Chapter 2: Sentimental Trash

"My Name is Margalo. I come from lands once lush with green and thistle. I come from bales of meadowsweet, and I love to whistle."

Ol' Meadowsweet Farm. Shrewsberry Vermont, 1995.

"You'd never let me fall," I remember asking her. "Would you?"

Chips and twitters sprinkled the quiet that followed my question. Happy, familiar bird sounds. Conversations half a mile away. I was surrounded by members of my own kind. Flocked by flocks of birds who'd mastered the art of flying.

That did nothing for the dread filling my stomach that day, and it only got worse every time I peered over the edge of their nest. But the vibrant pair of wings that gently, wrapped around my shoulders did. "Of course not," my mother told me.

We were perched on the corner of the old jewelry box, just the two of us. This was my favorite place in the whole world. When it came time to lay her eggs, Mom had found something better than weaving together some thin twigs between tree branches. The idea radiated Mom's cleverness: Picking a space for our nest that would stay intact for all seasons, through the wind and rain and snow and ice.

To be fair, I had never actually seen Mom make her own real nest from scratch. But I'd never seen Mom unsure of anything. I was convinced that, if she had to, Mom could make a fine nest. The best, in fact. Just like everything else she did.

I don't remember much about Mom's past, if I learned anything. I never thought to ask her questions about herself. It's shameful to admit, but I don't even remember her real name anymore.

What I do remember is that I cherished her company, and this sense of calm it brought me, even as my eyes swept across the far away ground below our home.

The rectangular box we called home was laying on its back with its two long doors open on their hinges, one of which was gray and weather battered, the other missing. The drawers on the right side of the box that were designed to hold bracelets, rings, and lucky coins were also long gone. Other than that, the box was still intact. In fact, on the left side of the inner partition, that wall that divided the box into two symmetrical halves, came with a mirror. It was scratched and scuffed and caked with dirt, but I loved our mirror floor. My brothers and I'd pass time by making stupid faces into it. Sometimes we'd make a game out of it. Whoever broke down and laughed first lost, and would get stuck cleaning the box all by themselves.

It sucked when I lost. I couldn't scavenge outside for fresh bedding materials, because I still hadn't flown anywhere. The idea of leaping over the edge for the first time and being expected to stop myself from falling was terrifying. And 'cause I still couldn't fly, I couldn't help my family with more important tasks than bedding. Like finding food.

My brothers had taken their first flights months ago. They hadn't gotten far. In fact, one of them plummeted straight to the ground from our nest. Thankfully, there was a patch of tall grass there to cushion the fall. I sat and watched as they got a hold of fluttering inches over the ground. Flying in small bursts first. As their wings grew stronger, they didn't need to stay close to the ground. They didn't need the grass to cushion their falls anymore.

In a few days since their first respective flights, they'd both managed to return to the nest to be with Mom and I. I resented them, and I knew they hadn't done anything to deserve it. They were just growing up, and I wasn't.

"I found something."

Mom's voice pulled me out of my thoughts. "Huh?"

She pulled her wing back down to her side, turning to face me. "On my rounds today. Wanna see?"

I nodded eagerly. Every few days or so, Mom would leave the nest and come back, her satchel crammed with food and home making materials. Sometimes she would find treats for us, and even toys, too. Once, she found a little rubber ball that the boys immediately claimed as their own, to play in the grass below. I remember how I would sit and watch them from the edge of the box, quietly jealous. I tried to make myself feel better by telling myself that they wouldn't want me to join them anyway, even if I didn't fully believe it.

Today, I watched as Mom reached into her rag-made satchel. and produced a long strip of bright, teal colored cloth. It was soft and clean. Such a pretty color, too. It reminded me of the nearby lake I might have wanted to fly across someday. In the summer, the water was a deep, pure blue. But in the winter, when the clouds would white out the sky, the iced-over waters turn a lovely powdery green. Winter here in the north was just as pretty as summer, at least I thought so. It was a shame it got so cold. Only some single birds who haven't yet started families voluntarily stayed behind in the winter. Maybe they appreciated what seemed like a totally underappreciated beauty of winter, too.

As many things as Mom was, I didn't think she had an eye for fashion. Occasionally, she would rip out pieces from magazines that she liked for bedding. Maybe it was an interest she kept to herself. "I'll help you tie it on!" I told Mom.

But she shook her head. "It's not for me."

She took the ends of the cloth in both wings, and draped it around the back of my neck, fastening it in the front. "Where'd you get this?"

