Bone birds fly with the tide they once knew. The tide’s a pitiful thing now, the sea so small, only a twitch in the rotting salt along the plastic pebbles of the beach. But bone birds are nothing but memory. If you raise a new wall in their way, they’ll beat themselves against it until they’re battered to dust.

If the wall falls, the dust rejoins its fellows, a year later or a century.

It’s not quite a living to net bone birds. But no one will question your sitting somewhere high, in the burned ghost of a barn or the skeletal crown of what was once a tree, if you’ve nothing better to do. They’re easy to catch, flying heedless as they do. Most people won’t try it. Bone birds are sharp. They don’t understand change, but the years they think they’re living in offered them enemies. They know how to bite.

I know how to be bitten.

They catch things, the bone birds. Tidings. Scraps. They’re faster than smoke sometimes, so when you land one freshly scorched, you’ve some warning of the next wildfire. You’ll find things wound around claws and caught in bone cages. Seeds. Trash. Littler birds, the alive kind.

Well. Usually not alive by then.

 I share the flotsam they bring from the sky, and so people in town let me be. But the reason I haul my sorry self up among the bone birds is to send things away.

I write. On cardboard and wrappers and fragments of newsprint, scratched into slate and stone, carved on driftwood.

Is it better where you are?

Do you have a name?

What is your sea like?

My mother called me Gracie.

How many fires this year?

Our last tree died last monsoon.

I saw a cat once.

There’s never space for more than a few words. I can’t claim I ever put much thought into them. I don’t even imagine anybody reading. I did when I was a child, and the habit of hope might be excused. I do it now to prove to myself I’m real. Sometimes I find a fragment of my own message still nestled in a bone bird’s ribs. I’m not sure how far they go, but they do come back.

Maybe they circle the world. They don’t remember how to stop. Our sea was something else, once, when the moon was whole and the ocean one fat, sleek monster.  She lives on in her thousand toxic daughters, but the bone birds belong to that rich and long dead sea, even where she’s gone, even where she burns.

I think somebody wrote me back once. The bit of wood was flat and slimy and faintly green. I could hardly read the words. Why was six afraid of seven? The rest was broken. I don’t wonder about that person. But I kept the relic until a rat ran off with it.

Even rats don’t bother me when I’m up in the sky. I crawl and climb at least as well as the bone birds fly. My legs have never done me any good. I had a wasting sickness as a child. It took my mother and half the town away clean.

But one or two less fit limbs than usual will tell. Even I’m not surprised when I overbalance and tumble from that last dead tree. People’ve expected it for years.

I haven’t time for a full thought as the sky rushes away. The crack comes. I feel it more than I hear it. Pain’s not the word. Maybe I don’t have live nerves enough for that. Maybe when everything is pain, nothing is.

It’s short. Nothing to be done. I don’t expect rescue. I think I hear shouts, but mostly it’s roaring. Then I don’t hear.

* * *

I have a little more sense than the bone birds. Sometimes I know I’m dead. The sea’s shrunken now, further from the ruins of my tree. No one lives here anymore, so no one minds me. I climb until I run out of height. If I don’t fall, I wait for the birds. And I write. Letters come much harder than they did. 

Gra

G

cie

tree

brds

fffffffffire

Sometimes its only scratching. But the birds don’t mind. And I haven’t run out of things to write on in ages. I have pieces of myself. When the last one goes, when the last tooth and knuckle and tendon are hidden in a bone bird’s beak, I hope that one finds a reader. I don’t mind if they’re dead, too. I just don’t like to think of the bone birds circling alone.

* * *

Ⓒ Malda Marlys