Mr. Brown Finds a Bird

Mr. Brown had been walking one day observing the many trees in his neighborhood whose branches turned upward like mossy, green elephant trunks and spun in the light as though they were caught in a stream of falling, golden water. It was because of his upturned gaze that he had only noticed a small dark spot in the path resembling a shadow or stain or some other inconsequential trash that naturally arose in this shady lane. He thought this up to the moment he stumbled over it as it squawked. He crouched as low as his portly body allowed and peered at what turned out to be a squat, ebony bird. It was not a raven or a crow, and Mr. Brown, with his limited knowledge of ornithology, knew it was fantastic but too dark to be a misplaced bird of paradise. Its body bulged as it sunk its small head low like a marble resting atop a velvet cushion, but its beak was disproportionately large and looked wooden as though it were a makeshift prosthetic made from soaked oak. The creature did not move or bite no matter how close Mr. Brown leered but simply tolerated his presence as much as it seemed to tolerate its uncomfortable place on the hard ground. Mr. Brown stood upright and looked around expectantly as though somebody were to come claim the abandoned bird or explain its odd presence. Finding himself completely alone among the lane, he considered the bird precariously sitting on the sidewalk before cupping it in two hands and carrying it home.

          Mr. Brown walked up his porch holding the bird aloft so he could consider his steps though the empty space between his extended arms. The front of his home was a weathered red with a brown door laid beneath the transparent mesh of a heavy screen door. Mr. Brown was unsure how to proceed with the small bird still in his hands. He considered his porch for a spot to securely place the delicate fowl, but he found that as soon as he brought his cupped hands towards the ground, the bird squawked in a panic, extending two feathery wings with a rapid flutter while Mr. Brown shut his eyes and hugged his chin helplessly to his shoulder. It was only when Mr. Brown returned upright that the bird returned to its docile state. Realizing that depositing the bird would be impossible, he struggled with his elbows to open the screen door and prop it open with his shoulder. He then confronted the greater challenge of turning the sleek, brass knob while the heavy screen door constantly shook against his back. He entered his living room by way of a small, alabaster-white archway where he had an old, red leather chair in the corner. He stood before it and slowly dipped, bracing for any sudden alarm, but found that the bird had not registered the slightest acknowledgement of having been moved from his hands to the chair. Mr. Brown, enjoying the sight of the bird neatly tucked like the hull of a boat into the hospitable crest of a leather wave, decided he ought to fashion something more fit for a bird and less of a risk to his chair. He left and returned with a shallow, wide box he had filled with paper and twigs which the bird seemed content to occupy. Mr. Brown then placed the box neatly between the stabilizing arms of the leather chair.

          Like all small creatures recently invited into one’s home, the bird inspired a fascination in Mr. Brown that provoked him into curious gazing and humble smiling. The bird was very patient with him and tolerated his face as he brought it low and close trying to find a trace of its tucked legs and hidden feet. He wondered if it were the type of creature that, when threatened, becomes impossibly still. Then, he wondered how he should attend to the diet of the mysterious bird. He certainly had many options, but he feared if it were an exotic that it may be upset or even poisoned by some mundane item that the local fowl took for granted. Among the bookshelves, he had no reference books on the diets of birds, and when he brought a sampling of treats and critters, the bird only snapped at his dangling fingers ignoring the piece of melon that had fallen from Mr. Brown’s retreating hand. Then, Mr. Brown decided that he may have stumbled upon the bird right after a particularly gluttonous episode, and the poor thing was weighed down by the sum of its elephantine meal. This, he decided, would account for the bird’s apparent inability to fly. Then he became nervous that the exotic, pampered bird may have haphazardly bolted some foreign matter being unaccustomed to the land or the notion of feeding oneself, so Mr. Brown leaned over the black bird and slowly descended with twitching fingers and gently massaged around its deflated rump trying to discover if any oblong objects jutted from its paper-thin stomach. He was surprised to discover that the bird beneath its coils of black plumage was very firm, more muscle than bone, it seemed, and he found no irregular lumps in the bird’s small body. The bird reared its head in an uncompromising, stately way that declared no possible agitation save that which might be felt by a bored, proud monarch. With nothing else to consider, Mr. Brown placed a small bowl of water in the box and sat on his sofa adjacent to the chair glancing at the immobile bird in between the pages of some unhelpful book he had of illustrated fowls.

          The coming evening had no discernible effect on the bird. Mr. Brown had eaten and returned finding it not at all curious or concerned with the room in which it had been left alone. If it weren’t for the unblinking eye presenting its dark, unbroken focus, the bird would seem entirely unconscious to its surroundings. Every so often, it would preen its feathers which stuck out like the limbs of a sable fir tree, its unwieldy beak surprisingly effective in combing its body. Mr. Brown tried his best to out endure the small creature but felt himself constantly rising from a persistent spell of sleep. In the end, the bird seemed decidedly unconcerned with its surroundings and truthfully seemed far too small to be a danger to itself so Mr. Brown wished his small, new friend a good night and went to bed.

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In the morning, Mr. Brown saw his red leather chair rivened. It lay in stripes that exposed its pale underside while the bird sat atop a mount of stripped cotton filling. Mr. Brown stood arms akimbo in grey robe and slippers, his feet angled with his elbows, the toes of his slippers upturned, and he studied the bird’s work with despair. He had been fond of the chair. He was promised it was of rare Italian manufacture brought here by an illiterate vecchia who made her humble living selling fresh vegetables on the street. It was left to her granddaughter who sold it to him for a sum consistent with their broken emotional attachment because they had no place for it after buying a large, luxurious couch which really was much more fitting for their weekend nights surrounding their vivid flat-screen TV, but Mr. Brown conceded there was nothing that could be done about it now and remarked that these are the risks when inviting strange animals into one’s home.

