Canary
Flash-fiction - by Barbara Lock
Henry met The Artist in between Lumber and Stairs when she asked him whether one might fashion an unprimed, maple baluster into a serviceable tibiotarsus, which, she explained to Henry, was part of the skeleton of a bird.
I don’t work here, said Henry.
But you consider yourself a helpful man, said The Artist, pointing with the baluster.
Henry pulled out his phone to search up the shape and density of bird bones. Variously hollow, read Henry, and spinal rigidity. Whose skeleton needed repair? What is the tensile strength of bone, and how does that compare to wood—maple, cherry, pine, balsa? Would this repaired bird be live and capable of flight? The Artist with her big owl eyes and knit poncho in a yellow flame stitch flapped over to Closets, while Henry followed, tap-tapping on his phone. Are we talking ostrich, emu, or imaginary? asked Henry. The Artist strutted over to wooden dowels, turning her head with a languid neck droop as if she might soon sleep under her own wing, while Henry inched over to compare the size of bodies, arms. To measure his foot against hers. The heels of her black, pointed boots were two inches in height—wouldn’t she still be taller than him in socks?
What would The Artist say if I were to ask her to lunch? asked Henry.
The Artist eats meat, said The Artist.
Henry, tap-tapping, asked the internet whether the Japanese Steakhouse next to the laundromat was open on Mondays at 11:30 am, while The Artist waved a maple baluster in her right hand and a five-foot pine dowel in her left. All clear for landing in the aisle between Fixtures and Tile.
In my studio I have a lathe, said The Artist. But I’ve only ever lathed small pine logs, she said. Then she mumbled a musical word that stuck in her craw like she was swallowing a small pill, or a seed, or an insect that flew into her mouth by way of surrender. The Artist waved the baluster and the dowel in front of Henry…Well? Will I be able to work with this wood or will the chisel skitter onto the floor? She wanted him to hold her question in his two hands, caress it, release a surprise dove into the three-story air, which would later make a nest in Lighting, thought Henry.
These are the terms in which Henry explained his first encounter with The Artist to his social media friends: I knew her reputation, but she handed me a pile of sticks. The snapshot of Henry grinning next to The Artist as she spilled wooden objects into the back of her green hatchback got two retweets, 14 likes, and made 1174 impressions, he saw, when he reviewed the post after a solitary beer. Later, Henry would look back at this moment in his life as a brief, pure, clean, interlude between gratitude and regret. The Artist—is this really how he came to know her? He, her helper, porter, confidant, she, a strange creature in need of assistance with materiality and thought. For The Artist, Henry carried balls of twine; glass eyes; copper washers; lighted strings of twinkling, glass stars, yellow and white. He procured wool roving, old silk scarves, athletic padding, fiberglass resin, fine chain mail. He carried a five-pound box of drywall screws into her studio, (a converted garage,) and a 30-pound bag of mixed high-oil birdseed into the mudroom. The Artist scattered the birdseed into the grass under her kitchen window and set a camera on a motion sensor to capture whoever came around.
Henry’s favorite visitors were a mourning dove and her pair of mauve offspring poking among last year’s leaves, but The Artist declared the photos of the doves maudlin and instead snapped a black-capped chickadee clamped onto an azalea. She fashioned a three-foot likeness of the chickadee, fastened it with rebar legs to a cedar stump, which she gave to the Friends of the Library, who set it on a concrete pad behind the playground where it stayed until a three-year old placed there by a teen babysitter fell and bent his collarbone.
Don’t talk to me of danger or beauty, said The Artist.
Subsequently, The Artist snapped an Atlantic Canary with a sunflower seed in its beak, and showed the photo to her husband, a man who did something with spreadsheets for a living. I very much doubt that you have an Atlantic Canary here, said The Artist’s husband. Said, if it were a bona fide canary, it must have blown in from Bermuda and not from the actual Canary Islands. And, maybe you can stop leaving the door ajar, then I wouldn’t have to field angry emails from neighbors about the dog, said her husband. There were brisk movements about the kitchen involving the return of knives from the dishwasher to the knife block, which caused confusion and distress between the pair, and someone preferred to sleep in an undisclosed location instead of the marital bed.
