When I was twelve I killed my parakeet. She lived for a few years after I killed her, but she was not herself—she was thicker, slower, had to beat her wings twice as hard to get into the air.
Before I killed her she was at the apex of energy, and in love with me. When I got home she flung herself against the bars of the cage, chattering and shrieking and beating her wings, wanting out. When I let her out, she wanted either to be tearing something up (the edge of my father’s refinished wooden closet, the jade plants, my mother’s cookbooks) or to be sitting on my shoulder talking to me. She never learned human noises other than wolf whistles; but she was convinced I spoke parakeet—or, as my mother suggested, that a parakeet lived in the back of my throat.
If I stopped talking to her, she stretched her neck and hooked her beak around my hair to pull it out of the way and get back to my face. If this didn’t work, she began flying from shoulder to shoulder, trying to land on my nose—or she sat on the crown of my head and slid down my hair sideways, dangling into my eyes.
She loved to bathe in the sink with the water dripping when my mom washed lettuce (to avoid bird on our food, my mom gave her a separate leaf, one from the middle, coiled tightly to make a little private pool). She’d shake herself and puff out her feathers, getting drips from the faucet on all parts of her neck. When she was too wet to fly, she’d let me hold her in my cupped hands, completely enclosed; she’d blink her scaly gray eyelids shut, and nibble dreamily on my thumb.
It was on an afternoon when she was particularly frenetic, shrieking and flying at me with the little feathers on the top of her head raised, unwilling to leave me in peace, that I tried to lock her in the cupboard with the silver bowls. Normally she liked these; she could see herself in them, and would play quietly. But today she wanted me, only me, and when I tried to close the cupboard door quickly, there was a tiny thud of resistance and she dropped to the counter, flopping in a circle, head bent back stiffly, making a thin repetitive cheeping that did not stop.
What had I been wanting to do? What had seemed so important that I couldn’t spare time to play with her? I do not remember. But I remember her little circles, the awful wrongness of them, the flight gone from her body, the alertness shifted from her usual fierce curiosity into pain. I scooped her up, carried her two stories up the spiral staircase to my room, and cradled her on my bed, sobbing, regretting my hasty irritation more than I had ever regretted anything in my life.
My little blue parakeet taught me my first lesson in the fragility of bodies. She taught me the ease of killing, the horrible afters that can follow a careless now.
And she taught me, on a day long before my impatience, another lesson.
The window was cracked in my room, and she was playing on the curtain rod. I didn’t see her slip, but when I heard her wings rattling against the glass and looked up, I realized she’d fallen out. I was down the stairs and out the door in stockinged feet, following her, calling, following, inarticulately praying she would not fly into the tall trees. She was calling in her loudest voice, terrified by this enormous place with sky, but flying, beating her wings hard, as though she didn’t know what else to do. I followed her, climbing the hedge into the communal yard of the ten-story apartment building one street down, where she landed in the crown of a maple sapling. She called and called, little body all throat, white cap on her head standing straight up, and I called back, tried to whistle but my lips were trembling, climbed slowly to the highest branch that would hold me, pressing my chest against the trunk, wanting to get close but afraid of startling her up and away forever.
I knew my proposition was impossible, calling a bird home out of the sky, which had become a terrible inverted bowl of blue, a vast probability against return. I held very still, calling softly. I did not know where to put my hands.
And then tiny claws in my hair, the weight of the beating of wings. I climbed down, rigid with hope, walked like a girl in finishing school with a stack of encyclopedias on her head. But the claws did not budge. What was she thinking? Was it love, or fear, or bird-brained insanity? I do not know; but those claws in my hair felt like choice. It was me she chose, over the sky.