To the troubled girl in the park who inspired me that day 2 years ago.
Chapter One
The small bird lay on the table, the soft feathers of it's stomach exposed to the girl above. Taking the scalpel in hand, Astrid dove the tip into the beginning of the small bird's throat. Slowly and evenly she brought the blade cleanly and easily down the front of the thin torso, stopping about and inch above the underside of the tail. She opened the chest cavity with the small blade effortlessly, as though simply opening a zipper of a small child's coat.
With the small, fine surgical scissors, she revealed bone, muscle, and organs. She removed them with the care of someone moving a newborn kitten, placing them on the spread newspaper to her side. After the insides had all benn cut and scooped out, with her fingernails Astrid grasped the thin layer of fat that had once adheared muscle to skin. Gently, she peeled it off in thin, greasy sheets and placed it on the newspaper as well. The small pile on the newspaper resembling the scoopings of a pumpkin being carved. And like a carved pumpkin, Astrid was trying to make something beautiful.
She peeled the last layers of fat from the skin, the color of a greasy hawaiian sunset, and flicked them on the paper as well. Wiping her fingers off on an old dishcloth, she shifted the papers farther away on the table from her hollowed bird.
The 'table' was nothing but extraordinarily long, thick boards of wood balanced on sets of sawhorses. There were only a couple sticks of actual furniture in the apartment, those being simple stools, a couple small tables, and a bed. Those were from the local thrift shop, she and Paul weren't the kind of people who collected furniture and decorated.
She and Paul rented the apartment floor together. An artist friend of paul's hooked them up with this for a phenominally good price. Astrid was an artist and did requests, but some people were just as eager to buy anything she made. Her most recent hit were suitcase diaramas she created, symbolizing her different homes in the travels of her life. Distant countries she never wished to revisit.
Paul worked downtown in a little comic book store on the corner of two streets. A small place, a small job, but a job nonetheless. A glance at the small alarm clock resting on the floor in the closest corned revealed it was 7:34pm. Paul would be home soon, hopefully with some sort of food.
Pushing her long, blonde hair over her shoulder, she started on pushing the ends of the bird skin in, reversing it to be inside out. Astrid had read somewhere once that you did that when skinning small animals, but she wasn't quite sure it applied to birds as well. Taking the 20 Mule Team borax in hand, she rubbed it into the skin, paying special attention to the facial area. The borax would help preserve and dry it out. The holes where the eyes were facinated Astrid, and for a moment she played with the rim of one with the nail on her index finger. She worked the canvas of feathers right side out again and petted the soft feathers of the stomach lightly, thinking.
For the past week, an unusual amount of birds had been flying into into then umerous windows of the apartment, plummeting to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Astrid had grown a fondness for the still, lifeless bodies on the sidewalk below and had begun taking them up to the apartment and putting them in the freezer to keep them fresh.
She thought they were beautiful and melancholic in their stillness, and she wanted them to stay that way forever, preserve them. A photograph of their little forms would never have done them justice, she knew that because in the photographs she took, they just didn't capture the essence of the creature, the feel. It was then that she had gently carried her first one up to her home in a plastic bag to see what she could do.
Astrid and Paul didn't have enough money to take all the little birds to a taxidermist to have this done professionally. A few glances at books from the library and she had a general idea of what to do. She had never been squeamish or afraid of blood, so the work was easy. There was a surprisingly small amount blood, but she couldn't figure out where it had gone. Trapped in the organs perhaps? Opening up the defenseless little bodies had also made her inquisitive, curious, as to how these fleshy lumps she was removing from the inside had somehow made this beautiful creature alive. How could lumps of tissue do that?
The sound of the apartment door opening distracted her from these thought and she looked up from the table. The sound of tossed keys hitting the floor pierced where a moment ago there had only been silent ponderings.
"Astrid?" Paul's voice projected curiously. "You there? I got chinese." The crinkling of bags confirmed her hopes had come true. Food. She hadn't eaten since dinner the previous night, Paul had been away at friend's houses and she had been too busy with little projects to spare a thought to sustinence for her gnawing hunger.
Paul walked into the main room where she was with his bags, unwrapping his scarf from his neck. "Oh, you are here. Thought you mighta been at Laina's show or something." He walked over and gave a small kiss to the top of her head before setting the bags down on the large expanse of table next to her.
"Cancelled," Astrid said, pulling a small wastebasket from under the table closer. " 'cause of all the snow." She brought it to the lip of the table and pulled the newpapers in by their corners. She had to push in the large corners of the newspapers that stuck out, like prisoners hand's reaching out from their cells, begging.
"Where's all the blood, thought there'd be more." Paul said, shifting to sit on the table next to her. "Don't know. There wasn't really any. I think it's trapped in the organs or something."
Death truly was mysterious she thought, nobody knows much about it, and it made thiungs dissapear like a rabbit in a hat, dark and mysterious. Death takes away a lot of things. She thought back to Claire. So many things.
Astrid got up from her wooden stool and shut off the worklight next to her. She crossed from the main room into the makeshift bedroom. There on the wall on the right between the two rooms was the only sink in the place. She turned the knob for cold water and began washing away the traces of the bird from her hands. Blotting her hands with a dishcloth, she returned back to the main room and leaned against a wall.
Her bare feet were cold against the old, gray wood floor. The floors all throughout were all like this. Maybe at one point they had been finished, but years of this being starving artist's studios, it had been exposed to all the chemicals and paints you could imagine. Assumingly accidental paint spills and splatters adorned the floor, no hope of getting them out. It added to the patina though, as well as the fact that the two current inhabitants just simply didn't care.
The walls were brick with an old coat of white paint over them. That was probably new 20 years ago or so, now in most places it was gone or chipping, but one could grasp the idea of what it had been. In the brick were numerous windows, old and big, letting in large amounts of light. These were source of the recent avian body count.
Paul walked over and handed her a red-and-white carton, you could practically smell the sodium from it. It was sweet and sour chicken and Astrid plucked one off the top from the thin little cardboard nest. She took a bite and gazed thoughtfully at the bird. It reminded her of something but she couldn't quite place it.
Then it dawned on her. Claire. It reminded her of her poor, sweet Claire. So delicate and defenseless. An unfair death. Something haunting and beautiful.
A/N: This story is just something I've been playing with in the back of my mind for a while. If you wanna read more, just drop a review and tell me your thoughts and if you think it's worth the time. Thank you.