“Sparrow”
Chella woke and found herself lying on the freshly tilled dirt covering her baby’s grave. She was on her side in a fetal position, her arms hugging around her curled knees as if she was afraid that her limbs would drift off if they weren’t contained by something. She breathed in deeply, smelling the musty aroma of the earth beneath her, and tried to imagine what it was like to be down there under all that heavy, fragrant dirt. “Stop it,” she told herself. “He’s not really under there. He’s dead, can’t feel a thing.”
She sat up slowly, keeping one slender, freckled arm latched around her calves and pushing herself upright with her other arm. The colors of the outdoors assailed her freshly opened eyes. Even though the sky over the small graveyard was overcast, there was still a white glare that bounced sharply off the grass, making it appear an almost artificially bright green. Brushing chunks of dirt off of her cheek, Chella chuckled wryly to herself. Only now that she had lost her newborn son did she realize that she had always had trouble letting go of things. She didn’t know whether to blame God for ruthlessly using this tiny human life to teach her this lesson, or herself for being too damn stubborn to learn it earlier. The opportunity to learn had presented itself again and again throughout the twenty-six years she had been alive, but she had ignored it, choosing to cling to her idyllic vision of the world where everything lasted forever.
Chella had been an only child, a sensitive girl belonging to a desensitized mother. When she was ten, right after her father died, Chella and her mother had moved into a small, squat ranch-style house in an even smaller suburban town, leaving all the memories of her father behind- “starting over” as her mother had called it. The two of them coped with the same loss in drastically different ways. Liquor, cigarettes, and an endless harem of one-night-stands served to deaden her mother’s emotions; Chella preferred to create her own more innocent worlds to escape into. While her mother was lost in a drunken haze in the den near the back of the house, Chella would disappear for hours at a time to the park a few blocks away from her home. She never went there for the playground itself- she barely took notice of the other kids, who were busy playing hot-lava tag on the interconnected slides, bridges, and monkey-bars. The woods behind the park were the real draw for her. Once she was safely past the playground and under the thick cover of the trees, the real world melted away and Chella’s fantasies took over. She climbed trees and called them castles, dug up earthworms for pets, and gave her favorite flowers names, as if they were little faeries or sprites. In all of her invented fairytales, her father was always the knight in shining armor who never failed to rescue her from her mom, the wicked stepmother.
One morning almost a year after the move, Chella was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast, which consisted of a bowl of Lucky Charms with milk, the only meal that she had learned how to make for herself in her mother’s absence. After about six months of living in their new house, Chella had stopped going to school all together- her mom hadn’t noticed, and apparently neither had the public school system. Instead, she spent her days avoiding her mother as much as possible. She had overheard her mother’s encounter with one of her “man-friends” the night before, and it had ended badly, with her mother screaming drunkenly and some piece of glassware shattering against a wall. Chella’s only goal for that day was to get out of the house before her mother woke up and tried to be motherly in that false way of hers. Her mother’s bouts of sympathy for Chella usually stemmed from drunken guilt rather than motherly love, and as much as Chella craved her mother’s attention, she couldn’t bear playing her games to get it. A loud crash from the den warned Chella that her mother was awake, and she started shoveling the sugary cereal into her mouth even faster. “Fuck… God damn it!” her mother’s nicotine-marinated rasp forced itself into Chella’s ears. “No good fucking bastard. Goddamn.” She was too late to escape.
Her mother’s entrance into the kitchen was almost comical. The room was dull and gray, as if someone had taken a black-and-white photograph of the room and had hung it up in place of the room itself, and Chella’s mother was a gaudy Colorforms sticker stuck right in the middle of it. Swaddled in a bright red terry-cloth bathrobe, she stumbled into the kitchen wildly, catching herself on the island counter in the middle of the room. Her dyed blond hair was a tangle of matted yellow straw, her bony legs two toothpicks that ended in a pair of ridiculously large blue plush slippers.
“Hey, kid,” she croaked, reaching for a pack of cigarettes that sat on the counter. Chella kept silent, munching loudly on her cereal and stealing a backward glance at the woman. Her mother lit a cigarette and thrust it between her clownlike lips, closing her blue-shadowed eyelids as she took a drag. Her whole body shook as she breathed the smoke in, like an old rusty car struggling to start. Opening her mouth wide to exhale, she kept talking to her daughter. “Chell, what’d ya do last night? Didn’t hear ya come in.” Chella did not respond. Picking up her cereal bowl in two hands, she placed the rim against her bottom lip and tipped it all the way back, emptying the contents into her open mouth. She closed her lips around the bulging mouthful of cereal and chewed even more loudly, pretending not to hear the woman standing behind her.
