“The Seven Feathers”
by Deborah Quirke
“Can you tell me a story, papa?” said Piper to her grandfather as he tucked her in to bed. He stopped and looked up at the small picture on the wall. Inside an old and slightly chipped, wooden frame lay seven feathers. In faded pencil were the words ‘lost songs’.
“Can you tell me the story about the seven feathers?” she asked.
He’d told it many times.
“Yes,” he said as he sat on the fading, blue rose-printed chair. “I’ll tell you this story. Then you have to go to sleep.”
*
A tall, dark haired girl in a navy blue uniform hesitated in the centre of the highway. Warning lights were flashing on her little gold Nissan. Behind her, the sky was dark. Storm shades. A wide dirt road with deep, muddy car tracks lead up to a prison. Corrugated iron sheds loomed over the highway junction. ‘Wheatbelt Work Camp’ was printed on a large, sage coloured sign. As she walked, the moaning wind lifted the long red and black tartan blanket she was carrying. It billowed slightly. Shifting her head only slightly to glance at an approaching car, her royal eminence carried the sky’s messenger to her golden carriage.
*
It wasn’t a sharp, musical whistle. It was a hungry, miserable, hoarse scream.
“Ghwart! Ghwart!”
“It’s alright. Everything is alright,” she said gently.
The closest town with a vet was a few hundred kilometres away. This was an indignant and scared parrot- a ‘Twenty-Eight’. The yellow belly of the Wheatbelt hybrid stretched into an iridescent, green-blue sea of opal-hued tail feathers. Piercing, reddish, brown eyes watched her. Without warning, it managed an almighty bird feat and wrenched its wings out of the blanket. She pulled over. A terrified, shocked bird flapping around inside the car was dangerous.
*
The bird and the Bird Queen looked at each other calmly. It was hiding behind her handbag on the floor of the car. She lifted the bird carefully and placed it on the ground. Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps it was concussed. It still faced a lonely death on the isolated road. If the hail didn’t kill it, a truck would have. She’d planned to release it where she’d found it. She would have to let it go. The ‘Twenty-Eight’ sat on the ground, spread its wings, then fell to one side. Its right wing was bent and useless. Time was going to kill it. The Bird Queen returned to her carriage.
“Ghwart! Ghwart! Ghwart!” it shrieked.
This wasn’t a soft, trilling chirp. It wasn’t a melodious vocalisation of any bird emotion she knew…. This was a burst of angry, indignant, unfriendly noise…a horrible anti-tweet. It twisted its head and bit her finger. Her husband would have said the bird didn’t need to be rescued…it needed an exorcist.
It was saying, “I’m sore and I don’t like the blanket!”
*
The vet in York had been closed for four hours- it was Sunday. No noise inside the car. Silence.
Under the seat, nearly an hour later, there were loud shrieks, “Ghwart! Ghwart! Ghwart!”
It made some little clicking sounds in the dark then…nothing. When she got home she placed the silent bundle inside a cardboard vegetable box and put it near the fireplace. The bird’s chest feathers were fluffed up. One eye was closed. Parrots can sleep with one side of the brain turned off, while the other side remains awake and the second eye open. One foot was tucked up and the claws curled. She wasn’t sure if it was dead or asleep.
*
She typed anxiously into the Google search engine,” How do you tell if a parrot is dead?”; “difference between dead and sleeping birds”; “dead birds”; “sleeping parrots”; “what do parrots look like when they are asleep?” An hour later, she still wasn’t sure. She wasn’t exactly the ‘Bird Whisperer’ she thought. She would drive to an after-hours veterinary hospital in Baldivis.
*
“Go straight to the Intensive Care unit. The surgeon needs to speak to you tonight” instructed one of the policemen after breaking the harrowing news, adding “We found a dead bird…a dead ‘Twenty-eight’ … inside a handbag.”
Trembling, he said, “I’ll drive straight to the hospital.”
As they turned and left, one of the policemen chided, "What the hell were you thinking? What the hell did you say that for?"
Cupped in her hands, the bird’s royal blue chin feathers had melted into black. The green tail feathers faded into a faded, winter blue. The colours seemed to change like the edges of an Okavango’s swampy sunset.
*
She had walked in his garden. The first time he saw her, she was holding a dead bird. Its eyelids were the same soft, faded grey as its worn beak and its feathers were onyx black against shocks of scattered white. It was here that she appointed him to bury a magpie. Piper bird. His first task for the Bird Queen was to be the royal grave digger. When he next saw her he, her most humble servant, gave her a feather. Each time he fulfilled this duty, he gave her another. Until now, there had been seven feathers. Piper bird. Cockatoo. Red-necked Cuckoo Shrew. Emu. Signet. Crow. Duckling. He knew that she was the Bird Queen when she uttered the words, “The world has lost another song.”
*
“What did he say?” the intern asked the nurse next to him.
Sorrow-filled, he walked past them. Her car had spun and slammed into a grey, metal barrier when a heavy freight vehicle skidded on oil foam, crushing her car into a ball. Trampled Gold Foil Bitumen Bird.
Puzzled, she said, “He said ...he lost the last song.”
The draft from the door blew a green feather under the Bird Queen’s hospital bed, where it glimmered like a tiny, smashed emerald. She lay like a cold vision. Her soul was pale blue. Her last breaths lay on a stony road. Reclaimed. Nature’s painful exchange. Seven feathers for seven birds. Final consecrations. The Bird Queen wasn’t coming home.
*
He began, “Piper, I am going to tell you the story of the ‘Seven Feathers’…”
The End
*Thsu took these photos on SL. This story is dedicated to three people I love ...a star...David Zubelgenubi, Shark ...and my dear friend Rocky Mystar.
