The Hummingbird by Robert Hill Long
How the hummingbird got into the attic he didn’t know. All day at the desk rewriting a single foolish page, he’d mistaken that vibrato for something within—onset of tinnitus, a Cassandra vein in his temple forewarning a stroke. In the ashes of afternoon, he pictured an angel of perfection, tiny as a needle injecting the word No through the top of his skull.
The ocean outside was mantled in fog as though the sky could not stop lighting one cigarette after another in order to forget that its job was to deliver clarities blue as a god’s eye. Beneath the fog, barn swallows veered, sparrows hovered and pounced in the grass. Whatever had gone wrong with him did not spoil how the crow furled wings like an umbrella and strolled toward yesterday’s picnic crumbs, how gulls hung in the offshore wind like a long suspended chord in a Bach toccata.
The thought of Bach pushed him away from his ashtray full of crushed words: he wanted to hear that toccata and fugue—if only to deaden the vibrato wire in his skull—but it lay in the attic. In the hall, he lowered collapsible stairs (the gulls resolved into the melody line of the fugue, cascading away) and climbed: unreliable steps to a permanent cedar twilight. Here, a box of anniversaries of the dead; there, a century of moth-eaten linen. Shelves of wind-up tin toys, dolls whose porcelain heads lolled in a choral stare.
Stowed beneath the attic’s end-window, the phonograph bin echoed the placement of his desk one floor below. As he squatted to flip through the albums, an iridescence caught his eye. On the sill, outspread wings, a needle-tipped head of emerald and garnet bent away from the glass. There had been an angel; it had called out overhead. He stood briefly—to accept the silent charge against him—then knelt, to balance each rigid wing on his index fingers. Then he rose and backed toward the trapdoor where, if the world were just, he would plummet and break his neck. But he managed this backward pas de deux down the steps, the dead bird before his eyes like an iridescent chalice.
In his studio, he rotated slowly to show the hummingbird what he had done with its life: ashtray and scattered books, cheap prints on the wall. Then lowered himself to the rug, and stretched on his side, the hummingbird by his head. No Bach now, no ocean of smoke, no work to ruin, no consoling acre of birds. Only this note, repeated inside each time he blinked until the window went black. Once his arms and legs had gone to sleep, he recognized the note’s irregular signature.
It was his heart—a little faster than the last time he’d checked, more syncopated. Probably it was the cigarettes, but he hoped without being able to see a thing that the hummingbird had found its way to some nectar in the cage of his bones.
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About the Author
Robert Hill Long
Born: Wilmington, NC USA
Now Resides: Eugene OR USA
Online: www.roberthilllong.wordpress.com
Bio: Robert Hill Long’s books (1987-2010) include The Power to Die, The Work of the Bow, The Effigies, The Kilim Dreaming, and The Wire Garden. He has been recently awarded second fellowships by the NEA and the Oregon Arts Commission. Recent work appears (or soon will) in 2River View, Cirque, Dead Mule, Diagram, Gray Sparrow, In Posse, Los Angeles Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Sentence, The Other Journal, The Pedestal, The Writing Disorder, and Unsplendid. MSS. seeking publishers: Hello Hell (prose poems), The Republic of Robinson (verse bio of jazz guitarist), Aftermathematics (elegies).
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image by jayantib.
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