THE WOODPECKER by Jen Logan Meyer
It was early afternoon the day of the party, and as I stood in my bathroom, running Minnie’s purple brush through my hair, thinking things I should not have been (innuendos, scenarios) – in that unremarkable moment when flyaway strands of hair were released from the bristles of a child’s cheap plastic brush – is when it struck me that I had yet to hear the woodpecker.
The woodpecker had been at it for weeks now, and its knocking had become as ordinary and expected as any neighborhood sound. It could be heard amidst the whir of lawn mowers and yelps of the two cocker spaniels up the street. Rat-a-tat-tats rolled through the chorus of hollers from the park’s jungle gym, splashes from the Dawsons’ pool, the labored breath of the mail truck as it halted with a squeal at each house.
According to Minnie, she was the very first – and one of the few – to have actually seen the bird: a male pileated woodpecker, so said the Audubon guide she’d checked out at the county library, now long overdue.
It was a striking thing, about the size of a raven. The red crest shaped like a Spartan helmet and its ermine-like body gave it an air of royalty. The long, shiny black beak curved like the blade of a scythe, gothic and sinister, the black stripe through its eyes like a bandit.
It was perhaps because of this regal, menacing elegance that the woodpecker had become something of great importance to the neighborhood’s kids: an exotic harbinger, a mascot, a distraction. Theories – endless and inconclusive – about the woodpecker’s arrival were much discussed, and meaning after meaning had been heaped upon the bird. The kids had made a great fuss. Woodpecker portraits rendered with crayons, crepe paper, and glue-stuck googly eyes were exhibited on refrigerators. Whooping calls and maniacal clapping crisscrossed backyards in efforts to summon the bird from the mess of brush and dead evergreens beyond the cul-de-sac. Tales of wildly exaggerated sightings and fabricated encounters spun from Linden Lane to Sunnyside Drive. Dads performed lousy imitations of the Woody Woodpecker theme song that their kids did not recognize. Guess who?
All of this because of a bird that was rarely seen, only heard.
I had first heard the woodpecker three weeks ago, right before I’d rushed into the bathroom, heart racing at the downstairs sounds of the sliding door whooshing open, then slamming shut. The pipes had let out a scream as I turned the faucet, and while waiting for the water to warm, I listened for what I had mistaken as the arrival of the exterminator or the driveway sealer or that little shit from up the street, Robbie Dawson. Stretching down my underwear with one hand, I had cupped the other under the stream so I could splash water up just as a shuffled gallop ascended the stairs. I had, just then, been thinking about things I should not have while lying on the bed I shared with Jim, not thinking about Jim, imagining my fingers were not my fingers, the surge and collapse that followed, not brought about by the fingers that I had imagined were not mine. Then, knock knock knock, like the tock of a metronome, a kind of cautionary sensor gone off, a tsk tsk tsk, a warning to stop the thing from happening, that thing we had not yet done, but lately seemed inevitable. Minnie had roared into the bathroom just as I was toweling off, arms outstretched to show me how big the woodpecker’s wingspan was, flapping proudly.
From that moment on, I had connected the knocking to Richard, fusing illicit masturbation to the sounds of a bird foraging for carpenter ants. Perhaps he had heard it, too – at the exact same time – maybe after jerking off in the shower, whispering my name, and that he now associated his desire for me with the noisy, erratic stabs at dead wood.
