Little Birds
Shae Krispinsky
Her daily routine that year, her last year of college, the year after she had taken two semesters off and her friends had all graduated, the year she lived off campus in a cheap apartment in a red brick building in the historic district, was to spend the mornings sleeping, the afternoons wandering around the massive cemetery across the street, taking photographs of the mausoleums and trees and crows, and the evenings lying stomach-down on her apartment’s rough beige carpet listening to Chopin waltzes, the single serviceable vinyl record she had found at the Goodwill for twenty-five cents. She had stacked her classes, so she only had to drive across town to campus two days a week. Glutted with free time, she came to know the cemetery’s rippling hills and the texture of her carpet well.
As she edited photos on her phone or as she lay and listened to her Chopin, she plotted. How to stop lying on the floor listening to music for a dance she did not know how to do. How to become something more than what she currently was, which was on the cusp of graduating but otherwise nothing, an unremarkable blip. In her plotting, she never got very far. She didn’t know how to start anew. She didn’t know what she could become and didn’t know how to test the limits of her boundaries. Her apartment’s heat would not shut off. It was February, snow on the ground outside, but she kept the windows open. The cool breeze sustained her.
She began uploading her photographs to a social media app, adding filters, giving them a moodier tinge. She got a few likes, gained a few followers. People did not seem to like images of winter-bare trees as much as she did. It was when she’d post the random photo of herself that the notifications came rolling in. Though she didn’t find herself particularly compelling, and though she thought it odd that anyone would heart a picture of a stranger, she liked the dopamine hit each time she saw someone new had liked a post, so she began making sure some part of her—a hand, her shoulder, her smile with her crooked front tooth—was in any given shot. It was hard finding interesting ways to capture herself—she didn’t want an account full of the same image with slight variations, different backgrounds, different clothing—but she liked the challenge. She could make herself appear to be someone other than who she was. She convinced herself she was making art.
Men started sending her private messages through the app, asking her age, where she lived, what she liked to do, and what she would like them to do to her if they were to meet in person. Or they would send their own photos cropped to highlight a certain singular body part. She took in these messages, bemused. Did this ever work for them? As creative as she hoped she was, she couldn’t imagine the messages achieving any success in their pursuits. Yet, she continued to read them before deleting them, so maybe they had succeeded in a sense.
One message stood apart from the rest. With no preamble, it asked, Your photos remind me of Francesca Woodman’s. Are you a fan of her work? While the name sounded familiar, she couldn’t place it without Googling. This led her down a rabbit hole to other tragic women artists, not all of them suicides, but all of them now dead. Without considering what she was doing, she responded to the message. Does a woman have to die to become a successful artist? Even though it was after three in the morning, a reply came immediately. No, she has to live and live and live.
And so began the affair. That’s how she thought of it, anyway. An affair. It sounded adult, worldly. It was her first relationship. In the afternoons, when she dressed for the day, she stood in front of her closet pondering what to wear, what he would like to see her in, despite the fact that he would never see most of the outfits she chose. Their relationship existed entirely online, except for the bits that occurred in her mind. She didn’t know where he lived, though she guessed out west from the plethora of desert scenes, sunsets and Joshua trees and striated canyons with slices of light lasering through them, posted to his own account. Nor did she know the sound of his voice or even if he were actually married, as he said. No posts of a wife, no mention of children.
If she felt any guilt over this affair with a married man—which she did, at first—she quickly tamped down the feeling, soothing herself with the fact that nothing, really, would happen. While she knew his name—the name he gave her, at least—she still called him by his username when she thought of him. Parallax. Did he think of her as warpedchopinwaltzes? Did he think of her as his mistress? She doubted it. That was her own fantasy. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she thought, This is what a mistress’s throat looks like. The secrecy of it all made her prettier.
They messaged most of the night, every night. That’s when he painted. During their conversations, he sent her images of his work as it progressed. He wrote that he liked the new rhythm their back-and-forth gave him. It imbued his painting with a boldness it previously lacked. To her, it just looked like smears of paint, but she told him she liked the energy, the vibrancy of the dripping sapphire blues and emerald greens. When she imagined him painting, she saw a man, balding, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, dressed in dark denim and a tight black t-shirt, dousing the canvas with paint from a small bucket. Later, she realized this was a memory of a photo she had once seen of Jackson Pollock.