"There's an old doll shop in the township five miles away. I've passed by many times. The owner seems like a sweetheart. She has a cat, but he's an old thing. Mostly sleeps by the window. Doesn't even bat an eye when he sees me. Anyway, the owner woman has a feeder filled with seeds in the back of her store, facing her backyard, so I know she likes birds. I'd been eyeing this scarf for a while, and today she caught me on the window sill, staring at this doll that had it tied around its neck. She looked at me, and it was like she read my mind. She gestured for me to stay put, then untied the scarf, and came out the front doorstep. And she held it out to me. I couldn't believe it!"

I loved when Mom told me the stories of where she'd been, and what she'd seen. I'd never seen a human before, but they seemed like funny creatures. All I learned about them at this point was from Mom's interacting with them. Stories like this made them seem so kind. I didn't realize until I was older that it was likely Mom would pick and choose which stories about humans to tell me. She didn't want me to fear humanity, even if, as I got older, I realized there were many reasons to.

This gift confused me. "But it's not my birthday."

"No. But I've been searching all over for just the right thing."

She hopped down into the box and approached the little pin in its corner, gently sliding it free of the tangle of frail twigs that kept it in place. The pin was the only thing original to the box left inside when Mom settled into it. Its size suggested it had been overlooked and thrown away with the box by its owner, long ago. I always felt sorry for that little pin, sitting there all lonely in that corner. Small and forgotten.

Mom gently brushed off the dirt from the bead with her feathertips, and fastened it into the scarf around my neck. "Can't pin a pin onto air. Can we?"

We turned and looked down at ourselves, in the dingy mirror that made up part of our floor.

I knew everything about Mom as she was, then, but I didn't know anything about her past. About her childhood, or our grandparents. About our father, Mom's one and only Mate-For-Life, whom I can only assume later she had lost contact with at some point. I never thought to ask. Whatever she'd been through, she was made tough. Tougher than I'd ever be. And that made her the most beautiful bird I've ever known.

While I was still studying my reflection, she'd reached around, retrieved the pin from its home, nestled in the corner, and fastened the pin into the front of my new scarf. When she was done, she backed away. "Wow…" She turned away, shielding her face.

"What?" I asked, suddenly worried. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, baby." She pulled her wing down so I could see her face. Her eyes were wet with tears, but she was smiling what might've been the biggest smile I'd ever seen on her. "I just had this incredible deja-vu moment."

"De-ja-vu?" Now there was a new phrase for me.

"It's like when you feel like you're relieving a moment you've already lived, long ago. Only you're in my place, and I'm in my mother's place. And the mirror is the puddle by our nest." She turned her face away and tried to wipe away a tear discreetly. "I knew I would feel this way someday, I just didn't think it would hit so hard."

And I patted her shoulder, because I didn't know what else to do. So much was said there that went right over my head. What could I even say to all that? There was so much emotion on her face all the sudden. So much... Pride? At me? And it came totally from nowhere.

I didn't get it. I hadn't done anything to earn that.

I went back and studied my reflection, now with the pin. Compared my looks with hers. She was taller and broader than average, for a bird of our kind. Beneath her feathers, she was all muscle. I've seen her satchel weighed down with food, and she still makes flying look easy. She could carry all us kids in a sack across the ocean she needed to. Not that she'd ever need to, but it was a comforting thought.

But I never really saw a resemblance between the two of us. Maybe I recognized the colors that made up my mother's feathers made the colors in mine. But I had no muscle. I lacked the smallest sense of confidence that made me the seed of a warrior.

I reached up and touched the bead. It had a little weight to it, which later clued me in on the idea it wasn't just plastic. It was small, but it wasn't costume jewelry. I always thought of it as greenish blue, but up close, now, it seemed pearly. Against the jade of the scarf, it looked like it was glowing. Spotted, like a little moon.

The image that reflected back at me in our smudged, cracked floor mirror looked like collage art. I remembered how ugly my wrinkled, pink skin looked when I was newborn. At least I looked like a member of their kind, with feathers. Now, I'm so many colors. I'm yellow and brown and green and white that blend in with the foggy green wilderness.

I turned to Mom again. I couldn't savor this moment. I needed her to tell me the truth. "Would you ever push me out?"

Mom answered confidently. "No."

"Never?"

"No."

"But Ceylon says the other bird moms kick their kids out."

"I don't care what they do." She said this so calmly. "I'm not them."

"You wouldn't push me out for any reason? Any reason at all?"

"Not unless you ask me to."

