In sleep, Mary dreams of pinions and tailfeathers, of the empty hole between her beak and her throat, where her unspoken desire can escape.
When she wakes Mary feels rustling deep inside. She hears it over the sound of the nurse brushing Mary’s long hair from its tangled nest, over her husband and the doctor in the garden below. She eats breakfast for the first time in weeks, gluey porridge and an orange, tinctures the nurse places beneath her tongue. She holds still and silent, swallows as instructed. But deep inside her womb, Mary senses a creature perched like a comma, like there is a clause after this months-long pause.
Later, her husband insists Mary is excited again, reminds her not to read or write, send her imagination soaring that way. He holds a hand to her flushed forehead as if to say, “Look what you have done,” and she feels the weight of his insistence.
Her doctor agrees, forbids Mary the watercolors she has been using to paint the majesty of the peacocks strutting the grounds of this hospital masquerading as an estate, courtyards and carriage houses along with bars on the windows, the ties that bind Mary to the bed.
The colors are magnificent, she knows, even from her window so many stories above. She looks down, down at the bleeding of blue imperceptibly to green, the eyespots looking back at her like a terrible knowing, like even the birds monitor if she eats, sleeps, wants too much a child.
Wanting is why Mary is here, her desperate desire for a child a sickness, her husband said after the first blood and the next, after she wept at the mass she passed under the moon, held it wailing in her hands as the owl shrieked, darting towards a mouse, swallowing it whole.
She felt consumed by her grief and need. She felt the pulse and seep if she stood too quickly or when her husband tried to caress her late at night, a tearing she could not explain except the pain shot through and she found her face suddenly wet.
Still, Mary hoped for a child, the stirring she had felt before, along with the sense she was finally not alone, isolation a terrible thing with feathers that overtook her sometimes like afternoons stirring milk into her teacup or when she spied her reflection in the looking glass, dove eyes and pinched silent mouth.
When she imagined herself pregnant once, twice, a dozen times, the doctor looked over his spectacles with concern and said it was not real. Phantom pregnancies, he explained as her husband gripped her hand so hard she could see the whites of his bone beneath, were common after so much loss.
Now Mary was here, the peacocks squawking outside to alert the world to their vibrant beauty, their unusual splendor in a world that preferred women like brown hens, her own husband in suits of canary yellow and flamingo pink, linen that breathed while her own cotton gowns and now the hospital sheets stifled like a cage.
But the stirring, she knew, was real. She imagined something hunched inside of her as the leaches sucked madness from her blood, later when she stepped into an ice bath.
She could not come home, her husband said. She must rest, the doctor said. The burden grew heavy inside and her breathing labored.
Days she heard the peacocks and watched the robins fight on the grass, the male pinning down the female as she cried out, her resistance to the inevitable piercing the air.
Nights she imagined the child a bird. Feathers, bones as hollow as she felt. She knew she was growing not a sparrow but a bird of prey, talons gripping her flesh, the restless desire to hunt. She grew afraid, cried out for a glass of water, a little cake, for the windows to be flung open so she might grip the bars in terror and scream into the void.
When at last she delivered her premonition, slipped a creature unrecognizable from between her legs, slick with blood and her effort, feathered body indeterminate as it began to dry, the doctor adjusted his spectacles, demanded to know who had indulged her sick fantasy, and her husband retched into his cardinal red pocket square, and the blue-black raven fixed her with eyes dark as glass, and slipped easily through the bars and open window to the waiting sky.
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