“Chella, answer me when I talk to you,” her mother demanded. Chella turned around in her chair and gave her a long stare. There was no emotion in her face, but in her mind, a million angry words were flying around, threatening to leap out of her mouth at any moment. I’m not going to talk to you just so you can feel better about yourself. It’s not my problem that you drink too much, or that your stupid man-friends don’t give a shit about you, the same way you don’t give a shit about me. Either leave me the hell alone, or start being a real mom. She managed to avoid speaking any of this, and instead turned back toward her empty bowl, waiting to be left alone. “Fine,” her mother whined, taking another puff on her cigarette. “Be a brat. I don’t care.” She held her cigarette between two fingers as she walked past her daughter, trying to act cool. Before she could make it out of the room, she stopped. Chella looked toward her mother and could see her start to shake, and when she turned back around, there were tears in here eyes. She lurched toward Chella, falling to her knees beside the girl’s chair.
“I’m sorry, Chell,” she choked, gripping her daughter’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I do this to you. I’m so sorry…” the woman’s apology dissolved into sobs that racked her whole body. Chella didn’t know what to do, so she simply stayed still, not returning her mother’s embrace or looking directly at her. Her mother lifted her bowed head and looked at the girl, trying to read her mind. Sighing, she pleaded, “Chell, sweetie, just say something, anything.”
Chella turned her head and looked her mother in the eye. “All you need to know is what you just said, mom,” she spoke slowly and deliberately. “Don’t apologize to me. Do something about it instead.”
Her mother sighed heavily, letting her hands fall into her lap and slumping to the floor. As the woman sat and wept softly to herself, Chella quietly slipped out of the kitchen toward the front door. The mood inside the place was suffocating- the house had always had a clinging, depressing darkness about it that could never be dispelled. Even during the day when the windows hung wide open, the beams of sunlight would only venture a few feet into the house before being swallowed by the gloom. Now a steadily tightening tension had been added on to the dreariness, and Chella was almost at her breaking point.
Squatting by the door, Chella reached down to tie the laces of her pink-and-white sneakers as fast as she could. She sprang to her feet and pulled open the heavy oak door, pausing to fiddle with the latch of the outer door whose thick glass pane was the only thing separating her from the outside world. Suddenly, a hard thump caused the door tremble in her hands, and she looked up just in time to see a dark shape fall lifelessly to the ground. A terrified scream escaped her throat as she jumped back.
“Chell, what is it, honey?” her mom came skittering into the front hallway, her bedroom slippers unsteady on the slick tile floor. The woman’s face was still bloated and red from crying, and the gooey mascara dripping down her cheeks gave the impression that her face was melting.
“Something crashed into the window,” Chella replied, sidling away from her mother’s touch. Her mother cautiously shuffled up to the door and peered down at the front porch.
“Oh, it’s just a sparrow, sweetie,” she said, not noticing the tears welling up in her daughter’s eyes. “It’ll probably be fine. They don’t always die when they fly into windows, sometimes they’re just shocked and they’ll wake up later.” She paused and gave Chella a sideways glance, not knowing how to comfort the girl. “Why don’t you go outside and play, huh?” Chella nodded, eyes downcast, and waited for her mother to walk away before going out the front door.
Kneeling down, Chella craned her neck to have a look at the little bird that lay crumpled and unmoving on their welcome mat. Its tiny black beak was tilted at an unnaturally sharp angle, and blood was starting to pool beneath its head. She knew that it was most likely dead- the creature’s broken beak had probably been smashed through its skull and right into its brain from the force of impact. In her anguish, though, Chella refused to accept this fact. “No,” she muttered to herself. “You’re not going to die.” Cradling the bloody mass of brown feathers in her shaking hands, she slowly walked the few blocks to the park, not taking her gaze from her precious cargo once. She didn’t even notice the other children, who had stopped their games to draw closer and stare and whisper, one girl outstretching her arm, pointing a finger and letting out a shriek of “Oh my GOD!” Chella made her way past the playground and into the woods with one thing and one thing only on her mind- she was going to heal this little crushed bird; she was going to bring him back to life.
Once Chella was tucked away in her wooded sanctuary, she made a bed of fresh green leaves and set the bleeding bird down upon it. She paused, having no idea where to begin. In all of the fantasy novels she read, spells and poultices always worked, but as much as she relied on her little world of make-believe to shield her from reality, she knew that magic didn’t work in this life. She hadn’t been able to bring her father back from the dead, her mother had been irreparably severed from her, and this sparrow was at death’s door. Tears welling up in her eyes once again, all Chella could do was fall down beside the bird’s limp body and cry. It wasn’t as much for the sparrow that she cried, but for everything it symbolized in her self-contained world. She cried for her father, and for her mother, for herself and for her lack of control over her life. She felt like a sparrow that was continuously flying into glass doors, over and over and over again, dying a little each time but never learning to avoid those invisible panes. She cried until she fell asleep, and awoke hours later to a stray cat feasting on the corpse of the sparrow. She didn’t even bother to chase the cat away before she trudged out of the woods and made her way home.