She shared with him more of her work, the photographs too personal to post but not untoward. They weren’t great; often they were blurry or speckled from low lighting. But there she was, looking like a corpse on her carpet, or seated on a bench downtown by the depot, the streak of a passing train behind her.
You’re able to focus in on what isn’t there, he wrote of one photograph, pointing out a triangle in the sky made by a building and a tree. He never commented on her body within any given scene, only on whatever else was around her. He told her she had a good eye and called her clever. He told her she was boiling potential, ready to spill over into greatness, but she was holding herself back.
How? she asked.
You’re not living. You need to get out and live.
How? she asked again, but no response came.
***
The following day, returning from campus, she found herself walking up the walkway with her neighbor. He asked about the music he heard coming from her apartment.
“Is it too loud?” she asked, horrified.
He shook his head. “A band’s playing a bit later at this bar not too far away. If you’d care to join me. If you’re not busy. Since you like music.” His invitation dissolved into blushing, which she didn’t find charming, necessarily, but she admired his initiative, and thought of Parallax’s injunction to get out. If what she had been doing was not living, by his standards, then she might as well try something different. A few hours later, she found herself at The Coffee Pot, the only active roadhouse in the Roanoke Valley.
Because she didn’t know her neighbor, she couldn’t tell if he had dressed up for their evening, or if he regularly wore pressed chinos and pastel collared shirts. If she had passed him somewhere else, at Kroger or the mall, she doubted she’d notice him, but here, amidst the few aging bikers and veterans, with their tattoos and black t-shirts and leather, he stood out, a paragon of strait-laced normalcy, attractive in a nondescript way.
Her neighbor asked her what she wanted to drink. Back in her apartment, soaking in her bathtub and chatting with Parallax, she drank plastic goblets of diet Mountain Dew mixed with gin, but she figured this would not be an appropriate request here.
“Tanqueray and tonic,” she said. “Yes, lime.”
He ordered a Seven and Seven for himself and they found a table up near the stage. She took out her phone and snapped a few quick photographs of the bar’s uneven black and white striped walls, the dizzying checkerboard floor, the red-framed posters hung near the hallway leading toward the bathroom, the twinkle lights and tinsel wrapped around a pipe running the length of the ceiling. What a magical, terrifying place. Alice’s wonderland, transported to the Blue Ridge.
“Drink me,” she said to her glass.
Her neighbor leaned in, cupping his hand to his ear. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Thank you,” she said, raising her voice.
The band came out and played a style of music she dubbed junkyard rock. The lead singer banged out open chords on a Stratocaster painted like Old Glory. A woman to his left had a washboard strapped to her chest and ran thimbled fingers up and down in a counter-rhythm to the drums. They looked as though they were from New York, or perhaps Europe, the stars and stripes a joke, like how other countries threw USA parties where they imported red Solo cups and listened to bad country music. She didn’t like the band, but their novelty held her attention. She resisted the urge to check her phone for messages from Parallax.
After the band finished their set, the singer approached her, his forehead glistening, his white ribbed tank soaked through. “I saw you out in the crowd,” he said.
Well, yes, she thought. At the front table in a mostly empty bar, I’d be hard to miss.
“I like your coat,” he said, fingering the sleeve of her red faux-fur jacket. He then nodded toward her neighbor, who was ordering another round. “Your boyfriend?” In his voice she detected a Staten Island accent somewhere underneath his attempt at a Southern one. When she shook her head, the singer stepped closer. She could smell him, cologne and sweat and whiskey, and that close, she noticed he was older than he had appeared on stage. Did he notice that she was much younger? If so, it didn’t deter him.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
He told her Austin and offered to buy her a drink. By this time, her neighbor had finished at the bar and approached with three cocktails. He passed one to the singer. “Figured Jack and Coke was a safe choice,” he said. “Good job tonight.” The men clinked their glasses. She gripped hers, studying it, until her neighbor said, “Why don’t we all sit down?” Her neighbor took the seat next to her. Instead of sitting across, the singer repositioned a chair on her other side and then proceeded to talk over her until her neighbor excused himself to the bathroom.
