DISTANT BLUE JAYS

Distant Blue Jays, a short story

Take a seat and listen, I'm not going anywhere. Listen carefully. I only have one chance to tell you all of this and I want to make sure that it's perfect, down to the word.

I went off the trail. Man, when I'm at home, if I got into a fight with Sarah, I could just storm outside and take a walk. I guess that's not the greatest idea out here in the woods. Our marriage councilor told us that we should get away for the weekend, that a little quiet would do some good. What the hell did he know? I had to have wandered for at least a couple miles; the only way I could tell is that I couldn't see the campfire anymore.

When all the light had faded and the safe, dirt path was nothing but a memory, I saw the first of them. At first, I didn't make anything of the rustling in the bushes to my sides; I thought it was either the calm wind or my own clumsy movements. I should have known better. The beast was smaller, weaker, and far less intelligent than I, and yet I felt powerless while I was caught in its gaze. Its eyes, a dark beacon of the reaper's arrival, cut into my flesh just as well as its bloodstained teeth could have. The wolf would take a few steps to the right, and then to the left, telling me with no words that the night belonged to him, or at least that's what I got out of it. Unfortunately for me, he must have meant that the night belonged to them.
I didn't hear the others coming out of the brush, but when I finally escaped the vision of the beast before me, I found similar harbingers of death to my flanks. The first one barked at me, spitting a foul saliva on the ground. Instinctively, I jolted backwards in a dead sprint, or at least what a man six and a half feet tall and no coordination would call a sprint. The wolves started to follow me, but, knowing the forest a bit better than I could have possibly known, retreated after I passed a couple boulders. Apparently, those boulders signaled the end of the world, and I fell off it.

“Where are you at right now, the moon?” she asked me. I couldn't help but stare blankly at the wall. I had that feeling like I did something wrong and I just didn't want to be hassled about it any more. We've been at least a few days on the same few issues: how are we going to support our child, should we move out of the city, should I look for a job that doesn't have me work the graveyard shift, stuff like that.

“Listen, if we move,” I began to tell her, “there would just be too many question marks, you know? I have barely enough cash in the bank to make the down payment on a decent place, so how would I support a baby? I can't guarantee that there's a job out there for me, not in this market. Are you going to get a job? You haven't been able to hold one for over a month.”

I knew I went too far with that last comment. There was no need to bring Sarah's employment record into this mess, but the Devil got the best of me. I got up from the corner of our bed and moved anxiously toward the north corner of the room, nearest the screen door that blocked the way to the balcony. I thought she would have gotten angry, but she didn't raise her voice, not at all. Sarah whimpered, and a cascade of tears began to flow over the stress torn crevasses of her face. “I know…I know. I try, really I try…” was all she could muster as she wiped the ocean from her soft cheeks.

I sat down beside her, and hugged my sweet wife and child to be. I could have said anything; in fact, I probably should have said something comforting like “It's alright” or “I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that,” but the words just couldn't find their way off of my lips. She held me tightly, and we began to rock back and forth, a ritual that would cast away fear and banish our insecurities if only for a little while. It must have been hours that we sat there, and eventually she found herself in the realm of dreams. I gently laid her head on her bright blue pillow, and I quietly opened the screen door, walking out onto the balcony. “Here we are, New York City. What the hell do we do now?”

I tumbled down the sharp incline like a fleshy snowball, gathering rocks and decaying brush into my skin. With each bounce against the earth, my bones shattered and popped, leaving my body no more solid and structured than a piece of rope. I screamed when my knee split open and exposed the fragments of my knee cap covered with blood, smashed up against a rock. Strangely, I didn't really feel anything after that horror; though I could still hear my injuries accumulate as I rolled down the cliff. Wasn't it Doctor Livingston who had the same kind of feeling? While getting mauled by a ferocious lion, he said that he couldn't feel any pain, and that this mercy was nature's way of thanking the prey for perpetuating the circle of life. God, what am I doing, thinking about literature when I'm lost, crippled, and just about freezing to death? What time is it anyway?

I know I can't fall asleep now; I may be reveling in my final moments, after all. I think time fell out of my pockets on the way down this cliff, because I could see the sunrise. Beams of light gracefully enter the arboreal palace like kings ascending to their respective thrones. Each lord met with extended leaf and danced in a fiery celebration of crimson and orange; luminescence captured every passing moment. As the dance came to a conclusion, the lords rested in tranquil beds of dew across the mossy turf. They had brought light to the day, and now must rest. I must rest. Sarah probably left already; she probably left me in this place. I need to rest; I need to get the strength to get out of this place, out of this pit of flora I had fallen in to. Thankfully, I have long stopped bleeding, and now my red life energy solidified onto my skin. I know my bones are broken, but maybe I can crawl out of my self inflicted Abaddon.

“It's not over,” she tells me, “we can still make this work, you know?” Sarah stood up and brushed aside the black leather chair. Then she smiled. Why would she smile? Tears had just come pouring down her face as if her eyes had sprung a leak. We were yelling at each other, again, about some nonsensical dilemma that honestly I cannot recall. Why is she smiling at me?

