Another short piece from the book...

Yes y'all.

This part is a short story that one of the character's writes and submits to her college's literary journal, inspired by some recent events in another's character's love life:

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Ballad of the Bird Girl
By Najla Aziz

Miranda was twelve when the feathers started growing. At first, the downy grey that started to cover her lower belly seemed like just another mysterious product of adolescence. She wore high-waisted skirts and dresses and hoped they would go away. Eventually, one night she snook into her family’s kitchen, fill a plastic cup with ice, and took it back to her room. She filled a blue towel with as many pieces of ice as she could wrap up and applied the makeshift cold pack to her stomach until the skin around the feathers was pink and numb. Then she grabbed a hold of one of the feathers and began plucking.
Miranda kept all of her discarded feathers in a tin on the windowsill above her bed, until it was full and she started keeping them in plastic bags, tied at the top and stored on the top shelf of her closet. She imagined that eventually she would have enough to start sewing pillows or downy blankets.
When she entered high school and made friends with some of the girls in her classes, she joined into conversations about the awkwardness and hilarity of first periods and stretch marks. One day, she asked, “what about feathers?” The other girls stared at her, and then dissolved in laughter. “Miranda is so funny! Miranda is so RANDOM! I love you Miranda!”
It wasn’t until Miranda was all grown up and out of school that she found the courage brought up the feathers to anyone again, this time a boy she had been kissing for a few weeks. When she told him, he laughed, but this time she remained firm. “No, seriously. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She found the tin, and the bags full of feathers, now filling two large plastic tubs in the corner of her apartment.
“Look.”
The boy looked at her incredulously, and started asking her how many birds she had to kill for this sick prank. When she began crying, he left her apartment, sure that she was certifiably insane.
Miranda felt desperately lonely when she considered the option of keeping the feathers a secret forever. She had resented them, sure, but they seemed like an essential part of her being, and she knew that if she ever loved anyone she wouldn’t feel truly loved in return until she convinced him the feathers were real.
So, the bird girl decided to let herself be, and she stopped pulling her feathers. They grew in more quickly than she imagined they would, and they began sprouting in other places too – her shoulder blades, between her legs, on the tops of her feet. She kept to her apartment – it was too hot to cover her body thoroughly enough to hide the feathers and she didn’t want any questions from strangers at the store.
One day, the bird girl heard music playing outside her home. She pulled on an oversized sweater and opened her door. Outside, she found a group of musicians. Mesmerized, she sat cross-legged in front of them and listened. In the middle of the group, a boy sang songs that Miranda felt were being shot straight into her heart. When they finished playing, she began clapping and was soon joined by all of the other strangers who had joined her, sitting on the grass and admiring the musicians. She suddenly felt sad, realizing that the songs weren’t for her at all, and she started to go back inside when she felt a hand on her back. No one had touched her for months, and she was immediately paranoid that the hand would feel her feathers through the fabric of her sweater and recoil. It stayed, and she turned around to face her singer.
The singer and Miranda soon began spending time together. Mostly, she would invite him up to her apartment, where they would drink wine and he would play songs for her. He’d written hundreds of songs, but staring at Miranda made him feel that he needed to write a hundred more, just for her.
He wanted desperately to touch her, kiss her, lift her heavy clothes off of her head and start to map every inch of her body. But every time he moved towards her, she moved away, blushing and laughing.
One night, a thunderstorm broke holes in the sky and the singer and the bird girl were stranded at her apartment. As the hours ticked by and the rain never ceased, she sat nervously on the corner of her bed, drunk on most of a bottle of wine. The singer sat next to her and took her hand.
“I want to stay with you.”
The bird girl sighed and told him she had something to explain. She squeezed his hand, kissed his cheek, and invited him to lift off her sweatshirt.
The singer felt strange – such a forward invitation was not the way he had imagined this moment would happen, but he was desperate to see more of her, and he reached towards her, pulling the shirt off of her head and kissing her, hard on the mouth, before looking down.
By now, Miranda the bird girl was mostly covered in feathers – grey and white down sprinkled over her stomach, yellow and brown streaking her shoulders and her upper back. Around her chest, neck, and lower back, there was skin, but it was thin and pink, not quite human. He gasped, and Miranda sighed, feeling the sting of saltwater behind her eyes.
“What are you?” he asked quietly, not moving away.
“I don’t know,” Miranda responded, reaching for her shirt, ready for the singer to stand at any moment.
“Stop,” and he reached over her, staying her hand.
The singer kissed the bird girl’s chest and he could feel her heart beating twice as fast as his own. “I think you’re magic,” he spoke quietly, and laid her down on her bed, stroking the feathers on her stomach, aching to explore every part of the beautiful creature he felt lucky to see.
Secretly, the singer wondered if he had made her up, if she had materialized from one of his strange dreams. But when he made love to her, losing himself in the endless softness, when he slept beside her and woke up next to her the next day, a few stray feathers floating up from the bed like down escaping from a pillow, he knew she was, somehow, as real as anything else.
They had real problems, too. The bird girl was sensitive and often scared, she would repeatedly ask him when he was going to leave her, whether he wanted her to take care of “her problem,” whether he thought this “normal girl” or another was prettier than her. It took him months to convince her to leave the house with him, and when she finally did, she always bundled up in jackets and scarves and long pants, wanting to assure that her secret would remain her’s and the singer’s alone.