The singer leaned in, his breath on her neck as he asked, “You want to get out of here?” The way he said it, like this had worked before, like she couldn’t possibly reject his offer, made her think of those private messages of body parts and innuendo. She looked up, searching for her neighbor. The singer noticed this. “He won’t mind,” he assured her.
For a moment she considered leaving with this singer in a shitty band who played a shitty, ugly guitar, and wondered if in the moment she made that decision, she would become someone else, someone who would do such a thing, someone who was living. She pictured them in a room at the Days Inn out by the highway, the air conditioner unable to clear the musty air, the synthetic floral comforter scratchy, the television playing some movie with one of those actors whose names she could never remember. That version of her would remember the name of the actor, but not of the singer after she left him sleeping in the early morning.
But she was not that woman, could not even think of herself as a woman, a title she had not yet earned, a status she had not yet become. It would take far more than one night in a cheap hotel to achieve that.
Her neighbor returned. “We should be heading back,” he said. “I’ve got work in the morning.”
She nodded, relieved, and handed her untouched drink to the singer. “Cheers.”
In her neighbor’s car, there was nothing to talk about. Or, there was everything to talk about but not with him. She didn’t think he would understand. She wanted to get home and message Parallax. At a red light, her neighbor glanced over and smiled. “We should do that again.”
“Sure,” she said, knowing she would go out of her way to avoid him until she graduated and moved out of her apartment.
She regaled Parallax with the story of her night, revising a few details to make it more exciting, hoping to make him jealous. She had never been in that position before, and she anticipated relishing it. Except Parallax wasn’t jealous. He asked why she hadn’t accepted the singer’s offer.
That’s not who I am, she told him. For the first time, she wondered if he were messaging other girls. And if so, did all of the conversations come to be like this?
Why not? he wrote back. And then, What if you were? What if you could be?
Pushing herself up from the carpet, she began pacing around her apartment. She didn’t know how to respond, and more, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Instead, she showered, and went to bed, pulling the covers up to her chin and feeling very small.
Up early, she ignored her phone, which beckoned from the nightstand. She jogged over to the cemetery to watch the crows. Now spring, the trees budded, and everything smelled fresh and renewed. What if you were? Parallax’s words looped in her mind. What if you could be?
What did she know about desire? Had she ever truly longed for anything? Had she stayed up all night talking with Parallax out of anything more than boredom and yearning—not for him, but for the validation he gave? It wasn’t that she believed the things he wrote to her, but that she wanted to. She wanted to believe that her own perception of herself was wrong, that the lens through which she viewed herself had crosshatched scratches across the entirety of its surface. He could see her better than she could, even though he had never really seen her at all. If he thought she could be more, then perhaps she could.
How? she asked, her favorite question to him, once back in her apartment.
Are you dressed? came his reply.
With shaking hands, she typed back, Yes.
Good, he wrote. Go out and find people. Exist among them. If you see someone who looks like me, talk to him. Pretend he is me. Flirt. Let him buy you a coffee.
What if he doesn’t offer? she interrupted.
He will, he assured her.
In the long mirror hanging on the back of her closet door, she assessed her outfit. Jeans, her favorite grey sweater. Too unremarkable. During the day, with the sun out, she figured it would be too warm for her red jacket, so she slipped on a long red and white polka dot dress, another Goodwill find. The thin polyester material clung to her. When she forced a smile, she looked jaunty and adventurous. Her denim coat, with the sleeves rolled up, gave her an air of confidence she inwardly lacked. A final muss of her hair and some cherry lip gloss, and out she went, heading downtown.
It was Wednesday morning. She had forgotten. People were working, not milling about in Elmwood Park. Still too early in the season, the fountains were off, the flowers just green stems and leaves. She would have to wait until the lunch hour. Pulling out her phone, she meandered around, snapping photos. An hour passed, and she grew bored and cold. Promised herself she’d try again on Friday. She’d bring a book with her, just in case. Even though it felt like one, she refused to see this as a failure.
What about your neighbor? Parallax asked that evening, after she told him about her morning’s fruitless attempt.
What about him?
I don’t think you gave him a fair shot. Perhaps you could go out with him again. Is he home?
You mean, now? Tonight? I have class in the morning.
It’s not that late there. I want to see him. I want to see what you look like with him.