“Listen, Jack, I'm willing to make this work if you are. Can I have your help, please? I love you.” Now it is my turn to rise from the blissful comfort of the sofa and enter the unknown. I needed to gather my thoughts, pick out the choice words out of the thousands that were fluttering wildly above my head, like some kind of Biblical plague. I fight them off to the best of my ability and clear my throat. I turn to meet Sarah's drowned gaze, but she isn't there; I must have been pacing across the room as I battled my own thoughts. With a slight adjustment to the right, I see Sarah messing with some old photographs from our days in college.
“I…I…I,” I wanted to start something, start to profess that this incident was my fault, that I sowed the seeds of our own destruction. I don't think she's smiling anymore. From the sounds of it, she's trying to cry again, but just can't force anymore tears out of her worn face. Sarah…she held in her grasp a picture from a romantic evening all too far away. I proposed that night…

The memories were so thick that I had to brush them aside from my face to see clearly. My past rolled over the mountainside and evaporated as the sun reclaimed it. Those lords that had graced me with their presence before had left some time ago, bored with my nostalgia. The leaves that were scattered on the ground were angry with me for chasing off royalty, and so they turned, showing me a dry husk instead of the beautiful autumn. I began to cry. I don't know why. It's all gone. Sarah, beauty, my life…it's all gone. I fed it to the wolves. They feasted on something more than flesh that night.

The merciful dopamine that had coursed through my veins began to wear off. I felt my heartbeat through my legs; with each rhythmic pulse, I sensed my desire to live slip through my fingers. A thousand serrated knives penetrated my skin, twisted their rusted heads, released, and started again, each and every second. I tried to brace for the impact, but no pattern of relaxation, stiffness, or screaming relieved my pain. Wait a minute…I think to myself, I should still have that hunting knife in my back pocket. In retrospect, I may have wanted to pay the extra couple of dollars for a sheathe. Nervousness kicked in and I lost control over my own motion. I was actually excited by the possible presence of a weapon in my possession. Like a child at Christmas, I dug greedily into my back pocket, and cut myself on the blade. Usually, I probably would have withdrawn my hand in pain, but this prick was like an angel's trumpet, singing the cadence of my savior's existence.

I readjusted my hand and picked up the shaft of the hunting knife, driving it out of my pocket and into the morning sun. Should I start with the leg, or should I go straight for the heart? No, I had to think about this some more. Is someone going to come for me? Sarah had to be out there. We only took one car up here and there's no way, even after our skirmish, that she would leave me out in the woods. I didn't know anyone out here. God damn it, I had to go off the path. I had to run, even with a knife in hand. I'm worthless. I'm worthless, lost, and crippled. Help isn't coming. If Sarah was trying to find me, she would have heard my agonizing screams by now; she would have heard my body being eviscerated by Gaia's heralds.

Could I even do it in one blow? The panic that had overwhelmed my reason up to this point was replaced by a terrible fear, a fear of a long and painful death. Thinking about it now, I can't help but laugh at the irony. I could slit my wrists and drain myself of life's blood, but with the effects of the dopamine long since passed, I would have to deal with each excruciating moment. With naught but a knife, what other options did I have, what could I really bring myself to do? I put down the knife and began to tremble. God smote my body and cruelly left a small will do live, or at least a persuasive aversion to pain. What celestial humor was this? Come to think of it, I don't think anything I could do now, outside of decapitating myself, could bring me to an end faster than the wounds that I have already suffered. I had already dyed my immediate surroundings in a deep crimson malaise, and the colors I used in this malignant palette were just becoming more pronounced as time brushed the strokes of my final moments. I cried something, some jumbled conflagration of syllables, out of frustration.

We sat in that cramped room waiting for our marriage councilor to show up. Late, as usual, he walked into the room with a smile on his face and a couple of pens in his shirt pocket. He never wrote anything down, but at least he showed us the courtesy of having the power of the written word at his ready. Dr. McLaren looked exactly like you would picture someone in his profession. An older man, probably approaching half a century, he sported a gray beard and a dark pair of thick glasses. His stomach stuck out definitively from his business casual white shirt. More importantly, though, he never entered the room without a smile on his face. Whether he was interested or not, he always gave Sarah and I the sense that he wanted to help. When we talked, he would listen. I couldn't help but think that we could have saved ourselves a few hundred bucks just by asking a stranger on the street to do this guy's job, but Sarah insisted that Dr. McLaren was the best in the business.

After sitting down in a leather chair infinitely more comfortable than what Sarah and I had to bare, the good doctor began, “I know that it doesn't feel like we're making progress, but let me tell you that from where I'm sitting, the difference between where you guys were at the start and where you are now is remarkable. You two couldn't even look at each other when you came in. Look at you now.”

Right on cue, Sarah and I gazed into each other's eyes for just a moment. Whether we did it out of a suppressed love or out of a mutual loathing of Doctor McLaren's patronizing opener I still don't know. I moved my eyes back toward the councilor, and crossed my arms over in a small display of defiance. “You two don't seem as talkative as last session, did something happen?” he asked us. I certainly didn't want to answer, but I think that Sarah wanted me to break the news. I hated when she did this; it made me look like the aggressor. We both know that we've both had our share of strikes against the other, but I'll look like the bad guy every time.

