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Bri Crozier
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I was with her when the songbirds died. We listened in the park as their little bodies made threnody beats against the pavements. She gasped, and I could feel her face fall, as mothers scooped up children and the elderly walked on, too tired and worn to acknowledge another SwallowTail collapse.
But not her.
We stayed for hours as she walked from bird body to bird body, acknowledging and remembering them, taking time to look up what they were so she could say their names. When we ran out of bird bodies to remember, I took her home and left her there, where I know she cried for the birds we saw dead on the ground. I went home then, and cried for her.
* * *
All at once, they died, just like the dogs the year before, the tuna the year before that. Just like the spiders a few months prior, and the snakes a few months after. Maybe it was Eve's true revenge, that her children would bring about the final death of the serpents. That we would stand above piles of their bodies on TV, see them on the news as politicians scratched their heads in mock confusion, and corporate scientists set themselves on fire in penance for what they had done, for just following where the money took them. Eve’s vengeance for the sin she chose, that we would stand in pointless triumph over the creature she blamed for her actions.
But not for too long. We all knew our time would come soon.
* * *
We were kids when SwallowTail first appeared, nothing but an iridescent, oil-slick spot in the sky, the aura that precedes the migraine. No one paid attention, blinking it away like sunspots in their eyes. We didn’t know, then, what was happening. What it was. No one did. It was named after the Swallowtail butterflies, whose death announced its arrival. The butterflies weren’t the first thing it took, but it was the first we noticed. After all, who stops to think about the last time a bug splattered across their windshield? Or a mosquito bites their arm? They don’t think anything of it, except perhaps to thank their own good luck.
But the butterflies we noticed, when their little bodies were left pinned to the ground, a display of things to come.
No one thinks about insects as quiet heralds of the end. We see Famine on his black horse as locusts, eating away with mindless hunger, bodies transformed by greed, like the stories my grandmother told me. Or White Pestilence, announced as a slap against skin from a bite full of malaria, or zika, or something worse. I don’t think I ever even had a mosquito bite before they were all gone. We think of wailing, and bombs, and not so empty threats, and trumpets of the end, and we were wrong. We know now what the end of the world sounds like, what trumpets announce the arrival of the horsemen. It’s Summers without cicadas.
* * *
One day, she called me crying while I was at work. It was the day the rabbits died, and she had found hers laying in its pen, cold and empty. She asked me to come then, to help her bury it in her backyard. I couldn’t, I told her, I had work. But I would come straight after. Okay, she said. Okay.
Five hours later, I pulled into her driveway. She was sitting on the short concrete steps up to her door, head weighed down deep and hands clasped like prayer. Maybe it was a prayer. Maybe that was all we could do anymore. She lifted her head when I closed the car door, her eyes empty too, and for a moment I thought she was gone. She stood, and I saw the tears, felt my own guilty relief. No, she was still there. I went to her, arms out and open, and she pulled me close, burying her face in my neck. I’m sorry, I said, I can’t lose this job. I can't quit like she did.
I know, she said. It’s okay. She was glad I could come at all. You're a good friend, she said. A good friend. I bit my tongue and said of course. For her, anything.
She took my hand and led me back through the house and to the yard, where she had placed the rabbit in a shoebox casket decorated with paint, stickers, and flowers. A little bouquet of dandelions and dead nettles sat on top, tied with a ribbon and bow. She had it laid out for closed casket viewing next to her redbud tree in bloom, a shovel waiting for me leaned against the bark. Beside it was a pot of young peonies. She bought them to plant over the rabbit’s grave, a marker of its life and name. It was shallow, the grave, but it was what we had the strength for, when we know that, soon, it won’t matter to anyone. And there weren’t any foxes left to dig it up anyway.
* * *
Tonight, I asked her over for dinner. The peonies died this morning. It was the first time SwallowTail had taken a plant. We didn’t know it could, that it would want something that didn’t move, or breathe, or grow like we did, but that was selfish of us to think. Why wouldn’t it? The peonies were alive, after all. Of course it would.
I asked her over the chicken and noodles with no cream, if she remembered plucking petals off peonies in the church garden when we were small. When there were still ants to climb on our hands, tickling across our skin like we now know a trailing kiss is. She says yes, she does. She doesn't remember the ants, though. I ache when she says so. I remember them. She told me not to hurt them. How much she worried about them, running along our kindergarten fingers. She didn’t want to crush them, when it was us who disturbed their flower garden home. That worry stayed, even when the ants died, finding homes with birds trapped in airport terminals, and turtles crossing the streets. All those are gone now, but her worry still finds things to hold it. She settles on me, most often, to fuss over in her gentle way. And I take it, even if it’s not what I want.
But I would never ask that of her. Not now.