Like, go take a selfie with him? That’s not—Appropriate? Going to happen? She wasn’t sure how to finish her sentence. At last, she typed, art.
No reply came. She noticed Parallax had started doing this, holding back his response until she agreed to whatever little request he made.
All right, she said.
Are you still wearing that polka dot dress?
No.
Put it on. It’s very becoming.
Ten minutes later she found herself knocking lightly on her neighbor’s door, half hoping he wouldn’t hear.
“Oh, hi,” he said with mild surprise when he answered. “Is everything okay?”
“I wanted to see if you’d like to grab some pizza. If you haven’t had dinner yet.”
“I was just about to start making it,” he said. “Let me go grab my wallet.”
Making small talk, they walked the five blocks to Grace’s Place, a small pizzeria next to the independent movie theater on Grandin Road. After they sat down and the waiter took their drink order, her neighbor, over his menu, said, “I didn’t expect to see you again. The other night at the show—I know it wasn’t great.”
“I don’t think either of us belonged there,” she said.
“That band was terrible,” he said, using his upper body to mimic the singer’s stage moves. She laughed in agreement.
The waiter returned with their Cokes, and she, still laughing, held out her phone. “Would you mind taking a picture of us?”
She and her neighbor leaned in toward the middle of the table before the waiter snapped several photos and handed the phone back. She studied the images, saving the best one into her favorites folder. The two of them, smiling over the red and white checked tablecloth that clashed with her dress, looked happy. Looked convincing. When the pizza arrived, she could barely pick at it. Her neighbor asked her if she wanted to order something else.
“I guess I’m not as hungry as I thought,” she said. Her neighbor asked the waiter for a to-go box, and then she and her neighbor walked home in silence.
At her door, the neighbor paused expectantly. Her heart sank, thinking he was going to kiss her. Instead, he asked, “Are you all right?” and relief rushed out of her in a small giggle.
She nodded. “It’s been a day.” She lifted the to-go box. “Thank you.”
Her neighbor leaned in and gave her a one-armed hug. “If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
Inside, shoes kicked off, pizza box tossed on the couch, she lay on the floor and sent the photo of her and her neighbor to Parallax. She didn’t consider that she didn’t have to send it, not until after she already had.
You look beautiful, Parallax replied. He rarely complimented her appearance like this, straight out. It felt like a dog treat earned as a reward for adequately performing a trick on command. Still, she wanted another.
Did he kiss you?
No, just an awkward hug.
Do you like him?
He’s nice.
I don’t think you should see him again.
***
Thursday, on campus, she made her way to the third-floor stacks in the library. Parallax had recommended a book. For inspiration, he had written. She found the book and slipped it off the shelf. The dustjacket was an innocuous beige, with an image of a young girl wearing ankle socks and black suede heels, a frilly black dress and a hair bow as large as her head, posing coquettishly with her head in her hands. But there was the title, screaming out in a flagrant red and black font: Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin. She flipped through it briefly before checking it out. The woman behind the counter said nothing as she scanned the book and handed it back to her.
On Parallax’s suggestion, she returned downtown the following day with the book in her purse. He had returned to his original injunction. Go out and find people. Flirt. Get coffee. She found an empty park bench and sat, ready. It was a quarter till noon, but the weather—bright sun, a warm, caressing breeze—had pulled people from their offices early. At first, she watched them as they passed. Men removed their sport coats and unbuttoned their collars. Women, chatting on cellphones, pulled sunglasses from their large, leather totes. No one returned her gaze. Perhaps she looked too open, too desperate. She slid out the book and posed with the cover clearly visible. She’d let it speak for her.
There, on the park bench, in the sunlight, pretending to read smut out in public, she thought she’d feel a frisson of aliveness. She thought she would radiate an energy, a magnetism, that would compel someone to approach her and invite her to join him at Mill Mountain Coffee for a chai latté, where they would sit at the small table by the large front window and make small talk before getting around to the topic of the book, of her affair, of her growing willingness to eat from the banquet of life with gusto. Instead of any of that, she only felt like a statue, exposed, there to catch the little birds’ shit as they flew by.
