‘Flight’, by Megan Wildhood

When my friend I’ve known since high school became homeless, I took her birds in. I offered about a hundred times to take her in, too, but she turned me down. At first, it seemed weird—she’d taken the money me and my folks had given her, no problem, but she wouldn’t take a room. After some thought, I realised I’d probably have responded the same way. I hefted the vintage cage into my spare bedroom I’d been trying to rent out for a year, the seven parakeets screeching their little heads off. Turns out, they didn’t actually settle down when it got dark—or for the ensuing four months.

My brother asked about the tweeting in the background on our weekly meeting about our aging parents. Things weren’t checking out, but then again, I’d known her thirty-five years and my memory’s never been great. When I tried to explain the situation to him, he thought something was weird, too. He was quick to put the kibosh on help from both me and Dad, who’d been giving her what I thought was just a few hundred bucks here and there at my request.

Molting from Tweety, Tweenkles, and the others framed a perfect rectangle on the carpet. I’d moved the cage to the floor over a month ago to wipe down the desk in the room getting it ready to show. The guy never came to see it and two weeks passed before I tried to remember the last time I’d fed the birds. They didn’t look any thinner when I rushed in to feed them, but their tweets seemed angrier. Sounds about right, I thought as I frantically scooped seed into their bowl. During the brief quiet while the poor buggers gorged themselves, my shoulders relaxed for the first time since they arrived.

The day she came to collect the birds, she didn’t have time to talk. I didn’t tell her that my brother had stopped me from seeing my parents because I’d been involved in her swindling them out of more than just a couple hundred bucks here and there. I just let her stand in my warm living room while I threw the bird things together.

I waited until her engine faded before I turned from my ivy-clung window to finally vacuum the room. I’d waited monthsfor this moment to clean things up. I victoriously plugged in my old vacuum, and started at the south side. Just as I finished sucking up the small mountain range of feathers and God knows what else, the bag exploded, flinging thunderclouds of dust and little knives of orange, blue, green and white to the four corners of the room.

I yanked the plug out by the cord, slugged the damn machine as if on the shoulder and walked out. Looks about right, I shrugged as I turned away from the room before closing the door, finally releasing that phony smile.

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.