The Avian Hourglass

I am seven when the last bird falls. I still have three baby teeth and my fathers won’t let me cut my hair short. We need to braid it, they tell me, to keep it out of your sweaty face. Dad picks me up and ambushes my face with kisses until I cover it with my hands while PaPa sets the table. Afterward, we watch the footage of the bird on television and I see them reach to hold hands. Dad rewinds the footage to see it again, then again, but I watch PaPa look out the window and though I can tell he tries to hide it, he wipes tears from his eyes.

That night I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about the fact that there will never be the natural sound of a bird waking me in the morning, there will never be the sensation of watching the strange and marvelous paths they follow in the sky. It had been a year since I had seen one in our yard, but I had always imagined they’d return. Dad comes in to check on me late and sees I’m awake. He rubs my back and tells me to breathe deeply, list the prime numbers in my head. This is how I fall asleep.

The next day, Dad lets me wear my Pterodactyl pajamas until dinner and I write a story about a girl who visits a hummingbird farm. At first she loves the experience of seeing so many covering a vast field. The hummingbirds hover in the sky at varying heights, but soon it feels like they’re hovering too long. It feels to her like they aren’t moving and the girl becomes frightened. Finally, she touches one and realizes they aren’t real—that they are merely mobiles hanging on string from a painted ceiling she’d mistaken for the sky.

Because I know it will hurt PaPa to hear it, I tell the story to Dad and he loves it, says it reminds him of a song in minor. Says it reminds him of a rainy day, reaching the dead end of a road. We are sitting in the grass of the backyard, drinking lemonade. We are quiet for a long while then, my story lodged between us. The only sound keeping us company is the wind through the trees and the gentle click of the ice in our cups.

I close my eyes and feel the wind on my face, hear it rustle the leaves. I think of the time my fathers took me to the Natural History Museum. There was one exhibit in which a human life was mapped over all of geologic time, so that each year lived by the imaginary person represented a whole period of the earth’s past.

I close my eyes and I think of that chart, how 4.6 million years were mapped over the life of a single person. How the age of birds—birds, who outlived dinosaurs—had yesterday come to an end.

Dad asks what I’m thinking and I hesitate to tell him. Nothing, I say, and he nods like he knows, shakes his head at me and tussles my hair.

I am seven, but I understand the weight of losing birds.

I am seven, but I recognize the fear of losing more.

________

I am thirteen when the last ice sheet melts. By this time there is turmoil on the coasts of the countries, and huge bodies of people must move accordingly. Our winters become so mild that they are no longer called winters, the local news instead describing this part of the season as The Turn—late fall becomes early spring. Things blossom when they shouldn’t because there is no cold to split the year. Mold builds and blooms and buds. The world grows moist and never dries, grows warm and never cools. I am thirteen and the rules of nature are changing quickly, in ways that are hard to track.

This is the year I fall in love. She and I spend hours making ephemeral art in...