and snipe it while it’s vomiting food into its babies’ mouths or whatever it does. Assassinate it. Before Oswald shot JFK, he tried to kill some rightwing general at his breakfast table. He missed. Aside from missing, though, his methods were sound. Only way Matt would miss would be if he tried to.

The kid’s still sleeping when Matt tiptoes in to retrieve the pellet rifle. Sleeping, but in a different position, sprawled. By the time he’s back outside, he’s lost his motivation. He’s too tired to hoist himself up onto the roof. There’s lead in his legs. A grown man should own a ladder, but he doesn’t. And the mockingbird is only doing what any parent would do, isn’t it? Protecting its kids. It doesn’t know what’s a threat and what isn’t—everything is a threat. In all the important ways, the mockingbird is a better parent than Matt.

He unpeels the cellophane from his pack of Camels and lights one. The first drag after an absence is always bad. All the nerve endings in his throat have to be rescorched. By drag number five or six, though, his head fills with pleasant fog. It saps his bloodlust. Instead of killing the bird, he drags a porch chair out to the metal gate, sets up a couple empty cans, returns to the porch, sits down, raises the rifle, and knocks the cans down.

Every time he goes back out to set the cans up, he brings a fresh empty. He’s on cigarette number two, and the sun is slipping down below the tree line. The light goes brassy. The shadows get complicated. The kid’s been asleep for an hour when Matt starts erecting the hotdog fire—a teepee of small, dry wood, some dryer lint tucked into the gaps to get it caught. A couple big breaths into the fire guts and the whole thing is

blazing in no time. He shoots a row of cans off the chair, puts on a bigger log. His belly is rumbling. He doesn’t have a clue how long kids nap for, but he could do this all day. Setting them up, knocking them down.

Dead grass crunches in the side yard. Matt swings the rifle at Coy without meaning to. Coy with his hands up like don’t shoot, a gallon jug of water hooked on a finger, a bib of sweat. Matt sets the gun upright against his chair and says he’s sorry.

“Dude,” Coy says, “I’m sorry, too. I know we’re supposed to steer clear, but I need a shower bad. Then I’m gone.”

Coy’s just twenty-five, supposedly in grad school for something. They’ve lived together almost two years but Matt’s never seen him do anything except exercise and drink.

Coy nods at Matt’s tallboy. “Can I get one of those?”

“Help yourself.”

“Dylan’s floating the river, so he won’t bother y’all.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“Where’s the kid?”

“Sleep.”

Coy jams his house key into the side of the beer can, lifts it to chin level and opens it, tilts it back and sucks at the aluminum wound. Loses barely a drop. He wipes his mouth with his shirt and sits down on the porch planks.

“So what, you already tired him out?”

“I guess so. He might’ve tired me out.”

Coy squinches his eyes at Matt. “You okay, dude?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Shit,” Coy says, “speak of the devil.”

Behind the sliding door glass, Logan coaxes the parakeet from its cage. It looks like he’s whispering to it. Matt raps on the glass with his knuckles and waves him outside. Coy, Logan. Logan, Coy. The boy’s hair is sticking up on the side of his head and his face is puffy with sleep, etched with the pattern of the corduroy couch pillow.

“Dude, cool bird,” says Coy. “Can I pet him?”

Logan doesn’t correct him, doesn’t say it’s a she. He extends his hand, Coy extends his, and it’s so weirdly intimate for a second, Coy stroking the head of the bird perched on Matt’s son’s finger. A kind of touch you’re not allowed to share with most peoHe cracks a beer on the porch and asks his phone what the punishment is for killing the state bird. (Class C misdemeanor, five hundred dollar fine.) Thou shalt not kill a songbird or a hawk or an owl. Nothing about parakeets.

What Size By Austin Miller

ple, maybe three people tops in your whole life. It feels wasted on Coy, who takes another beer from Matt’s cooler and excuses himself, just like he was paid to do.

“What’s the gun for?”

“Shooting cans. You want to try?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your mom probably wouldn’t like it, huh?”

Logan makes a shrugging noise and allows the bird to hop onto the rifle muzzle. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, bud.” Matt sits up straight like a dad. “Anything you like.”

“You think it would be okay if I let her go?”

Matt asks him why he’d want to do that, but he thinks he already knows. Maybe this is the shape his fuck-up was always going to take, something wound up in his fate as a deadbeat dad. Convincing his kid to free his helpless pet—because that’s how Esther’s going to see it, as Matt’s doing, not Logan’s.

“Because it’s bad to be in a cage,” Logan says. “I can let her go if I want to, can’t I?”

“I guess. I’m not going to stop you. Your mom will be mad.”

“My mom hates her. She wants a cat.”

Puff paces around the small circumference of the muzzle, six inches from Matt’s face. More like a toy than a bird. Odds are, free, she’ll get snatched up and eaten before sunset.

“Wait a sec,” Matt says. “You’re not sleepwalking are you?”

“Huh?”

“Your mom said you sleepwalk sometimes, and I bet you’d be pretty pissed at me if you woke up and realized your bird was gone.”

“No way, I don’t sleepwalk.”

“Prove it.”

Matt watches the boy consider what proof might look like. A couple seconds of looking off at whatever nothing lies just beyond Matt’s head.