Between us, nothing yet had happened. Interactions at block parties and potlucks over the past few months had never dipped below the surface of propriety, though clearly there’d been something tremoring underneath all along. Recent events had sent electricity into the air; I could feel it prickling underneath my skin, like the way dogs’ senses crackle and go haywire as fronts emerge, long before thunderheads assemble. We were two tectonic plates shifting on a fault line. Only a matter of time before the skies opened, or seismic waves shook the earth. An eruption, a landslide. Really, any catastrophic metaphor worked. Anyway, disaster was so close, you could smell it. It was just so obvious. Like, last week when we were at the Hendricksons’ for Neighborhood Game Night, I’d been sitting on the floor at the coffee table next to where Richard sat on the couch and he asked if I’d like to try the Tuscan olives he’d brought. He made the marinade himself. When he passed me the ceramic bowl, a glint of light reflected on his steel diving watch, and it seemed to burst just for me, like a wink. There was that, and then not thirty minutes later, he asked if I knew the Lowells since they had a house up north and went for the same two weeks in August every year, nudging my shoulder with the bowl of marinated olives, nodding. Not even Jim could tank my spirits, guffawing at my expense during Scrabble that night, spilling scotch on the carpet as he shook tiles in a light fist as if they were cocktail nuts. I knew the difference between deprived and depraved, of course; I’d just overdone it on the Chablis, that was all. I mean, was there much difference anyway? But I knew what was happening with Richard, what had emerged between us and the storm ahead. I had a sense of things, you see. My great-grandmother, a descendant of Albanian gypsies, had considered herself a clairvoyant, and everyone had always said we were a lot alike.
And so, the elusive, hulking woodpecker had been at it for weeks now. At the lindens. At the pines. Possibly, the cedar shingles of the house. Knocking all morning, louder in the afternoons, in the dingy sunlight before light dissolves and becomes shadow. And with every rolling knock, I could feel with more and more intensity the dampening of my underwear.
Lottie and Peter Walsh arrived early, as they often did. I was in the kitchen making a half-hearted horseradish sauce. From the window, I could see Lottie lolling on the chaise next to the pool, her long arm dangling, fingertips tapping the water’s surface, as if checking its temperature. Peter looked at her as if she was something to eat. He had The Times unfolded and spread like wings, but his head was turned in the direction of his new wife, now lying still on her back in a white maillot suit, eyes behind dark sunglasses.
The sliding doors opened. Jim carried the sheet pan and the basting brush to the sink and dropped both, making a series of sharp, stinging noises as they rattled against the stainless steel. My shoulders clenched. While loudly opening and closing cabinets and then the freezer door with his back to me, Jim asked where Minnie was. I said I didn’t know. Jim asked when I was going to come outside. I said I didn’t know. Jim asked if that was what I planned to wear. I said yes, yes it was.
I looked down at my tunic, the one I’d bought the other day when I took Minnie to the mall to shop for back-to‑school shoes. I felt my face redden but then decided it didn’t matter because I knew Richard would think it was pretty and would tell me so when he could. Even if for the rest of the day Jim, Richard, and all the others would look at Lottie as if she were a ribeye, with her curvy Veronica Lake hair and gold bangles, I knew better. Wouldn’t he rather bend me over the buffet table? Me – over Peter Walsh’s new wife?
It’s not that I was bad-looking. Actually, I was often stopped at the checkout line at United, or at the club, or at one of Jim’s firm’s holiday parties, as people always said I looked like someone. A second cousin (once removed), the paralegal at the firm where I used to work, Minnie’s substitute teacher’s former daughter-in‑law. Apparently, I looked like a lot of freshmen roommates.
“Don’t drink too much,” said Jim, with his back to me, still. Ice shards melted into amoeboid shapes on the black granite while he mixed his own drink.
I lifted my glass of wine and took a big sip.
By the time I was finished with the sauce and the salad dressing, almost everyone had arrived. In addition to the Walshes, there were the Dawsons, the Farrells, the Ackermanns, the Van Brundts, Silversteins, Hendricksons. Assorted families, some from the neighborhood, some from Jim’s firm. Men with a mélange of new wives, old wives, attention-deficit-disordered children. No sign of Richard.
The sliding door shut with more force than intended. Some of the talk slowed. A couple of faces looked in my direction, expressionless. I held up one hand in a half-wave to no one in particular.
