:: Searching for Puck... ::

:: Monday, October 28, 2002 ::

On the death of doves.

When doves die, it is not peaceful, or elegant, or quiet. I remember, vividly...I was 12, and my mother was in love with a man far away from our safe little haven in cape may. I was alone in a house that would have been condemned..and I had 27 birds, a dog and no phone or food. This is not about my mother and her not taking care of me though...it is about the doves.

Two diamond doves. I loved them, more than anyone could know. They were perfect, not garish, not loud...in fact they barely made a sound. They were quiet, in their little grey ways...orange eye-rings made them seem all the more quieter, speaking for them in hues. They were so perfect...so beautiful, and they made me feel like I was right. Like I was loved. They let me hold them. And then one night I found one at the bottom of the cage...dead, I had thought. I picked it up and wept, as children do, for its soul. And it stirred. So I stepped into a pile of trash and refuse and yanked, with my yet-small free hand, the ancient heat lamp out of the rubble of my life. I hurried with it to the bathroom...the only clean room in the house..and I plugged it in hurriedly, fetching a towel to cradle the dove in. I sat on the toilet and wept for my little bird, cradling it to my chest gently beneath the heat lamp. Then I looked down and saw red. The whole floor...red as scarlet, liquid, reflecting my wondering eyes. I let my gaze wander sideways and saw my foot, slashed open somehow, in that trek across the pile that used to be the living room. My bare, pale foot...a child's foot..stained and marred, utterly covered in blood. And ants. There had been a colony I had disturbed when I telescoped the lamp's neck to shine on us. Thousands of black biting ants, drowning in my blood. I looked back to my bird, in shock, and focused all my attention there, getting more and more lightheaded as my life covered the dirty tile of the bathroom. My dove continued to die..and so I reached down, smearing my fingers through my own blood, and with my clumsy and shaking fingers, tried to feed it into the tiny beak. My life could be given to save it...somehow, I thought that. Believed it, in my delerium. But it died, choking on, perhaps, the blood intended to save it. It's mate died too, after I went to the cage to deliver the news...it too, was dead, completely. The two of them I placed side-by-side on my mother's headboard, wrapped in a paper towel. Numbly, I treated my foot as best I could, clumsily, with an old military first-aid kit my father had left behind. The towel that I had cradled my dove in had fallen to the floor, and become utterly saturated with blood. I found an old pair of crutches somewhere and tried to get across the empty field to my neighbor's house...falling several times, and getting progressively dizzier. They turned me away, a cruelty I never will understand. I found out later the man who turned me away beat his wife and molested his children. I never got in touch with my mother.

My mother came home two days later and found me hysterically weeping in our front hallway. The doves I had left on the headboard, and their eyes had rotted. I remember how the eyes had rotted. The pretty glassy orbs had sunken in and made them dead, and the ants came again. My beautiful doves rotted and my skin scarred slowly.

What does this have to do with anything? Nothing. A memory.

My life has been a hellish thing.


:: Fox 10/28/2002 07:27:00 PM [Say what?] ::
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