Novel: Over Echoing Embers, Chapter 1.

Chapter 1 — The Bird

Chapter 1 — The Bird

Everything is a mess. Moving sucks—especially when you’re forced out, because the industry changed under you and you suddenly found yourself declared obsolete, not ’cause you don’t know shit, but ’cause you’re old. So, no job, selling the forever house you built because a bunch of people you don’t know declared you a relic.

But that’s beside the point.

It’s a mess, especially going from a bigger house to a smaller... whatever this is. Things had to be split between the new apartment and storage.

I guess that’s why no one noticed the parrot—a dingy, not-well-looked-after thing whose beauty was once obvious: white feathers with flumes of yellow, orange, and brown.

Makes you feel sorry for it. But it wasn’t scared of anyone, just shuffled aside as the movers went in and out.

Lola must have been looking too. She finally broke the spell.

“Dad, whose parrot is this?” she asked, trying to grab it. The bird didn’t run, only edged away.

I was wearing work gloves, so I grabbed the bird, mainly because I didn’t want her touching it—I didn’t know what was wrong with the thing.

There was beauty in the bird—beauty, fear, concern, and, somehow, hope. The bird looked at me, then at Lola by my side as we examined it.

“Bet it belongs to a neighbor,” I said to Lola—and the world, really. “They need to do a better job of raising it.” I rotated my hands to see every side of the bird.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “What are you going to do with it?”

“No,” I said, because I already knew what she was thinking. “We’re not keeping it.”

She gave me a sad look.

“Even if we can’t find its owner, I have to take it to an animal shelter,” I tried to explain. “It’s a lot of responsibility to take care of an animal.”

That line didn’t work.

“Besides, dear, its owners might be looking for it right now,” I said, turning the bird so we could both see it. “I think it’s tired—maybe got lost—and the owner might be looking for it right now. You would be, right?”

She nodded.

“Loooooolaaa!” Toby shouted outside, demanding his sister’s attention.

“You should go and see what he wants,” I said as she rolled her eyes at a call she clearly didn’t want to answer.

I went outside myself, bird in hand, hoping someone would see me holding it. No one seemed to have seen it before, no matter whom I asked.

Back in front of our new home—no, our new just-temporary apartment, just wait till I get back on my feet and we’re moving again to a better place, even nicer than the house we were forced to sell—I looked at the bird, which had been staring at me the whole time, as if trying to decipher what I was going to do, hope and trepidation mingling in its eyes.

What am I going to do with you? Helen has the car; she’s coordinating the storage move, so a shelter run has to wait.

CRASH.

I bet something pricey just met the floor. And a new brand of anger surged over me.

I set the bird on the mailbox.

This isn’t the shit I need to deal with right fucking now.

If the owner found it, great; otherwise, tomorrow.

Inside: a mover had knocked a box of dishes off the island while wrestling a queen mattress down the hall.

“Really?”

“Did you not see the fucking thing?”

“Are you fucking blind?”

The young Latino guy was clearly sorry. He kept apologizing in Spanish and broken English.

“It’s alright,” I said. The guy was hired cheap, probably over-worked and under-paid. My real anger was reserved for the folks who hire labor they can underpay while whining about lost jobs.

Besides, it’s possible—the only hallway to the back bedrooms cuts straight through the kitchen, so the movers had to thread a queen mattress past the island.

That, …, and he really wasn’t whom I was angry at.

I can see exactly how it could have gone down and how I could have made the same mistake. But that didn’t cool me down any. Then I had to go and massage that rage—rage I can’t do anything about, the rage and the hurt in my heart I can’t explain. The injustice of it all.

I am blessed, more than a couple of folks, white people including, so I am grateful, for my kids who can telepathically sense my feelings and can be counted on to do something funny, and they had gotten my wife, who had just got back, in on the act.

“I think they broke the plates,” I said to her after a while, once they’d managed to drag a smile out of me.

“Oh,” she shrugged, “I’m not surprised. Moving day!” she added with a fake smile.

“Which one?” she asked a minute later, giving me the eh, babe, what are you talking about? look.

Imagine my surprise when I marched her to the kitchen and pointed at the upright, un-crushed, perfectly fine box of dishes that hadn’t looked like that just a few hours ago.

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The bird was only the beginning of the weirdness. But, that’s the end of the free chapter.
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