The Roach and Bird

The image of the roach walking near my laptop- I thought it was some

sort of hallucination. Its burgundy shell, I thought, must be the only thing

that keeps its insides intact. As if a roach is a composite of boxes,

separated parts that would otherwise crumble-if it weren’t for that red shell.

Its whiskers slanted forward-I wondered if it sensed us. When I saw it,

I gasped furtively and continued with the conversation I was having with

my parents. My intoxicated father, sitting on the couch with a blue bag

near his shoulder, was puking every so often. My mother, concerned for my

father, begged me:

“Ordenale algo a tu padre.”

But there was nothing opened. Really. I dialed Dallas BBQ and they had

stopped deliveries at 10pm. I called the local pizza place and no one

answered. And so, my drunk father went to sleep that night

on an empty stomach.

But that night, even before the roach, my father had stumbled into my room

as I slept, chanting sad things about how he was due to die and how

my grandmother (his mother) was talking to him, asking him to join her

in the afterlife. At the sight of my father, I had leapt from the bed and

pushed him away. What it was, I am not sure. Maybe it was my profession

that had made me instinctively afraid of any drunk man at night. Or

perhaps, I feared my father was dying right in front of my eyes,

experiencing a stroke or had been stabbed or something-I don’t know. But I

had pushed him hard enough for him to tear up, mumble inaudible phrases

of confusion.

More interesting I think, is the story of the yellow parakeet my mother

and I found at a shopping mall. The day she caught it, we had been arguing

about the nature of man. She had said something like:

“Ya sabes que los hombres aprovechan de uno y en el final

somos nosotras que quedamos solas y jodidas.”

In other words: “Men will take advantage of women. And women will,

in the end, be fucked over and somehow, end up alone.”

Or something like this:

Man+ Woman= Deceit=Man+ Another Woman-First Woman=Life Happens.

As if life really could be a set of equations and answers computed so easily. I may have shivered.

I may have responded with a mask of confidence, trusting that men

could indeed be perfect and without fault. I believed at the time that I

would be the living proof that true love is real. It was a good time in

my life-I was young and I wasn’t fat.

My mother knew how to break down my spirit, fragile at the time

and hopeful.

“ Tu crees que el no mirara las otras muchachas?”

“Tu crees que no se estara aprovechando de ti?”

“Quien crees que eres?”

Thinking back I guess she had a point- Who did I think I was?

Before I could come up with concrete answers, we had become

distracted by a crowd who’d gathered around a Vitamin Shoppe.

Onlookers searched the skies. I couldn’t see anything.

Someone must have shouted:

“ Look! Up there!”

Someone must have pointed to the left, then to the right. Young boys

and girls, I imagine, thought they would be witnesses to the

coming of Superman, Batman, or some other famous legend.

I won’t lie, whatever it was in the sky, it too, made my heart flutter-

as if this was the arrival of my very own saviour.

Of course, it is no surprise to you that the thing in the sky was a bird,

a yellow parakeet lost and confused.

The disoriented bird had managed to get itself on the ground.

My mother feverishly shoved herself through the crowd, flailing her arms,

shouting:

“ Es mio. Mine. My. My.”

I watched in awe as she smiled at the people who had gathered around her

now. She knelt and slipped the bird into a plastic bag.

When she rose, some clapped and shook her hand. And the crowd

receded almost as fast as it had aggregated.

As for the parakeet,

I wondered if it had chosen not to fly for fear of the vastness of our skies.

As the years passed, I found myself oftentimes staring at the little bird,

now in a small cage it shared with an aggressive cockatiel and a

yellow-green lovebird. I developed a case of

chronic anxiety-fluttering heart syndrome as I call it-due to their

continuous squabbles. After almost 6 years with the bird and more than

a decade with the old cockatiel and the lovebird, my mother had grown

negligent and bitter toward them. One year, I had bought a cage three times

larger than their original cage, only to discover its deconstructed parts

in the garbage-and at home, excuses that the cage was “demasiado grande”

and a hindrance to the maintenance of our home, always somehow

in gradual demise.

But the most interesting thing, really, is the day I discovered my bird

was no longer in its cage. Due to my condition, I had given up on saving

the birds. I had settled on letting them rot inside because I couldn’t feed or

ater them without the urge of setting them free, which would have been

a sure death. They would be eaten by the hawks in our area and would

not be used to the sudden exposure of heat, of cold-I didn’t know which

was worse. Instead, every morning I’d insistently remind my mother:

“Dales de comer. Dales de tomar.”

Or nudge my father, tell him:

“Make sure to feed them. Give them some water.”

Whether they followed through with my commands, on most days I was

not sure. I had made a vow to not investigate. I had a little dog now,

growing older by the minute, suffering a new set of plagues

I needed to address.

But yes, there was a day I looked into the cage as I sat in the living room.

And well, there were many theories as to what had happened to our little

bird. The bird, they said, did many things. My sister said it died, like our

old one- a blue bird named Mustafa we had when we were toddlers.

She said it fell unto the cage’s edge like a feather. And I suppose, if my

sister is right, it must have been picked up by my mother, and it must

have been rigid and cold. But my father-he says it had stopped eating.

In its paramount effort to escape, it had grown thin, and

after so many years, squeezed out from its cage.

I like to think that maybe    it succeeded.