“Here I am again, flying straight into the next window,” Chella sighed to herself, a tear springing up in her eye. “Fifteen years later, I’m still eleven years old.” She still sat on her nameless son’s grave, arms around her ankles, swaying back and forth like a branch in a slight breeze. In her right hand she clutched a silk flower- a bright red gerbera daisy with a black-and-yellow center and green flocking on the stem. She had bought it at the supermarket the day before, rationalizing that any flower that appealed to her would be a fitting tribute to the child she never knew, the child who had not lived long enough to pick a favorite color. She rested her chin on her knees, gazing blankly at the plain marker that stood over the patch of naked ground. It sent a pang of guilt through her- guilt over the fact that she hadn’t even been able to think of a name for this child, much less pick out a headstone to put over his final resting place. The only thing that distinguished his plot from any other was a simple iron marker with Chella’s last name, McLeod, and the row number and column letter scrawled in white wax pencil.
Chella’s hand shook as she held the fake flower in front of her. Somehow, it didn’t even feel right to be grieving over this child, who she had only held in her arms for a brief moment before he died. She wasn’t even over the baby’s father, who had left her as soon as he heard of her pregnancy. She wasn’t even through mourning her own childhood; how was she supposed to begin to mourn another childhood that would never happen? In the distance, she heard the clanging of a bell, signaling the end of the day for the students at the elementary school across the road. As the more eager of the children trickled out the front door, their sweet voices flooded her ears. They called goodbyes to each other and greeted their parents, who were waiting by their cars in the school parking lot. Chella began to cry, moved by this reminder of what she would never have with her son. She buried her face in her knees and let the tears soak her jeans as she sobbed, clutching the fake daisy in her fist.
Suddenly, she felt a light touch on her wrist, and the gerbera daisy was being gently extracted from her clenched hand. She released her grip on the flower and looked up to find a little boy no older than eight standing beside her. “You can let go of this,” he said, taking the daisy and handing her a single white rose. “Real flowers are much better.” Chella was shocked. The boy closed her fingers around the live flower, then looked into her face. His huge brown eyes sparkled with warmth as he smiled at her.
“Wh- why?” she stammered, feeling like an idiot. “Why are real flowers better?”
“Real flowers are like real love,” he answered. “Real love changes all the time. It can last forever, but it blooms and fades. This thing,” he said, holding up the plastic daisy, “doesn’t change. It’s fake. You can’t use fake flowers to remember real love.”
Chella smiled through her tears. “I think I understand,” she said slowly. The boy leaned in and wrapped his arms tightly around Chella’s shoulders, and she hugged him back.
“You will understand,” he whispered in her ear. “All you have to do is trust love.” He stepped back from her and she saw that he was holding an entire bouquet of white roses. “Sorry I can’t give you more,” he apologized, “but these are for my mom.”
“Thank you,” Chella called after him as he scampered away. She saw the boy run and sit down beside a man who was kneeling at a grave about thirty feet back from where Chella was. The man looked up at her, and she smiled. He gave a tired but sincere smile in return, and wrapped an arm around his young son.
Turning back to her son’s grave, Chella placed the rose on top of the rectangle of dirt. From the moment she had let go of that plastic flower, she’d felt lighter than she could ever remember feeling; all the heaviness and longing she had lived with for so many years had all but disappeared. Real love, she thought to herself. Just trust love, and you’ll understand.
A week later, Chella returned to the cemetery. This time, however, she was not alone. Chella’s mother had come along to see the new headstone on her grandson’s grave. Now in her late 50s, she no longer covered her face with gaudy makeup, and had allowed her bleach-blond hair to naturally fade to gray. Chella walked peacefully alongside her mother for the first time since her father was alive, leading the way through the garden of headstones to where her son’s grave lay. She stopped in front of the plot and immediately broke into a grin- someone had left a bunch of white roses- eleven to be exact- alongside the one that she had placed there seven days earlier. Chella’s mother stopped next to her and read the inscription on the pink marble headstone. “Chella, sweetie, that’s beautiful,” she exclaimed quietly, her voice quavering.
“Thanks, mom,” she replied, squeezing her mother’s shoulder. Beneath a carving of a cherub, the chiseled letters read:
Sparrow McLeod
May 5th-6th, 2005
Life is fleeting,
But Real Love is Forever.
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