by Jennifer Harvey
Summer, and the world beyond her window is a little too bright and not quite real. The sunlight is a primrose yellow, the sky an eggshell blue, the trees a chameleon green. Everything shimmers like a fevered hallucination. Like a wish.
Vivian lies in her bed and tries to stifle her longing by contemplating the colours and the impossible brightness of it all. She wants to forget that some days she feels she is already between worlds and that the colour she would choose to describe the feeling deep inside of her is grey.
So she stares at the sky and pretends she does not know that there is an inside and an out. That there is monochrome and technicolour. That there is this moment and whatever comes next. She has learned it is better to imagine time as something fluid. It is better to dream and imagine. This is how you take yourself beyond, this is how you carry yourself away. How you move from one day to the next.
Slowly, and day by day, she is learning what it means to disappear.
When the bird lands on her windowsill, she smiles and whispers, ‘hello again, old friend’, and stares at that black beak, those glossy feathers, the glint of obsidian eye.
The bird observes her for a moment, waiting for her to accept its presence, then taps at the glass with its keratin beak, and Vivian sinks a little deeper into the softness of her pillow and gathers her strength, as she listens to the tap-tap-tap at the glass.
Today, the bird is impatient, insistent. It knows she needs encouragement. Knows too, that exhaustion and pain, can be countered with a flutter of wings, with a feathered delirium and an imagined purpose. He has been my friend, she thinks. Has taught me not to fear. Slowly. Day after day. Moment by moment.
And now, today, she must open the window.
Despite her weakened state, Vivian obeys. She pulls the sheet away, shifts her legs to the edge of the bed, and eases her feet on to the floor. The linoleum is cold, and the chill makes her wince. If it wasn’t for the bird urging her to stand, she would have collapsed back onto the bed. But something about its rhythmic tapping compels and reassures her, and so she moves towards it. Aware there is a promise she needs to decipher in that tap-tap-tap.
It is not an easy journey. The slow shuffle makes her legs tremble, and the fear of falling, leaves her grasping at objects in the room. A cabinet, a chair, the wall. As if the physicality of things can somehow protect her. They are a reminder that the world is solid still. That she and it, exist. Just. That it is only the bird, for now, which possesses some different, more ethereal state.
When she reaches the window, she is out of breath and the thin cotton of her nightgown sticks to her back as droplets of perspiration trickle the length of her spine and run down the back of her legs. Those few meters, from bed to window, are the furthest she has walked in days.
Beyond the window, the bird watches her and waits. Quiet now. Patient. When she loosens the latch, it pushes at the glass and flutters inside, then hops on to the bed frame, where it perches, haughty as a king.
And in the expanse of its wings Vivian sees the true depth of its blackness. She notes how the feathers absorb the light, and how the room seems to grow a little darker in the bird’s presence, the shadows enveloping her. That black. She knows the deep hollow where it resides. She has felt it grow within her and has tried to turn away from it.
But night after night, her dreams have been filled with a persistent cawing. Night after night, she has hurtled to the ground and seen the earth rise to meet her as she accelerates. Night after night, no wings have unfolded, no will has lifted her. Night after night the bird has tapped on her window, trying to encourage her. It has taken her so long to understand that this is the choice it is offering her: fly or fall.
And now her friend is here in the light of the morning, and she feels the authority of its gaze. And though she does not want to turn and face it, she knows she must. But she hesitates, just for a second, and allows herself one last glance out of the window. She sees the translucence of the day and those colours again – yellow, blue, green – and thinks perhaps she does understand something after all. Then she turns and shuffles back towards the bed. And all the while, the bird watches her and waits, calm and certain of its purpose.
As she slips between the sheets, the air pulls away and Vivian gives herself over to it, their distant cawing. She hears it, faint at first, but growing louder. A rush of beating feathers. A flurry as they swoop inside and fill the room with the colours of her longing.
Indigo, violet, and blue. Green, yellow, and orange. Red. The spectrum swarming around her, shapeless, soundless, and serene. And Vivian closes her eyes at last and feels an unfurling of wings as she is lifted through the open window and into the day, into the bright beyond. The bed, the room, the solid weight of her, evaporating as she soars, sweet and free, and knowing nothing, save for the tilt of her wings and the rush of the air as it lifts her upwards, ever upwards. Everything there, in that final moment. Freedom, in the end, nothing more than this: this light, this exhalation. The world so bright and oh, so real.
Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Denmark. She is the author of three novels and her fiction has appeared in various journals in the US and the UK. You can discover more over at her website: www.jenharvey.net