* * *
She wanted kids, you know? She tells me this as we sip on dry dandelion wine. But not anymore. Why try, when they, and we, and everything else, she guesses, will drop dead sometime in the next few years. If we even have that. She is tipsy, and it lets the hurt float to the surface. I don’t prompt her, but she keeps going. She can’t do that to them, she says. She can’t do that. It’s not fair to make them live like this, in hospice for our own species. That's why she quit being a nurse, she says. Everything is dying, and they all die at the same time, so what's the point? She can’t make it better for anyone in the end. She can’t make it gentle if she goes too.
There is no point. There’s just no point. I don’t know if I agree. Sometimes I do, I know, but a part of me wants to tell her that it’s not useless. She has never turned away from hurt, and there is worth in that, even if no one will remember in the end. I think of her over the songbird bodies, holding a funeral for them in her own way. I want to tell her that I will remember her like that. That it will matter as long as I am here to remember, and after that, it will matter because it happened at all.
I tell her: she reminds me, sometimes, of this story. Has she heard it? No, she says. Can you tell me? So I do:
* * *
Once there was a village, where an ice monster, who had once been a man, was coming to destroy everything, bringing with it winter so cold it would crack bones with the snap of frozen trees. No one would face it, not even the strongest men, who knew it would mean nothing if they froze and were consumed before they even reached the thing, when the giant is taller than the oldest trees.
Everyone kept huddled away in their homes, and when no one would go and meet the creature, a little girl stepped forward. I will go, she said, I will go and meet it.
You can’t defeat it, they told her, you’re too small, too alone, it will freeze you before you can see it through the snow.
The little girl could not be stopped, though. She would not turn away from the hurt. And she still went, first to her own home, to get her fathers hunting dogs, and then to her grandmother's house. To her grandmother, she said, I’m going to become something else, grandmother, and I need someone to remember me back when I’m done.
Her grandmother nodded, and set a fire to melt tallow. From there, the girl went, breaking two branches of sumac, and set out to meet the monster. She grew then, with each step, remembering everyone she loved, remembering everything that mattered. And she grew, and grew, and grew, until she was the same size as the beast, her sumac branches as long as the trees, her dogs as big as the hills.
* * *
I pause then, and she asks me to keep going, what happens, and I laugh, and continue:
Then the little girl beat the shit out of the monster with the branches.
She laughs at the change in tone, more than I have seen in a long time.
I grin, having coaxed this out of her, until she stops eventually and I grieve. She asks what happened next, with the grandmother and the tallow.
* * *
After the little girl killed the beast, she came back to her grandmother, too big and cold and afraid. She didn’t want to stay so big. She wanted to come back.
I know, said her grandmother, who offered her the warm tallow.
The little girl drank, and it warmed her up and brought her back down to what she had been before. Everyone in the village was proud of her, then, for saving them, even though they didn’t think it had mattered, that she would die for no reason. But she hadn’t. They had been wrong.
* * *
What happens after that? Or is that the end? she asks, and I shrug. That's all I know.
How does it remind me of her, she wants to know, and I say that she’s the one who goes out to meet the creature. She doesn’t hide from it. When no one will look at the bodies of birds in the grass, she does, as monstrous as it is to hold what's left of them. She remembers.
She smiles then, sad, because this is my eulogy for her, and we know it. Thank you, she whispers. It’s all she can say, as she takes my hand, which says more. We keep them together for a long time, intertwined, the only change being the occasional squeeze, just to say: I am still here.
We sit on the porch then, and look up at the sky, now filled full with the silhouette of SwallowTail. We don’t know who made it, and it doesn’t matter. Just that it’s our fault. I don't know how it can be our fault, least of all hers. Except that we haven’t done enough. That my ancestors haven’t done enough, even after everything was stolen from them. This is another cycle of the same, of forced death, and removal, and starvation for singing. My ancestors survived it all, and for what? Even our future, now, is forfeit. It’s all we’ve ever known. A sky full of SwallowTail, and to listen as breaking news becomes standard reports, or not reported at all. What things have died this month, this week, this day. We find out online, through tired outrage. It’s mundane, the end. We grow used to the in-between of waiting to die, watching as the passage of time is told through the thing that took even the sky from us. It grows with each species it takes. Most days, you can’t see the sun, but between its wavering shapes, we can catch glimpses of the stars.
* * *
We sit in the cheap lawn chairs, and I want to tell her so badly that I love her. I want to say it to her, to take her hand to my lips and whisper it to her like it’s a secret we don’t both know. The world is ending, and I love you.
But I can’t. I won’t.
I swallow it down too, swallow it down and let it die, like the songbirds, and snakes, and peonies. Bury it out with the rabbit, under the redbud that's withered now too. It’s not worth it, to offer this up with no hope of it growing. It’s not worth it to risk losing her if I’m wrong. Each day, I will go to work and wait for her to call, wait to drop dead, wait for her to tell me she feels the same way.
On my off days, I go to her house and we sit together, listening to whale sounds and bird songs online. We go on walks through the dead grass park. We sit and remember the rabbit, and the peonies, and the ants, and we wait. I say nothing, but I am here. If she asks, I will hold her hand when the end comes.