The red bird was her favorite. Reminded her of old songs from her youth. The blue was the wiser. Never preened for anyone but her. The morning her old man stayed gone, she went ahead and fixed the glass. From his time gone, four days followed with what could be, had the heavens heard her wish. When the detectives came in to tell her the news, she had two words for them: You sure? They glanced at each other, and one of them asked her to come down with them to identify the body, to sit for questioning. She looked at the birds. A tear broke loose over its edge. Once and big. Long crawl down. Inside the tear, the years of it, over. She breathed and looked skyward. Swollen heart. The joy in her. The detectives stared at each other. After she had viewed the corpse, grey room, two-way glass. Never a suspect, but her relief at the news caused intrigue in the lead detective he had not felt in years. Heartbeat aside, he needed a recorded statement. He set the coffee in front of her. Before he hit record he had squeezed her hand.
“Just protocol, sweetheart.”
The apartment between them, empty. His on the end of the hall. Hers two down on the left. The Sun gone from the city, the last moments of light, gold. A knock. Nobody knocked on their floor. Out of bed, the dream pulled pack, a café blurred. Feet to floor. Eye through the doorway. Two men in suits, talking to Aria. Her door open. Her body unseen. The men were sharpened. Linear men. He listened there nude. The detectives, there by word of the bartender. The body was discovered a week after death, they canvassed. Easy work led them to Aria. Her voice from her place. The sound. Satin over chalk. The music. She had nothing for them. She had neither felt him walking behind her nor heard a sound. Blade broken off in his head, teeth kicked out. In that order. They waited for body language. Aria, stared through them. She asked them how the landlord was holding up, and nothing more. They left, locked out. A beat of three on down, and the shower turned on.
At the counter, she watched them leave the lift. Across the lobby. The lead told her they were still working the case, but after this much time, absence of outside prints, and the fact nobody in the area knew anything, to have no expected miracles. She smiled at him. This one was plenty. Done with the floor upstairs. The face and body behind the door up there. The ink behind her robe. The hardness of the widow facing him. He gave her a smile, loose. He left with his partner. Night in the city had swallowed day and any trace of the case.
The city kept him busy for its own reasons.
•⊷⊶•
The old man was prepared for nothing, and he remained that way. What he wanted from the city was easy, a blank space from which to breathe. On his bed in the dirt, when the city called to him it was nature now. Servitude, hungry. Involuntary. Never enough love from the skyline, from the base of his fathers looking down on him. When the night covered the city, the old man could even see the tops of the buildings bent down, slight, glass eyes watching his blood.
—Four nights back, a long thought up into the stars, he had been pulled to his feet. A degenerate moved west down the boulevard to pluck their flower. The old man in dirt, he was a fix for the city. Nothing he would do more. Where the silhouette of the stranger would walk east, across the street moved the beauty of the city, a song of life everyone heard but her. A mass of silhouette following. The old man reached down his side and gripped the handle. When he moved, he moved to hunt. The warm voices in his head, what was needed, and what he would give. Unlimited love:
Leave the blade inside, son. Take his teeth for fun.
The kill was not the first, the last, or the slowest. He had done worse to others when the city called him out.
At the counter. The landlady sat, younger. A reverse lift of burden, Schopenhauer. Her old man, dead, the city out there in her consideration. Her birds in tune with her. Well-slept, bellies full. Songs of the streets, audible now. She had tried to feel for him, to feel the loss, any type of semblance to sorrow. It fell dead upon conjure. The wish for him to feel long pain, fear until his end, was the only stone in her faded. Her fridge bulging with health. Skin on the mend. Lotion on her face, lemons to her elbows. Unlimited moonrise, a kind Sun. The faces crossing the lobby almost beautifully. The fridge became full on the afternoon of the letter from the holdings company. A condolence, and praise for her work. She was full management now. All checks would be paid to her name. It arrived with one, made out with an extra month in full. Hers. Signed with a stamp. She sent the post office box a card. A message of grace, of gratitude. She dipped her wedge in honey, sucked it off the end. A slow bite into the meat of the fruit. Life had not been as bright as this dark truth. Age set aside, she could breathe and live like the others did.
Jeff Stewart 