My Bird
Jessica Richardson
The Dr. was still angry with me about accidentally breaking his coffee mug. You could tell. He put his stethoscope on my chest and shook his head. He told me I smelled like ammonia, and that meant that I must be really sick. I could smell the ammonia too. Still, I refused to believe him. We argued about this while my eyes wandered around the clinic, crowded with stand up instruments on wheels, diagrams of skeletons. There were nurses carrying clipboards and old folks on scales with their bottoms hanging out.
I saw a girl in the next stall, through the curtain, which no one had bothered to fasten. She was pregnant. She had chai tea skin and big curly hair. Her belly jutted out in this extreme way that extended her stomach like an upside down desk drawer. She was getting a procedure to remove a bird trapped in her chest. You could see the outline of its bones under her skin.
“That’s what it is!” I pointed at her. “I’m not sick. I just have a bird in me.”
The doctor didn’t believe me. He sighed. “It’s very rare, that.”
“I don’t care if it’s rare, that’s what it is. I can feel its bones and feathers.”
My insistence made him weary. Finally he sent me to see another doctor, this time a woman. She found the bird right away. She marveled and clucked. She said she’d help me get it out carefully, so that it would live. She applied some numbing ointment. She used tiny silver tools to scrape into my chest, thin bristles, scalpels, and shiny chisels. I was awake. She was an archeologist, humming with her findings. She brushed dust and flesh from our bones, the bird and I. It had a stunned frozen face, big eyes, a pterodactyl shape. But it was my bird, scared or not.
I noticed that someone was watching my bird get removed. They were out in the hall. I saw them through the curtains that refused to close. This person had curly hair too, but was a boy. He trembled like a wet mole as he touched his own chest. I saw him flag down a nurse. He pointed at me with a shaking finger. My bird’s right wing was now free. It hung out, softly flapping from time to time. This, my half emerged bird, was somehow more private than my bloody naked breasts. They really needed to be more aware of curtains in this place. He pointed at me and then at his own chest, back and forth. He was insistent. The nurse shook her head and led him to an examining room.