The life of a collared dove

A Story by Rana

a piece of life-writing

My parents were pleasure-seeking extroverts. They often had friends over for dinner-parties or barbecues where my dad drank too much beer from the cooler he put outside for convenience, and my mom had too much wine from her crystal wine glass. It was on one of these evenings, not long after I buried the bird, that my parents invited a group of their friends, who all brought their children to play with me and my brother. These were kids that Ben and I would not have made friends with on our own, but through the forced togetherness during these evenings, we became what I would now term, loose acquaintances. Noel was the oldest, three years older than I was. He was tall and skinny, with dark hair and eyes. I was always between seeking his approval and being disgusted by his rough way of speaking and his dirty hands. His younger brother Justus was less remarkable in my memory. He was a wiry boy, timid and quiet, with big, light green eyes that saw everything but understood nothing.

‘Who wants to see something cool?’ I asked them in German.

They assented. I remember Lea nodding with her pale doe-face. I hated her.

I took them outside the iron gate beyond the driveway and approached the mound. We stood there, five primary school children with grim faces, towering over the final resting place of a little collared dove, when I dropped down and dug it up. I want to say that I did not lift it back up, but knowing me, I am not too sure that I did not. I cannot remember now what all these kids said, but I remember the ants. The glistening black ants crawling all over the sand-covered carcass. Its eyes were dried up and hollow.

When the dust came low in the evening, daylight faded particularly slowly. We ate hotdogs on the stoop and talked about school. None of these kids went to the same school as me or my brother, who was in kindergarten at the time. He sat next to me, ketchup smeared around his lips, and did not speak.

‘More sausages, kids!’ My dad offered us each another sausage from a big red plate. An apron was tied over his beer belly. There was a photo of a well-defined six-pack printed on it.

We grabbed the sausages with our hands and wiped our greasy fingers on our pants when we were done. Out of colourful plastic IKEA cups we drank sprite and orange juice. I always lifted my pinkie to show that I was civilised.

Night came and grew cool, though the air still had that certain heaviness it carried from the desert in the daytime. Our parents were sheltered within rings of white and yellow light from camping lamps and candles in glass jars. Their faces harboured long, fluid shadows that distorted their eye-sockets. A song by Udo Jürgens played from the boombox next to the table. It was a song I knew well, a song that, even today, I associate with my father and with these boozy soirées.

I watched my mother for a few moments. Her arms were folded under the plaid scarf that was wrapped around her shoulders like a blanket. A faint smile played over her lips, though her gaze seemed distant. Her eyes were shining. She reached for a cigarette and lit it. Her mouth grew small and wrinkly as she took a drag.

I visited my parents last November and found a diary entry from 2018 that details a defining feeling for my sixteen-year-old self. It is a feeling that receded into the archives of my emotional catalogue for the last two or three years but has come back after what I did in Frankfurt, and I kept wondering why it all felt so familiar.

‘June 9^th 2018.

I feel stuck. Waiting.

I’m getting that feeling again.

Where I’m cold but it’s not cold.

The AC is off.

I want to cry. But I can’t bring myself to.

I want to go and make something happen.’

I remember writing this sitting at my desk just before moving for the fourth time. As I took the pictures off the walls a deep urge came over me to see the place empty. I wanted to know it was just a room like any other. It was not some magical place where time moved slower than on the mainland; it was just a house, just a room. All that was left when my things were packed were countless scabs of blue tack and the faint smell of nail polish.

My new room had one orange wall, the colour of a ripe peach. The movers set up the IKEA bed that had followed me since I was a child and left me in a nest of brown boxes. I had a wall of windows facing West and I still remember the first sunset. It was dusty. The sun sank down between the houses on the opposite street, leaving the sky the colour of a dried bougainvillea in summer. A twilight the colour of nothing set in and I turned on a light so yellow it made my face look sickly, almost green. To my great dismay, it was the same face that looked back from the floor length mirror; the same short blonde hair, almost copper in this light, the same eyebrows three finger-widths apart, the same crooked teeth.

I began unpacking my boxes then, unpacking the things that belonged to the person I wanted to leave behind. A butterfly piggybank, journals fattened with writing, torn friendship bracelets. I was convinced that I could leave my sadness, my inadequacy behind in the blue-walled room of my early adolescence, but here it was, the tangle of threads that I willingly put back in my mouth so they could sit in my stomach, knotting the life out of every good thing.

I saw all the little acts of cruelty that speckled my childhood not as a testament to learning and growing but as proof that I was always bad, always evil and rotten and selfish. I remembered, then, catching that bird in my rabbit’s cage and clipping its wings so it would not fly away. When it died, I took it outside by its stiffened feet, just beyond the gate of our driveway and buried it. I dropped onto my knees and dug a shallow hole in the sand between our house and the neighbours and placed the bird inside. A stick marked its grave. Though it was early in the year, the days in the desert were warm, and sand was everywhere. I never wore shoes if I did not have to, or pants, just a flowered vest top and my underwear�"and that is how I went outside that day for the makeshift funeral.

Now, years later, I no longer live in the room with the orange wall. I only lived there for a few months before leaving again. With each move, I thought I could reinvent myself, become someone new, someone better, but I just kept running into myself wherever I went. The threads were still there, and they were still tangled. After leaving the desert for Europe, I missed the dusty sunsets that seemed to last forever.

‘Paris’ by The 1975 has been on repeat in my head, in my room, in my car for the past two weeks since I drove home from Frankfurt. It is March 22^nd, 6:15 in the evening and the sky is an electric yellow that reminds me of the desert. The air is warm, a familiar feeling, but one that is still so new this time of year when the weather is just turning. The birds are calling to each other as they always do, but I am not ok. I am nursing a cold and these past weeks have left me more lost than I have been for the past two years, and it all feels so fitting under the awning of the yellow sky.

In the chaos, again, it is the little bird that returns. It did not occur to me then, but that was when I grasped the concept of consequences; that the choices I make have the potential to hurt others in a way that is irreversible. It is a lesson I have been reminded of once again after the choice I made in Frankfurt and has given rise to one final question. Am I intrinsically bad, or am I just unsure of who I am in this world?

Noel and Justus’ mother died last year. It was breast cancer. I no longer know these boys, who by now, must be men, but I thought of them then, of how fleetingly our paths crossed and uncrossed. And then I thought of their mother and though it was not her choice to die, how she hurt her children by doing so. How they must be grieving. I am working to disentangle the threads in my belly, to find a way to be in the world so as not to hurt, but after what I did, I am back at the beginning, humbled.

© 2024 Rana

Author's Note

1534 words

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Ballpark Frank

We're you trying for a story of 1500 words? Just curious. This intrigued me. Lots of random thoughts here that somehow tied together very nicely. Your imagination Is vivid. I like how the end summarizes what the main character learned. Excellent.