All of a sudden, the kid’s eyes roll back in his head, his arms shoot out, and he commences to shake, like he’s overcome, saying, “I’m awake, I’m awake.” He jumps on the ice chest and karate kicks the air. The parakeet doesn’t react, not until Logan leaps off the porch and comes down hard with both feet on the ground. Then she bolts. One flap of her wings and she’s gone.

“Fuck me.” Matt’s stomach biles up in his throat.

They dart down the porch steps and scan the trees. Everything’s green—the bird that isn’t there, the leaves. The yellow of the bird’s face matches the yellow of stray parched leaves. The inkblots match the gaps between.

“How you feel, dude?”

“I guess okay,” Logan says. “I was going to let her go anyhow.”

“You want to say goodbye or something?”

“How?”

“We could wave.”

“I already said goodbye.”

“Well, shit,” Matt says. He feels like he should say something significant, but all he comes up with is, “Good luck, bird.”

The sun goes down. The bird’s gone and she’s not coming back. In some version of the future, Matt will have time to arrange the day into a satisfying order—what already happened and what’s still to come. To sort out cause and effect. For now, everything just happens:

How the boy fires the pellet rifle and misses every can he aims at. How Matt makes him steady the barrel on the porch railing, breathe in through his nose, out through his mouth as he eases the trigger. How he pulls the trigger too hard and jolts, and how every pellet strikes the gate with a metal ping and leaves a new dent. Practice makes perfect is Matt’s motto. No killer was built in a day. How the boy wants to keep trying but Matt can’t resist the urge to show off. How he lights a fresh cigarette and hauls a hackberry limb to the fire. Drains all but the last couple swallows of his beer and places it on the chair by the gate, just the one can. A cigarette butt fits so snugly into the hole in a beer can’s pull tab, Matt kind of believes they were designed for that purpose. How he takes a long hard drag, blows the dead ash off the cherry, and fixes it in the tab slot.

How he says, “All right, so if I can knock the cherry off that cigarette in one shot, then we can roast them hotdogs and eat.” He wipes his hands on his shirt and adds, “Otherwise.”

“Otherwise what?”

“We go hungry, I guess.”

How he turns the porch chair backward against the railing and straddles it. Cocks his right elbow, snuggles the stock into his shoulder. One eye closed, waiting for the smell of paint to tell him to fire. How the cigarette cherry at the end of his sight is not a face, or, it’s only a face the way a storm cloud can be a face, distantly, with a nose, a brow ridge. How he doesn’t have to think about shooting the cherry. He just does it—the pellet is expelled and the cherry is gone. How the pellet rings against the gate.

How the kid is in awe. How when Matt calls the red hotdog wieners dog dicks, the kid laughs like it’s the first time he’s ever heard a bad word. How his dad can fire a rifle with pinpoint accuracy and use dirty language. They untwist wire hangers and impale the franks. The buns are set on a cinderblock near the fire to toast. The ketchup bottle, the package of red hots minus two. Everything smells like fire and meat, and how Matt’s beginning to think the boy holds nothing against him, sitting beside him on the asphalt, his wire bent above the fire. How he feels more like a cool older cousin than a dad. The red hots are spicy, but not too spicy. Way too hot for Logan, who starts hiccupping and trying to wipe the heat off his tongue with his shirtsleeve. How he’s kind of freaking out, walking around in circles. How Matt wants to touch him, to help, but he doesn’t. The boy doubles over and clutches his stomach, groans. If Matt only touches him when they shake hands goodbye, how he’ll be okay with that, how their first real time together is restrained.

How the kid never accidentally calls him dad, and how it also doesn’t feel like they’re strangers at all.

And how it feels when the kid does break. How his face contorts in the firelight. How Matt doesn’t realize until later that when Logan is hurrying from the fire, up the steps and through the sliding door, he’s shitting his pants the whole way. Not until Matt finds the dribbles of evidence later. And how the guts-deep groan Logan makes is because it hurts. How Matt checks the ingredients list on the package of red hots for pistachios or goat cheese. How he doesn’t know what allergies are or how health insurance works, but he knows ambulances are expensive, and he knows if he tries to start his car, the breathalyzer is going to laugh at him. Do kids die from allergies? And how, if the kid does die, it’s because Matt can’t figure out how to get to the hospital. How total destruction is a fun idea until you feel it breathing in your face.

How the hollow-core door feels pressed against his back and how he’s sitting on his bedroom floor, listening to the groans and splashes of his child expelling illness from both ends of his body. Gasping, crying. Through the door, he tells the kid it’s going to be okay and nothing lasts forever and this too shall pass. And how if it’s not going to be okay, if Esther revokes everything and he doesn’t get to see the kid for eleven more years, then he at least wants to get this ghost’s face right. If the dream gets it wrong, he wants to correct the dream. How he’ll stand up and raise his hand and say excuse me, you’re wrong. How his kid’s nose looks like this, his eyes are this color, his parakeet was green, and this is what it sounds like when he’s crying and hurt. This is what his dad looks like sitting on the floor. How he’s trained for different surprises. But also, how this is nothing he can’t learn to do better.

Construction Zone By Austin Miller