The singer’s friends and band mates didn’t understand what he saw in the bird girl, thought that she seemed childish and empty. He tried to explain what it was like between them when they were alone, sometimes even felt tempted to shout that she was a magical creature that was created just for him, delivered to him, for him to take care of and keep safe.
And this, in the end, was the biggest problem between the singer and the bird girl. He thought of her as his own, and for the most part didn’t consider that his own actions would ever affect their relationship. Although he did think that her feathers were beautiful, he also took comfort in knowing that she thought of herself as strange, unlovable, an oddity. The knowledge of her neuroses kept him secure, knowing that he was the only one who could ever really understand her.
After years of sleeping next to one another; after one particularly rough night where Miranda, inspired by whiskey, decided to try to fly off of her third floor balcony and fell hard on the porch below; after the singer tended to her wounds and kissed every feather; after she made a pillow of the down that she had collected in her teenage years and embroidered it with a bird perched on top of a music note; after all of this, Miranda started to gain an extraordinary amount of confidence in herself. She knew she had the singer to thank, but his possessiveness started to feel like a cage. She began to venture outside without him, often, making new friends and coming home late. Usually, especially after she drank, she would end calling him after the bars closed, begging him to come over and sleep next to her. He always agreed.
Eventually the bird girl started wearing fewer clothes when she went out, and inevitably, her new friends noticed something peeking out from under a tank top one night. She was drunk, and she just shrugged as one of her friends pulled down the top, peeking down at Miranda’s shoulders full of long, dappled feathers.
When the bird girl told the singer that a few of her friends had discovered her secret, he was horrified. He felt ready to comfort her, to reassure her that she wasn’t a freak. When she told him that they had loved it, found it extraordinary, even taken pictures, he was even more upset. He didn’t know how to explain to the bird girl how it made him feel that she had let someone else in on her secret. The singer waited for her to fall asleep before he began to cry.
It was soon after her friends discovered the feathers that Miranda met a boy who looked familiar. He reminded her of the birds she watched from her window – flighty, nervous, and beautiful. Miranda fought hard against the urge to ask him to see her again, but when she ran into him a few weeks later, the fated feeling of it all was too much. They made plans for the very next day, when she knew the singer would be busy.
The next day, when the bird girl kissed the bird boy, she didn’t think of the singer, or of her strange affliction, or of her friends, or of flying. She thought just of him -- the feeling of his mouth pressed to hers and the back of his front teeth on the tip of her tongue. She imagined the past life she was sure they had lived together, as sparrows or owls or seagulls dipping into the ocean. Her heart pressed against her skin and felt as if it was going to fall right out of her chest.
When they finally stopped kissing and stared at each other, the boy looked startled. He told her that he wasn’t sure how he felt or what he wanted from her. She rushed to explain, in a river of sentences that ran together, what he made her feel and what she was. When she tried to lift up her shirt to show him her feathers, he immediately flinched and looked away, asking her to keep her clothes on. The bird girl blushed, recalled her first kiss and the shame of the years that followed. Her heart slowed and receded. And when the bird girl began to cry, the boy stood up and walked away. He assumed that she was thinking of the singer, assuaged with guilt.
That night, Miranda did think of the singer. She lay in her bed, staring at all of the tokens and pieces of him that were scattered around her apartment. She realized that the reason she had pursued the bird boy had very little to do with past lives or destiny. It was just that her entire soul felt wrapped up in the love that she had, and she had wanted to feel what it would be like to unwrap it and get a good look at herself. Then she contemplated her life without him, and immediately felt panicked and afraid. She didn’t want to be alone, she told herself. She could work out her identity with him at her side. She would ask him to forgive her
When the bird girl told the singer what had happened, he wanted to understand. He tried to hold her when she began crying, but his hands wouldn’t move from their stilled position at his side. He tried to tell her that it was okay but when he opened his mouth he yelled terrible things.
The singer told Miranda that her heart was as hollow as a bird’s bones. He told her that she couldn’t possibly be real, because no real girl would be so cruel. He told her she was a child caught up in a fantasy she could never have, that believing that some boy was anything like her was a ridiculous and pathetic dream she had to avoid the truth, which was that she was too afraid of real life to hold on to the only person who could ever love her or even look at her without shuddering. He told her that the only reason her so-called friends hung around her was because she was an oddity, an animal.
The singer watched Miranda’s face crumble, and her limbs grow weak and shaky. He watched her start to grab at her feathers and let them fall to her sides. He watched her cry. He watched her as she ripped out huge chunks of grey and brown and yellow from her back and her stomach and between her legs, leaving her skin swollen and bare.
The singer could never forgive himself for the things he had said, but he also couldn’t forgive the Miranda for not loving him enough. When she finally stopped tearing herself apart and started breathing evenly, he left the room where he had first touched her and tried hard not to look back.
The bird girl stood, surrounded by her feathers. She felt completely alone and incredibly free.

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