A Beautiful Lie
by Rebecca L. Brown
It was a little bird with dark brown feathers, nothing very special to look at, but it was mine. Eva had bought it for me, a little token of her affection from the night I finally agreed to join her in bed. True, it didn’t have pretty blue and green feathers like the pretty African parrot Michaela had, but I loved it anyway.
Eva said it reminded her of me, the same bright little eyes, the head tilt when she spoke to us. She started calling me her little sparrow when she moved her toothbrush into my bathroom, her shirts into my wardrobe. I packed my skirts into a drawer to make space for her, shifting my little mementos around my shelves to make room for hers. Two pairs of slippers by the apartment door, two work screens in the lounge.
There weren’t many wild birds now except for the pigeons. They clustered in parks and under the eaves of empty apartment buildings, more bald than feathered. They very rarely tried to fly, their stubby wings almost useless. Nothing like my glossy little sparrow. Eva used to say the pigeons weren’t even birds really any more. She called them sky rats, winged vermin.
When Eva’s work screen crashed, she didn’t get a replacement. She would be a housewife, she told me. I could be her sugar mummy.
The neatly pressed shirts slipped into crumpled piles scattered around the bedroom floor. The bathroom sink clogged on her fine, blonde hair. She couldn’t afford to call a plumber, she told me, and she was too tired to iron. The television volume crept up as I worked, punctuated by shrieking bursts of her laughter. I unblocked the sink myself.
She cried when we argued. These weren’t unhappy tears, they were fierce and filled with anger. If they had been acid, it wouldn’t have surprised me. They burned streaks into the furniture as she threw my things — never her own — against the walls. The apologies were the most beautiful times, holding each other gently under the sheets.
When things started to go missing, I thought they must have been broken in one of those fights. The shelves became barer and barer until only her little mementos were left: a bronze butterfly, bleached white pebbles, a handful of coloured feathers.
I didn’t realise she was selling them until I noticed her new red boots, far beyond the subsistence benefits she had access to without my permission.
She denied it of course, tearing through my wardrobe, the carefully arranged shoes, the last few remnants of the soft, silk pillows which used to litter the threadbare carpet. In the centre of her whirlwind I stood unmoved until she threw her belongings into a suitcase and left. I locked the door behind her.
The cage had been upturned somehow as she raged at me, the little bird seeds ground into the carpet and the metal-hinged door left hanging open. The bird was still there, hopping from side to side as if hypnotised, head cocked awkwardly to one side. I reached out with numb fingers to smooth its feathers, a calming touch.
The feathers were warm and comforting; I lifted it out of the broken cage and pressed it against me, feeling the thrumming of its heart against my chest. My fingers moved instinctively over its little body, brushing the stray, bent feathers back into place.
Between the warmth of the feathers one finger brushed across something cold, something out of place. I turned the bird gently, hoping it wasn’t hurt. It twitched between my fingers. Between one row of feathers and the next, the skin had torn. Between the jagged edges, I saw the tell-tale glisten of oiled metal.
I recoiled in horror; it fell to the floor, landing on its side and twitching where it lay. It made no attempt to stand.
The feathers had been cleverly sewn into the false skin, overlapping so perfectly you wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t torn. A child’s toy decorated to imitate a reality, the softness a disguise for lifeless metal and plastic. I imagined her laughing inside as she called me her sparrow, a pretty little machine to play out a role for her entertainment.
The bird made no attempt to right itself, the wings and tail fluttering. One of those bright little eyes had been scratched, a long white line across the blackness like a cracked shadow. The beak opened and closed with a hushed click, as if choking. I knelt in the bird seed which it had never eaten, which Eva must have collected in the night from its bowl to maintain the illusion. Maybe she sold it; bird seed was never cheap. I didn’t care.
I lifted it again, the oily smell seeping out as the body began to cool. A little spark bit into my fingers, a last spark of life from a fragile, dying body. No, not dying, I told myself. How could it die when it had never been alive, never real? In a way, I mourned it anyway.
The body was cold now, stiffening as a hundred tiny mechanisms ground to a halt. Somehow, it looked flatter than I remembered, the glossiness I had imagined faded to a plastic sheen. My fingers pressed into the downy ball I had thought I loved, had thought was capable of loving me back. It might as well have been an empty shell, another memento tucked away on a shelf. I wondered if she would have sold it last of all.
My numb fingers dug into the edges of the tear, pushing the skin back onto the feathers to reveal the metallic body underneath as the last parts spun to a stop. In its own way, I suppose it was beautiful under the skin. In another way, its beauty was in the lie. From somewhere nearby, some abandoned space, I could hear a pigeon cooing softly.
Copyright © 2011 by Rebecca L. Brown