And yet, trusting Parallax, trusting that she had to give herself over to the moment and stop thinking so much, she sat. As she opened the book and read the first story about a man brandishing himself to schoolgirls, any hope remaining in her of a pleasant afternoon and a joyful retelling of it dissipated. This was Parallax’s recommendation, meant to inspire and enliven her?
This book is gross, she messaged him. She sounded petulant, unlike a mistress. Aren’t there other ways to live?
You may not be ready for it yet, he wrote back, but one day you’ll understand.
I understand it now, she replied.
You’re still afraid to bloom.
She tried to read on through the second story, but couldn’t, disgusted. She cast the book aside. It fell, splayed out, caught on the branches of a nearby shrub. She snapped a quick photo as she walked away. It would be more responsible, she knew, to retrieve the book, return it to the library, and never think of it again, but it felt better to leave it there, even if that meant having to pay for it later. It’d be the best money she—well, her parents—ever spent.
Walking back to her car, she couldn’t get the image of the book, prostrate, half-hidden in the bushes like a victim on a police procedural, out of her head. It deserved a sense of dignity like anything else. She ran back, tripping on curbs, thwarted at intersections by traffic. By the time she retraced her steps, the book was gone.
A man in light grey business slacks now occupied the bench. She noticed a movement and turned toward him. He was leafing through the book, holding it with both hands.
“That’s—uh,” she said, her voice in a whisper. He didn’t acknowledge her until she spoke up. “I’m sorry, but that’s mine.”
“Oh,” the man said, looking down at the cover, then looking over to her. “I thought someone had thrown it away.”
“That was the plan,” she said, “but it’s not its fault I don’t like it.”
The man cocked his head, mulling over her comment, before handing her the tome. “What do you like, then?”
“Chopin,” she said. “Cemeteries. Crows.” This was not a sophisticated response, but it was an honest one, not meant to impress him. Still, a heat rushed into her cheeks. She turned, pretending to glance at something behind her.
The man said, “Hard to throw a cemetery into a bush.”
He couldn’t have been much older than her, a few years, maybe, but he gave the impression of maturity, of having things figured out. A closet full of neatly ironed dress shirts arranged by color. A French press he used every morning. A 401k. He reminded her, she realized, of her neighbor.
“Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?” she mustered the courage to ask.
His face registered surprise, then something she could only label as pity. “I have a girlfriend,” he said gently.
“Does that matter?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “To me, it does.” He stood, slinging a messenger bag over his shoulder, and walked away without another word. It felt less like rejection and more like confirmation. It mattered to her, too.
She slid her phone out of her purse. I may not know how to live, she wrote to Parallax, but I know I’m not a flower for you to cultivate. She sent him the picture she had taken of Little Birds tossed aside, and then blocked his account.
Returning home, she ran into her neighbor, who was setting up a small charcoal grill in their lawned courtyard. He gave her an abashed smile, a tiny wave.
“Took a half day from work,” he explained, as though she had asked. “It was too nice to stay inside.”
Before she could stop herself, she asked him if he wanted to listen to some music while he cooked. And before he could respond, she raced ahead, into her apartment. Her record player was portable, fed by six batteries. She brought it out to the little brick stoop their front doors shared and sat down, cross-legged. “Do you like Chopin?” she asked.
“Can’t say I’ve listened to much.” He squeezed a can of lighter fluid, struck a match.
She set the needle in place. The Waltz in C# minor began to play, the notes jumbled, a frenetic dolor. “Not the best for a barbeque,” she admitted, “but it’s all I have.”
“Better than nothing.” He wiped his hands on his khaki cargo shorts before coming and sitting down on the stoop next to her.
“You’re probably right,” she said. Another waltz played through, and then she blurted, “Maybe we could give pizza another try.” She gestured toward the grill. “Not right now. Or maybe a movie? This weekend?”
Her neighbor leaned over and whispered, “We could live on the edge and do both.” He gave her a wry grin.
“Life on the edge,” she said. “I think I’d like that.”
The music ended. The record spun, giving off a whirred hiss. Her neighbor reached over and reset the tonearm to the beginning.
Shae Krispinsky lives in Tampa, FL, where she fronts the indie rock band, Navin Ave. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Vending Machine Press, Connotation Press, The Citron Review, Thought Catalog, and more. She is currently at work on two novels and finishing up her band's first album.