I set the crab dip down on the umbrella table then put a hand over my eyes for shade. The patio hummed with the shimmer of those first few drinks. The sky was bright and cloudless. In the air, there were still mosquitos, but also an absence of humidity, signaling the end of summer. Time was short, then, to serve pitchers of gin and limes before noon, throw meat on the grill, to hide your hard‑on from looking at a half-naked Lottie Walsh all afternoon. The chatter seemed overly exuberant for the hour, as if all had sensed the end of these things was near.
“Wow, I mean, I shouldn’t.”
Lila Dawson slathered a cracker with dip, using a small spreader with a ceramic watermelon for a handle.
“Is this the same one that was in the paper?” Lila Dawson had already begun to slur. Though, she was from the South, so it was hard to tell for sure. With one long, lacquered fingernail, she dug out dip from where it had been crammed in the corner of her mouth, smudging her lipstick. Though an old wife, Lila dressed as though she was unaware of this. Her flimsy black cover‑up suggested boudoir rather than barbecue, and was less opaque than it should have been, particularly around her middle.
I said it was the very same. Lila again said she shouldn’t but she did, humming and groaning and wiping crumbs off her mouth while commenting on the beautiful day. She then smeared two crackers at once, right after she said that she really, really should not. When she spoke, bits of cracker flew out of her smacking mouth.
“Sorry about the other day. She’s okay?”
Minnie was knocked over by Robbie’s dog earlier that week – the dog had escaped through a broken slat in their fence and bounded into our yard where Minnie had been running through the sprinkler. But I suspected it was Robbie Dawson, not the fat, skittish Labrador, who had barreled into her.
“What a good egg that kid is,” said Lila, dabbing her chin with a paper napkin. “So tough.” She rubbed her hands together as she lustily eyed the chip ’n dip bowl. “No harm, no foul, right?” She smiled sweetly, which looked as though it had taken some effort. I wondered if Lila had seen Minnie’s bandaged knees that were sprayed with Bactine every night while she howled. Really, blaming the dog. Robbie Dawson was such a little shit.
“So, have you heard?” Lila sipped her gin and tonic, nodding in the direction of the pool. “Cecile had another one. Shame.”
And there was Richard, waving to someone in the shallow end, his other hand at the small of his wife’s back.
Of course I knew he’d bring Cecile. Oh, Cecile was all right. She was light and airy and wore soft denim dresses and earnest sandals. She worked at the Lutheran hospice care, as you might expect. I couldn’t say anything about her that would have made me feel better about wanting to fuck her husband. So, I tried not to give her too much thought at all.
“I mean, what was that, her fourth?” Lila licked her fingers. “I mean, at what point are you like, you know, God has spoken. I mean, c’mon already. Buy a summer house.”
I mumbled in agreement and left her at the umbrella table with the crab dip. I didn’t want to hear any more about Cecile’s miscarriages. I walked toward the side of the pool so I could easily be seen, but held back a bit when I saw Minnie bouncing near the ladder. That’s who Richard had been waving to – Minnie – and now he and Cecile were talking to her with what appeared to be parental tenderness. Was that even appropriate, given the circumstances?
Cecile then kneeled down and responded animatedly as the story of being knocked down by Robbie Dawson was recounted. Minnie hoisted herself out of the pool, sat on the ledge, then peeled back her Band-Aids. Cecile covered her mouth with her hands in what looked to be a sincere gesture of empathy. Taking advantage of her captive audience, Minnie launched into an update on the campaign she’d initiated to change the name of the subdivision from Sunny Acres to Woodpecker Woods. She and Lucy Van Brundt had collected 36 signatures on the petition, and arrangements had been made to present at an upcoming neighborhood association meeting. The girls were also fundraising for special feeders that would hold the suet cakes that they planned to make for that goddamn bird (the main ingredient was suet – raw, hard mutton fat, harvested between the loins and kidneys, specifically, Minnie had said. We’d ordered it from a feed and supply store, and moments after it arrived, looking like a dead brain wound with Saran wrap, I shoved it to the back of the fridge. Better than beetle larvae, said Minnie, as I slammed the door, rattling the ice cubes in the freezer. Maybe. I wasn’t so sure).