"But what if you get tired of me never asking?"

"That won't happen."

"But what if I never LEAVE THE NEST?" I shouted so loudly, my voice echoed across the plane. I threw my wings outwardly in frustration so hard that two of my longer feathers fell out. They fluttered and landed onto the mirror, joining the other feathers I'd already shed in the past few days.

My own voice echoed in my head. I felt my body shaking as I looked from my newly lost feather, back up at Mom. All the unjustified pride she had for me was gone, now. But she didn't look angry. She looked concerned. She must've known then what I figured out by now: It wasn't healthy for a bird to be losing so many feathers. I wasn't sick and I wasn't malnourished, but it kept happening anyway. It had to be psychological. Combined with my outburst, that kind of stress was just not normal. Not something a child should have, anyway.

I reached up and felt the tiny patch growing on my shoulder. If this kept up, I was gonna be naked again, like I was as a baby. Wouldn't that be so fitting.

I didn't even know I was crying. I didn't know until Mom reached forward and cupped my cheeks, making my eyes squint and my tears ball up and run down the sides of my face.

She made me look into her eyes. "Baby, listen to me. Really, listen. When you're ready, you're ready. That's all there is to it."

I tried to be tough. I tried to look stoic. But when I tried to speak, I croaked. "But I don't want to let you down."

"It would take a lot more than that to let me down, Margalo. The truth is I would still love you every bit as much as I do now, even if you decide to never fly. But I can't deny the usefulness of it, or how much of your self worth rides on it. Worrying about it is only gonna make the idea more loathsome to you. Your life is not a scheduled event. You are an individual, and you'll live your own unique story. I believe you will get that urge to leave the nest one day. And I believe you will learn to fly. And you will make me proud."

She pulled me in for a hug, her body was warm and her heartbeat strong in my ear. She said these heavy words with the same unwavering conviction she said everything. The same voice of wisdom that taught me right from wrong was confidently telling me I would be okay.

This moment became one of my most vivid memories. But as the years passed, it came more to haunt me than comfort me. It played in the back of my mind as I turned my back on my consciousness, and became a damn good thief.

Seven Years Later

Your life is your own story, she said. Oh, brother. I wonder what she'd say if she learned of the kinds of twists and turns I'd experienced that got me here.

I'll never forget the time, years after I left our abandoned jewelry box, I swiped a necklace from this one woman in an outdoor cafe. It was held on with a clasp that, even with my then razor-sharp reflex, could not undo fast enough to get away before she caught me. In hindsight, it was a pretty careless job. But it was an expensive necklace, too. I couldn't pass it up, even if the risk was high.

It was one of the few times a human had ever immediately realized I'd stolen something right off of their body. I felt the wind rush past my ear as she swiped for me, missing only by a hair. I heard desperate, vulgar shouts in my direction. I could sense her jumping and swatting in the air in vain as I soared upward.

Mom was right about a few things: I did leave the nest. And I did learn to fly. But Falcon taught me how to fly like a bird of prey. How to use my little wings efficiently, to get up to a speed not thought possible by most songbirds. This was something crucial to me, if I were going to survive this new life, in the real world.

At some point, the woman must've realized then what all my victims do: Her accusation sounded nuts. Even if there were witnesses to back up the story, once something was stolen, it was game over. Animal control never did much to help. They once set up a trap with a fake costume necklace that was so stupidly obvious, I set it off with my toe just to give them the trouble of checking it. Pettiness and robbery go hand in hand.

And while the N.Y.P.D. might take reports of theft somewhat seriously, they had more important things to do with their manpower. Honestly, even on a slow day, it seems they'd rather swing by Dunkin to pick up a package of doughnut holes and coffee than follow a steadily increasing string of robberies by a bird wearing a leather dogfighter's cap.

The sad fact was, that woman was never going to get that necklace back. And once I was high enough in the skies, I thought I had escaped everything, any and all consequences of my actions.

I was wrong.

"BENNY! That bird!" I heard her shout after me. "It's got my mother's necklace!" And then the voice reduced into sobs before the distance between us became too great for me to hear her anymore.

Something cracked inside me then. I thought I stopped caring so long ago. I thought after so many thefts, my heart was hardened to this kind of thing. Emotions I thought packed away long ago, in order to survive, were flooding out of my heart.

Why? Why'd she have to say 'mother?'

As the pearls dangled at my feet, I felt the weight of the pin on my neck, and all it meant to me. This once encounter with a human finally affirmed something to me.

I am nothing like my mom.

I would never make her proud.