The Artist related the squabble to Henry at 6:37 AM in a series of forlorn texts. Henry marked the second text with a heart, sent a series of emojis that included additional hearts including a yellow one, and sent The Artist a link to the blog of a birder who claimed to have photographed a canary in Montauk. Look at the color of your bird, texted Henry. The grace, the posture. And—I get a sense of her scale from the mailbox back there.
I am not soothed, texted The Artist.
Later that day, for the first time, Henry put his arms around The Artist’s shoulders. It was a form of shelter, he thought. A gesture of care, as if his pure thought-energy might find form under layered clothing as non-material, airy, free. He petted her—so. Nothing more than a few warm strokes on the back of her head, neck, shoulders. She squinted at him, frowned. What is your purpose?—this she asked Henry with her eyes.
I wish I could vanish into the sky, said The Artist.
Two weeks later, a pack of dogs, nosing their way into the swamp at the end of the cul-de-sac, came upon a partially defeathered swan who hung from the branch of a pin oak by strips of white plastic fastened to a square, iron hook. The swan’s right wing extended to the sky, and the several strands of plastic wrapped around the appendage made the bird look like a giant roll of paper towels. The poor swan twirled gently clockwise until the plastic ties twisted tight, and then it twirled the other way round. The neighborhood dogs—there were two brown labs and a Shepard mix—laughed at the animal. Great big smiles on their faces, and they wagged their tails—an amusing joke! The swan dangled there in the swamp on the iron hook, twisting, twisting. It started to rain. The dogs blinked a few times, nodded, laughed.
The Artist put on her galoshes and her yellow rain slicker and went searching for her missing brown lab. By the time she arrived at the end of the cul-de-sac, the swan’s body had been torn down from the square hook and was scattered, feathers and entrails, among the flowering weeds where the ground was soft.
Go home, The Artist told her dog, who did.
The Artist picked up a single, white swan feather, wiped off the pink speck clinging to quill. Giggled. Another feather, laughing. After she had gathered as many swan feathers as she could carry, The Artist’s snorts and hollers fanned out in front of her, forming inclement weather. It was a dark, wet sort of evening, with bleak clouds of raucous laughter gathering above the treetops, and the air filled the space under The Artist’s body, under her arms—her wings now, filling feathers, and she raised her wings to catch this wind, this emotional energy. Three little flaps, and she was soaring over the neighborhood under a yolk-colored, setting sun.
With distance, the clouds brightened. Between the sycamore maples, neon spaces pulsed. The crescendo of evening birds. A blanket over earth.
From his bed, Henry listened to the birds and pondered The Artist’s very last text: Next, I will craft a canary, an animal twenty times larger than life. And Henry loved this. That night, Henry dreamed about bringing The Artist a three-stringed viola, a frosted glass window, and a large, unharvested wheat field. When Henry arrived at The Artist’s home the next morning, her husband answered the door with a dry, downward glance.
Have you come for the canary? asked The Artist’s husband. She left it behind, he said. Abandoned like everything else. You search for meaning on the computer and you get retirement planners, compound interest calculators. Venn diagrams about passion and memes involving otters clinging to other otters in an unrelenting ocean. The practical necessities of life passing away, passing away, sublimating into the sky like mist.
A forlorn brown lab nosed his way between the man’s legs, and Henry told the man yes. Yes, I’ve come about the canary. The husband pressed the garage door open, and there in the center, perched on a woven, wire stool, was a human-sized yellow bird. As if the bird was a dress on a form. Not a sculpture of a bird, it was a huge, live animal whose chest rose with inspiration and sank with exhalation.
A rapid transformation, said the husband. Fleshed out in a matter of hours. Noises from her throat this morning, he said.
I am a helpful man, said Henry. There are people I can help and situations that want my attention, and looking at this bird, I wonder about her substance, her composition, said Henry. Might she be a burden to you?
Needing care and feeding, said the husband—not my area of expertise.
The canary shifted and cocked her head, made noises in her throat. Shir, shir, shir. From the driveway and down the shallow-sloped road came a wavering note. The note reverberated thinly, flat, keeping Henry at arms-length from the infinite, but only just.