by Morgan Rose-Marie
It’s blue. This is the first thing Birdie notices. She fixates on the shade, matching it to memories like a DIY decorator comparing paint swatches. #03045e. Dark blue. 1.25% red, 1.6% green and a generous 36.9% blue. It’s a good color.
But, if it weren’t for the color, Birdie might appreciate the mailbox’s design. A bird with a spinning wing affixed to one side. Not exactly anatomically accurate. Whimsical, though.
“Are you alone?”
The question seems to emanate from the mailbox until it is repeated.
“Are you alone?”
Birdie takes a step back and the figure of a woman sharpens into focus. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“Well, I am not a stranger. I live here. My name is Ell—er—Mrs. Peterson.”
“That’s your mailbox?” With four fingers pressed together, Birdie stretches her hand out toward the box.
“Yes. Yes, it is. Do you like it?” Half of Mrs. Peterson’s face smiles.
“It’s a blue jay.”
“Good eye.”
“Blue jays are mean.”
“Excuse me?”
“They’re the Trump-ees of birds.”
“I’m not sure I follow.” The woman’s half-smile has vanished, and a puckered frown replaces it. “Do you live around here?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. Just so you know, Mrs. Peterson, blue jays aren’t really blue. They’re brown. It’s just a trick of the light that makes them look blue.” Birdie continues, more to herself, walking backwards, one cautious footfall at a time. “Blue pigment is rare in nature, and blue jays don’t have any.”
They aren’t truly blue.
“I met a neighbor.”
“Is that where you’ve been?”
Birdie wants to tell her mother about the mailbox designed to be a blue jay but sticks a mango sour Altoid in her mouth to pinch the thought away. “I met Mrs. Peterson at the house with the garden.”
Birdie’s mother had remarked on this very garden yesterday when they passed by it in the moving truck. It’s otherworldly, she’d whispered. It had sounded like a prayer. Yesterday Birdie couldn’t be bothered to offer it more than a passing glance.
“Did you ask her about the garden?”
“I want to take Bun on a walk.”
Her mother sighs. “How about after dinner when Dad gets home.”
Birdie is satisfied with the answer.
When Birdie had first asked for a pet, she wanted a bunny. Her mother suggested a Tamagotchi to start. (A blue one? Birdie almost asked.) Her father said he’d longed for a dog when he was a boy. There had been some contentious back and forth, during which Birdie briefly believed she would get a pony. After a therapist’s grounding intervention, they ended up with a cat that Birdie named Bunny and proceeded to leash-train.
“Bun doesn’t appear to have a destination in mind,” her father says that night to the back of her head.
With the loop of nylon over her wrist, Birdie meanders behind her cat, trusting he will take them exactly where she has in mind, and he does, flopping on his side in front of Mrs. Peterson’s sprawling garden.
“It’s like a sunset on the Elysian fields,” her mother observes.
“Or a sunrise,” her father counters, with an attempt at a playful hip bump that is too gentle to be truly uplifting.
A wisteria tree lords over the shivering magenta and mandarin orange ocean. Birdie pauses to drink in the magnificent sight, to wonder for the briefest of moments what it might be like to swim in sea of #FD3DB5 and #EC6A37. She leaves her parents in awe of the flora.
Birdie’s hand is shaking when she touches Mrs. Peterson’s mailbox. The pads of her fingers brush against chipping paint, which compels her to tip her nails in and help it peel off. Bunny’s ears perk at the sound, and he’s in the air, claws sinking into the post.
“Birdie!”
Turning to regard her mother’s stricken face, Birdie pulls the leash and yanks Bunny off the box. He puffs in indignation.
“What are you doing?”
“Inspecting. Bun and I—”
“Hello, there!” Mrs. Peterson has appeared, and Birdie recognizes her enterprise is over. For now, she reassures herself. Just for now.
She wishes she had Bunny’s eyes. Specifically she wishes her eyes had a tapetum like his to reflect more light onto her straining retinas.
Even though she is grateful the milk-white moon is more than half empty, its partial absence aiding hers, it also hides the mechanics of the mailbox’s wings. They cannot be.
She pulls, from the ground, and knows pulling will not work. She spirals the wing structure backwards before realizing there is no difference between backwards and forwards.
If you’d only been cardinal red #C41E3A or, even better, canary yellow #FFEF00 which has 0 blue…
In frustration, Birdie swats at the wing like she imagines Bunny would. She repeats the gesture with less than half her heart as her mind travels back to the daylight. Recalling Bun’s stunt earlier, she tests her weight against the post, then scales it, hoisting her body atop the box where she gets a closer look at the wing piece.
The base is cedar, and Birdie appreciates this. It was built with care. Just like the birdhouse she and her father built last winter.
“I like the smell of pine needles.”
“This isn’t a Christmas tree, Birdie. We need something durable. To withstand the weather.”
“We do get a lot of snow,” she reasoned.
Birdie had stayed quiet down the rest of the aisles, thinking about this. Thinking about all the things her father knew. Thinking about all the things that retreat inside when the snow arrives. Thinking about how ephemeral the snow is and the things that live inside, too.
The bird house had turned out perfect—all clean edges and neat corners. They’d presented it to her mother and installed it well before the holidays. “Human calendars don’t mean anything to the birds,” her father explained when she’d asked about waiting. Sure enough, a pair of robins moved in before the week was over.
They watched the robins make the house home.
As Birdie’s mother swelled, they watched them fill it with eggs.
And when her mother shrank too soon, they watched a blue jay break the eggs one by one.
When Birdie had asked why she was crying, her mother explained, “The damn blue jays. They ruin everything.”
Before that, Birdie thought they were lovely because they were blue. After that, she went searching for blue and learned how rare, how impossibly rare, true blue is on this blue planet. We aren’t meant to be blue.
The mailbox cannot be blue. It cannot be a blue jay.
Birdie grabs the two-in-one-wing that is not anatomical and too blue to be real and jumps from the box, believing her mass and the gravity of our blue world will right everything that is wrong as her body flies toward the ground. Life isn’t designed to reflect blue, she remembers, but to absorb it and its high-energy light. In the moon-light night she thinks of the robin eggs, their broken pieces, #00CCCC with no red, and how they are true blue because of the pigment, biliverdin, the same chemical compound that tomorrow will turn the skin at the elbow of her arm green.
Morgan Rose-Marie is a queer writer and an Assistant Professor at Utah Valley University. She serves as an assistant editor for Brevity. She has a PhD from Ohio University and an MA from Colorado State University. Her work has been featured in The Normal School, Heavy Feather Review, Tampa Review, and Pleiades, among others—some of which can be found at morganrosemarie.com.