Parrot
There’s a woman who lives below the floor. I can feel her heat when I walk.
In 2019 death found me.
In 2020 death found us both.
In 2021 it sat between us as we slept.
In 2022 we built it a bedroom of it’s own and didn’t say anything when it seeped into our food.
In 2023 death no longer resided in our apartment but it was ravaging hers.
I started telling people that some women have babies and others have cancer. It was a sign of our times I said. The thirty somethings hadn’t been affected with this much veracity before—they learned what it meant to have empty womb sacs and recurrent pregnancy loss. The twenty somethings weren’t prepared for the vast removal of breasts or the chemotherapy that forced them to see their own skeletons before they had a chance to see the world. The forty somethings were self diagnosing perimenopause, embracing the term middle aged and already on more medications and injections than their grandparents before they died. It might have been White women in Brooklyn or it might have been everybody—each day brought new statistics.These were the decades of truth and science—imagination replaced with tech, gods and goddesses replaced with avatars and humanoids, church replaced with rage rooms. Books replaced with keyboards.
The problem was the building materials. In this new world the walls weren’t thick enough to keep reality out. Those without the money to build fortresses around themselves were stuck listening to the opposite of statistics. Botox could’t save them from the sounds and smells of death. Scrolling didn’t stop the urine from seeping in. The pills couldn’t remove the stench of incontinence, the screams that shook the pipes at night or the banging that comes when someone is trapped inside of themselves, surrounded by concrete and zombies.
The twenty, thirty and forty somethings are all prepared for the zombie apocalypse completely blind to the fact that it’s already here. There is an old woman next to you struggling to cross the street but you didn’t know you were in the street to begin with. You didn’t know that the car with the intrusive horn was making noise because of you or that the baby in your carriage wasn’t asleep anymore but instead watching the face you make when you are buried in your phone oblivious to the feeble and the fury. Your friend just got fake eyelashes put on and thinks you should too. They look completely natural and they don’t fall off during sex she says. You laugh, tripping over the sidewalk’s edge as you reach the other side. You are the zombie my friend.
We could hear and smell the ravaging. We hoped for the sake of the others, that our death, the one whose bedroom sat empty now, didn’t continue moving through the floors. That after this, it would find an open window and allow the breeze to take it upwards and upwards until it was far enough above to lose us among the rest. But, for now, the woman who lived below was its vessel. She would’t be given a chance to build it a room of its own. It had taken her husband and it would take her too. But, not before it made itself known. Put itself in full throttle so that we could hear what happens when it decides to stay — when the screams don’t remain on the inside. When shit and piss can no longer be contained. When the only person who cares enough to help you is gone. You are alone, over the toilet, heaving because there is no more fluid to project just like there are no more hands to rub your back or hold your hair. We were sentenced to hearing it’s relentless inhabitance heating our floors with it’s anger, vibrating our walls with it’s howls— we may have pushed it out for a moment but it would be back, over and over again, until we built it a living room, a kitchen and one of those fancy his and hers bathrooms with a soaking tub and a glassed in shower. Until there was a walk in closet and a study. Until we gave it room outside of the house too—some woods and maybe a body of water. A place where it could garden and eat.
We weren’t supposed to talk about it though—talk about the fact that we were building space for death to reside. That by listening to it every day and every night it was already inhabiting us. That the deer that jumped out just as the truck was coming—split open right in front of our property—was a sign. That the rabbit we thought we hit and said a prayer for later, deciding it survived, was actually dead in a ditch unseen but watching.
Death was in us now. In our food and in our water, slithering through our gardens. The woman below us would be gone soon and the floors would feel cold again—but only for a moment. Death isn’t something we can push away — it is here and it is now.
Transmissions 2023
Birds-Eye-View Spotlight Artist
If you want more from The Birds — Check out Melody McKiver’s (they/them, do not use any other pronouns) musical work integrates electronics with Western classical music to shape a new genre of Anishinaabe compositions. A proud member of Obishikokaang Lac Seul First Nation, Melody is currently Assistant Professor of Indigenous Music (tenure-track) with the Desaultels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba and a member of the Mizi'iwe Aana Kwat (LGBTQ2S+ Council) within the Anishinaabe Nation of Treaty #3. They are the 2020 recipient of the Canada Council's Robert Flaming Prize awarded annually to an exceptionally talented young Canadian composer, and a recurring invited participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Indigenous Classical Music gatherings.
