Parts, by JACmRob
The Thing with Feathers
He'd never understood metaphors. Their assignment was to write at least a page on the meaning of the poem to them, and all he had come up with was 'I think this poem means…' She had come flouncing down the stairs with her three pages freshly printed, and clearing her throat, began to read: 'Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul. This poem—' He interrupted loudly to ask if everyone had a big fuzzy thing living inside them.
She told him it was symbolic, and that it was no wonder a big dunderhead like him couldn't understand the poetic beauty of the piece.
He retorted that Emily Dickinson was the dunderhead, and that she was obviously saying hope was a bird. However, his father had been a bird enthusiast and he had to say, he'd never seen a Yellow-Bellied Hope fluttering around.
She'd stuck her head up proudly and said that if he had any depth he would see Emily meant that hope can be compared to a little bird that still flies about through the darkest storms.
"Well then why didn't she just say that?" he'd countered.
She just sighed, and said Emily was trying to be poetic. Thus the poem. For example, she lectured, she didn't often or directly tell him that despite the worse parts of his personality, she still had hope that deep down he was a caring individual who just didn't like to show it.
He said that he still had hope that someday she'd sprout pudgy brown feathers and the Dodo would be back from extinction. And that wasn't a metaphor, he'd added as an after thought.
She'd stomped up to her room and refused to speak to him for the rest of the night, even after he'd pulled her hair when she was brushing her teeth and said that being flightless didn't necessarily mean graceless. Though, in her case, it probably did.
Then she'd screamed that he was a jerk and had to ruin everything for her, and wished he'd never speak to her again.
The next day, he'd stood up in English to deliver his paper.
"I think it's good that hope is always perched with us," he finished, "Because with the worst we do, we need to have hope that we'll be forgiven. And if hope flew away we'd probably just be jerks for the rest of our lives. Sometimes we are anyway, but at least hope lets us know that we don't always have to be."
She'd come up to him after and said that she was sorry for calling him shallow and that his paper was really good.
He only rolled his eyes and told her metaphors were still stupid, and that he had a bird-watching group coming to see her on Thursday. She hit him on the arm and walked away.
"Casey is the thing with feathers, that perches at the zoo..."
But, even she couldn't hide that she was smiling when he followed her around making bird noises. She crossed her arms across her chest and, trying not to let out a choked-back giggle, called him a dunderhead. He just asked if that was a metaphor, too.
A/N: Hmmm... this came to me while I was in the shower. I don't really know how or why. Give me your thoughts.