          The bird, meanwhile, would only cock its head and consider the nested fluff as though it were equally confused as to how it arose upon this mountain of displaced cotton. It would retain its equipoise of utterly calm and incurious squatting. Then, Mr. Brown suddenly leapt forward. He thought this bird looked different but had attributed it to its new perch on the remains of his chair, but he was sure the bird had grown a quarter in size. He quickly but gently felt along the rim of its bulging body and was certain the bird he had felt only the night before was now larger, fuller, and had a longer, denser beak. He knew that some small creatures tended towards rapid growth in a world where large, ivory-toothed predators sought out defenseless infants with slavering glee, but he had never imagined that it could’ve been anything so dramatic. It was very fascinating to him, especially because he had not seen a single piece of food pass through its flimsy, warping gullet, but there were, no doubt, many intriguing peculiarities of the natural world such as incandescent fish, aerial arachnids, and conscious fungi that would’ve seemed strange and impossible at first glance.

          So Mr. Brown, being very considerate of the law of conservation of matter, imagined the bird must be very hungry. He felt disabused of the idea that he might accidentally poison the bird for although the fowl had proven very picky, it also showed no signs of distress after destroying (and no doubt ingesting) portions of his Italian leather chair. On a cutting board, he prepared some sliced melon, a small pile of mixed nuts and seeds, pitted olives, and some vegetables leftover from his dinner. He presented it before the bird who seemed at first to decide upon the vegetables turning its head so as to enter them into its parted beak from the side, but quite unexpectantly, the bird moved in one clean motion and collected every piece of food in a shockingly deft execution of its unwieldy beak.

          After spending a time commensurate to the strangeness of the action he witnessed, Mr. Brown repeatedly produced food which the black bird quickly swallowed. It was not until early afternoon that Mr. Brown waved a pickle before the disinterested bird’s face and deemed him adequately satiated. Then, in order to maintain his good conscience, Mr. Brown put together an ad: “Exotic bird found — species unknown, black with long, brown beak.” Mr. Brown had no computer, no printer, he did not even have a television or radio. He was forced, with a confused mien of obsolescence, to have some adolescent with a rosy brush of bright red acne across his forehead print him twenty copies of his handmade flyer at a print shop six blocks down the road. It seemed, however, that the scanning mechanism malfunctioned for it turned Mr. Brown’s crisp penmanship into a bloated, dark mess which had to be deciphered meticulously with one’s face inches from the paper, and he was forced to rewrite his address on every piece of paper because it had faded into a spectral line of meaningless markings.

          With a newly-purchased staple gun, Mr. Brown made his way home in a long, ambulatory path posting these pages on as many telephone poles as he could find before arriving home and finding a strange sound, raw and violent, rising, falling, and often tripping into a sibilant ripping of the air. Quickly entering the living room, he saw the bird as docile as always while this disconcerting sound fluxed, becoming louder and clearer to Mr. Brown as he closed upon the chair. It was there, at the back of the chair, densely packed into the corner of the wall, that he discovered the source of the sound, with spine bent and fur bristling into sharp cactus like spikes, an orange tabby cat howling and hissing as though surrounded by a pack of baying dogs. Mr. Brown was, at first, afraid to introduce his hands into the space that the cat ceaselessly worked to present as untrespassable, but he found the frightened cat showed no alarm at his hairy paw as it descended to lay on its shedding rear end. He brought his hand round its trembling rump to turn and cup its sagging abdomen into the air while hissing all the time. As he brought the cat from around the chair, the cat was fixated on the bird, even swiping its paw out at the impassive fowl with feline agility. As he carried the cat from the room, it turned in his arms fighting for a perch on his shoulder where it could lock its frightened gaze on the sitting bird and hiss. When Mr. Brown dropped it onto the porch, he saw the cat work its way backwards making its horrendously mobile spine into a hump like some bent and broken piece of metal rather than scampering off as any other cat might’ve done.

          He was sure there was no open door or window for that cat to have used as a possible means of ingress. Unless he had some open aperture for bugs, rats, stubborn drafts, and the impossibly limber body of a creeping feline, then it must’ve been that the cat silently stole inside just as he was leaving for the printers. He apologized to his ebony guest, and after he promised to prepare some food, Mr. Brown discovered that his cupboards, his refrigerator, and a cooler he once bought to handle the overflow from a malfunctioning icebox were all entirely empty. There was not any evidence that any of these spaces had ever been filled save for a yellowed ring on the inside of the refrigerator door. Mr. Brown was sure this not the work of fowl or feline but some eccentric thief that sought to take dust and crumb in his mad scramble at Mr. Brown’s food, yet Mr. Brown could find no trace of the method in which such an odd and efficient heist was executed. He explained the situation to the bird who reacted with its selfsame complacency then rushed out the door to his neighboring grocer, returning with his arms awkwardly full of red and green colored cans, heaps of vegetables with the harder squeezing the soft into a red, pulpy mess across the breast of his coat, some spiced sausages, and a ten-pound bag of birdseed that the middle aged woman assured could not harm any class of the avian family as it plainly expressed on the packaging. His biceps strained and his fingers burnt as he came upon the porch in a rapid lumber only to pause in front of a paper tucked between the metal and the nylon of his door. Giving way to the exasperation of his limbs, he dropped his foods to the porch and opened the trifolded letter.

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The rest of this story is available in Volume 7, Issue 2 of Night Picnic.