I cleared my throat, “We had another fight.”

“Oh?” he responded, as if he was surprised to hear it. He was a marriage councilor for the love of God. “What was it about this time?”

“We just can't see eye to eye…”

“He doesn't care about our child,” Sarah interrupted. “He won't look for a new place; he won't look for a new job. He thinks that all of this will just magically be better when our child is born. We really do need to make some sacrifices, make some adjustments, and he just won't!” If it were just Sarah and I in the room, I probably would have argued with her, probably would have asked her what exactly she was doing about it. But here, here in this setting where there's supposed to be some sort of honesty, I had to zip my lip. It was true. I don't want to move out of my place. I'm not qualified enough to grab a job on a whim. She's seven months in, though. I should have done something; I've had the time.

We complained about each other for another fifty three minutes. I only knew that because I anxiously watched the clock during her rants. It's fairly safe to assume that Sarah was doing the same. Doctor McLaren made a fairly good moderator, and kept both of us from raising voices. When we had run out of artillery, he paused for a moment and said “Sarah, Jack, I think you two should get back to the roots of your relationship. You need to take some time out of your busy schedules and remember exactly why you fell in love in the first place. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk with a friend of mine; he's a travel agent. I'm sure I can arrange you guys a little vacation. I'm thinking a camping trip in North Dakota, something basic. How's that sound?”

In hindsight, I probably should have rejected his offer.

My legs were no more than dust at this point. I couldn't feel them, and, honestly, probably didn't want to feel them anymore. I couldn't bare to look at them and I won't give you the displeasure of listening to some gruesome description of those corroding masses. Maybe they're gone? I don't know. My thoughts are elsewhere at this point, into the wilderness that will be the record of all I have left and the keeper of my physical form.

Never in my most sacred dreams could I have imagined a more beautiful and humbling tomb. The emerald moss gently caressed what was left of my scarred skin. Autumn leaves, hanging on to the branches like a stalwart dragoon protecting the last of his comrades, took blow after blow from the midday sun, guarding me from the scorching rays. Even the stone colossus, my executioner, bowed its ancient head in respect. The lords that had graced me with their presence and festivities returned for one final dance, gracefully swaying between the shadows and sun that played under the canopy. They were welcoming me into their kingdom, and perhaps I could celebrate this brand new freedom. For what, I don't know. I'm not one to respect; I can't even hold together a relationship. I guess each dog has his day. God, that's clichéd, isn't it? Forget I said it.

It was then I saw them, everything I wanted to be and everything that was as distant as the horizon. Those two, small figures sat on a far away, completely immersed in tranquility. The blue jays were so beautiful. Wings of glossy ocean water and plumes of the whitest snow tenderly entered my eyes, and I could feel some of the peace, some of the freedom, that these birds felt. I couldn't hear them from where I was positioned, but I knew their song already. The high notes burst into an angelic chorus, bouncing along to create that magnificent bolero that would send me to the afterlife in style. I could not help but feel that I heard an entire choir singing in harmony. All of that pristine music breathed life into my desperate soul, and I voraciously embraced it. These birds, these flying saviors, were indeed in love. They nuzzled each other with their ebon black beaks, feeling each other's heartbeat. It was one heartbeat, a single pulse that united them both. Sarah and I used to have that. We used to have a connectedness that transcended the workings of our universe. Where could it have gone?

Everything was set up perfectly; I even had this little Italian bistro completely rented out and decorated to my exact specifications. God, that was expensive, but she loved her Italian. The lights were dimmed just well enough to allow our candlelit table to shine through the dark. I hired a local quartet to sing a few of her favorite tunes while we dined on manicotti and hundred dollar bottles of fine wine. Sure, it probably wasn't the greatest music, but they were there more for ambiance anyway. I thought I would sweat myself right out of this cheap rental tuxedo, waiting for my angel to finally arrive.

Forever passed and she humbled my eyes as she entered. I could never get that black dress out of my mind. That soft fabric wrapped around this goddess perfectly, accentuating every curve. It didn't sparkle, but God did it shine. Being so dark, it boldly pointed out every inch of her face. Each curve, each wrinkle, each dazzling eye glowed like a prismatic dream. Sarah, my angel, walked over my way with a smile on her face. I could have sworn time stood still, and she, being above time, came ever still. We embraced. The restaurant staff gave us a round of applause, and we sat down to our meal.

Like most of our meals, we were quite taciturn, but that does not mean that nothing was said. The elegant and child like smile she showed me gave me unwavering confidence. I couldn't stop moving; I was swaying back and forth and having trouble with my fork on the manicotti. I was sure that she picked up on that, but she didn't ask me why I was so nervous. Sarah would just pour herself another glass of France's finest, top off my glass, and continue smiling my way. She couldn't help but eat flawlessly. I guess I might have been too used to watching my brothers and father eat spaghetti, but I was used to people getting a spec of marinara sauce or two on their clothing. Not Sarah, not this goddess.