'The Seven Feathers'- a short story about the Bird Queen by Dheborah Quirke.

“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. 

Just before a solar eclipse...

I took these photos recently on a back road between Bungulla North Road and Kunnunoppin in the West Australian wheatbelt .The moon was rising on one side  of the road and the sun was setting on the other. The night noises sent a strange kind of silence to the universe around me. I could hear a small animal moving in the dry grass nearby. We both saw something out there and we were unbearably alone.

Pauline Hansen: the way I read the burqa statement...

The strong  verbal reactions to Pauline walking in to the Senate in a burqa, were actually from members of parliament with ambitions so political correctness was a good retort. However...it appears the Pauline was making a much stronger statement than the obvious. This was not a "gag". 

She is opposing female oppression. 

'Enough Water For Seventy horses'-a short story.

“Enough Water for Seventy Horses”

a short story

by Dheborah Quirke

 I could hear the sound of metal screaming. It was a tortured sound of cold groans…moaning metal stretching as fumigated grain was poured into the shunted carriages. Metal against metal. Aching. Pained. It was almost like a muffled heartbeat, interrupted by a sound like rolling thunder with piercing staccato screeches. The noise of the saw grinding against the metal of the car door was making me feel sick. My dad said his teeth hurt when chalk squeaked.

Tonight she was late. A call came through from the ambulance crew, warning us to expect a casualty from the nearby Namelkatchem Reserve. Hurry up Tiffany; hurry up; Joey was thinking. Her night staff nurse hadn’t arrived. Joey didn’t know where anything was and Tiffany had to do the stock order. A second phone call came through. Tiffany wasn’t coming. Her car was lying upside down in the reserve. Driving in the dark, as she came around the bend near the turn-off to Minnivale, she hadn’t seen the shaggy, damp red kangaroo standing in the middle of the road.

Joey spoke to the nurse on call, “They were going to be a while. Can you come in and help me? I don’t know how bad it’s going to be,” she said. “Just get here as quickly as possible. There has been a smash and my night nurse hasn’t arrived. I’ll explain when you get here.”

I was cold and nauseated. Trapped inside the car, I closed my eyes and imagined I was inside the box. I peeled off brightly coloured cartoon stickers and stuck them over the inside. A shiny blue streamer hung off the back edge where a little whistle had appeared on a piece of string. Attached to the luminous orange foam ring on the right side was a squeaky ball. Two silver cardboard stars shone like sparkling headlights at the front. I remembered the day it was filled to the top with polystyrene balls. They squeaked as I moved and they stuck to me with the static of my body as I tried to swim in them. It was the most colourful, amazing, joy-filled box.

On my third birthday, I found a big brown cardboard box in the room my parents got their medication in.

“It’s a magic box!” said the nurse. She was kind of fat but her eyes twinkled.

“Wow! A magic box?” I exclaimed with my eyes wide open in excitement.

Northam had no x-ray services for the weekend. There was only one nurse at Wyalkatchem. The chopper couldn’t come in due to fog. She was given morphine while she lay on the gravel.  It was raining. A slow, trickle of rain against her face hid her tears.

The sound cut into her while the teeth of the cutting jaw chewed the metal. The car creaked and yawned like beast is in agony. She lay trapped in sound. Then, when it was silent…a hollow, lone bird sound pierced the night. This used to be where the horse teams stopped to rest. The reserve has wagon wheel scars. There was enough water for seventy horses.Tiffany's mouth was parched.

She tried to swallow and said softly, “I’m really thirsty!”

The box changed shape. It changed colour. I found surprises. Stickers. Luminous orange dots. Glitter. Glue. Pendants. Silver shapes. Ball-things. Tiny books with mysterious pictures. Sometimes, it was invisible. 

The magic box made a tooting, party sound some days. My dad, with sea-weed injecting site tattoo-colours on his legs, watched me in the box. A tiny colouring-in book once appeared, with bright, crazy crayons. Slowly…my box transformed into something magical; wonderful; most fantastical.

Methadone had melted my mother’s teeth to a marshmallow brown but she was beautiful and fun.  She called me Sylus. When she fell over, she would laugh and say, “I’m just a bit smashed.”

The box made her happy too.

Jules, my father, and Susanne’s daily medication was crushed into a white, chunky powder every day at two o’clock. Taken with a glass of water, it stopped the nausea.

“It keeps us off heroin,” my  mother said. They had to pay for the heroin.

Jules had held a shaky, loaded hand gun to a terrified girl’s head and shouted, “Drive! Just fucking drive!”

He served his time in prison for hijacking and robbery. Mum said she cried every day ... and she refused to wash her hair.The first time, I don't think she washed her hair until he came home five years later.

Before he went back to jail, he gave me a tiny golden gun on a solid gold chain. I didn’t understand why. He said it was because of something he did with an axe at a petrol station when he had to pay for the heroin.

“But dad, you’re not a bad person!” I said, confused. “You are always nice to me and really friendly.” I kicked the box and I shouted, “I don’t want your stupid necklace!”

The manager of the hospital told the cleaner to throw away the box. My whole life collapsed into a desolate, dark, nothingness. When I walked into the dosing room, the nurse told me.

“The box is gone,” she said.

“It’s gone?” I said in disbelief, “But it’s a magic box. I love the box.”

When I got home, I cried. The magic box…was gone.

I reached to touch the chain around my neck. My finger ran over the chilled, worn surface of the tiny gun. The ambulance would arrive at the State Trauma unit in two and a half hours. As the stretcher was wheeled out of the accident and emergency unit, I caught a glimpse of an old lady who was sitting with her eyes closed in a powdery blue recliner chair. I could hear a kind of rusty moan. I think she was singing. She seemed to be picking at some crumbs from a bit of chocolate cake and had just a hint of a smile on her face. Her lips were moving at the same pace as the music. She could shut out the pain and go to that place. It was somewhere she could sing and dance: a place so beautiful. She had…somewhere wonderful, magical, and most fantastical. She had enough water for seventy horses.

My shaking jaw felt like a size seven earthquake. I closed my eyes and poured my soul into their revealing, salt sea-green rivers. If I was to survive the night inside my shocked, splintered limbs, I had to find my box …ever wonderful, magical… most fantastical.

By Dheborah Quirke.

(This is not really the true story but the people are and I apologise sincerely to Jules who is  in prison for an armed robbery. I wrote this in the hope that his kids turn out to be strong and kind and I will never, ever forget the magic box).

Divine interventions....Mukinbudin's famous...fabulous birds.

photographs taken tonight by dheborah

Update: Ariana Grande concert deaths. May 22: Manchester

Reuters report that there are indications that the explosion at the Arana Grande concert in Manchester may be due to a suicide bomber attack.

Tues 23 May WA time: 10:03 Australia.

Explosion reported in England at Ariana Grande tour concert (England. Manchester 22 May concert date)

A large explosion has been reported by News.com.au, at the closing of an  Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. A large amount of deaths have been reported. Before the concert, police had been on alert after a suspicious package was cleared. Ariana has won 46 major music awards, including the  2016 Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards and has appeared on Australian X-factor.

W.A time: 23 May 2017: 09:35