As Richard reached for his wallet, I walked closer, waving hello. He returned the wave and winked at me – out in the open! – then knelt down to the pool’s ledge, where with two knuckles, pretended to steal Minnie’s nose. She squeaked and then slid back into the water, dunking her head. Richard and Cecile laughed while they waited for her to bob back up again, clapping like idiots when she burst through the surface, beaming like Esther Williams.
I hadn’t known it was possible to feel so lonely so soon after your insides twitched like that, and you could sense that you’d gone wet between the legs.
The tenderloin was done, carved, styled on a silver tray with parsley. Saran wrap was removed from the salads, casseroles, and cobblers that had been placed on the large buffet table that Jim had set up that morning. Though it was still late afternoon, torches were lit. In the distance, the zap of a bug light could be heard, its sound about to be drowned out by the 17‑year cicadas. Everyone toweled off, toweled their children off, and moved through the line, balancing Styrofoam plates and oversized plastic wine glasses etched with sailboats and spouting whales, paper napkins scrunched in between their fingers. Adults scattered to sit on the chaise lounges and around the umbrella tables, their children at the picnic table or atop towels on the deck. Hugh Dawson and Peter Walsh smoked cigarettes by the pool gate, blowing rings into the woods.
While scuttling around the patio picking up empty cups and watermelon rinds, I had managed to avoid both Jim and Lila Dawson, but also lost track of Richard. I knew they hadn’t left, since Cecile sat at one of the picnic tables, taking Robbie Dawson’s corn off the cob with a plastic knife.
In need of a drink, I made my way back through the sliding doors to the kitchen. A curious smell wafted throughout. Minnie and Lucy Van Brundt hunkered over a muffin tin set on a wire rack. Before I could ask what in the world, Minnie looked up at me with her big brown eyes and said, “I thought it was okay?”
A timer dinged, sounding like an old telephone. Wearing two large red oven mitts, Minnie pulled a second muffin tin from the oven. The counter was a mess: jars of peanut butter lay open next to torn-apart bags of sunflower seeds and boxes of raisins on their sides. Rolled oats and cornmeal from overturned canisters had spilled into mounds on the floor. And at the center of my butcher block, glossy with sweat, sat half of the hunk of suet, glistening underneath the light. My stomach flipped and I put a fist to my mouth.
“Don’t they smell delicious?” Minnie pulled off the mitts and then poked one of the suet cakes with her finger.
“Smells can be deceiving,” said Lucy Van Brundt, staring at me. “And are not universal. Your mom may have faulty olfactory neurons.”
“So I guess you girls finished your homework then,” I said, forgetting in that moment that school was out for summer. Breathing heavily through my mouth, I pulled out an open bottle of wine and emptied it into my glass. Petulant child, that Lucy Van Brundt. Clearly, she had yet to develop a sense of self-awareness. Which was tragic, really, if you thought about it.
“Until we get the feeders, can we just scatter these around the yard?” Minnie arranged the second batch of suet cakes on the rack. “Maybe he’ll know to return, our yard will become home. Don’t you think, Mom? We should take some out now?”
“Undesirables,” said Lucy Van Brundt, who then took a handful of raisins and fed herself, one at a time, nibbling between her front teeth. “That’s what you’d be risking. Voles. Weasels. Worse.”
“Mom?”
“That’s nice, girls.” I pulled another bottle of wine from the fridge, opened it, refilled my glass. Richard, where are you? Maybe he’d found Cecile by now. Maybe at that very moment she was having her fifth miscarriage in my guest bathroom. A half-formed fetus expelled in the toilet bowl. But what I pictured sinking in the water was the remaining hunk of suet.
Some kid hollered in the direction of the girls as incomprehensible pop music began to blare from the screened‑in porch. The girls hopped off the counter and while Minnie ran towards the sliding doors, Lucy Van Brundt leaned back into the refrigerator and stared at me. Again.
With the exception of her hair, which was shaped into a precise and symmetrical pageboy, the rest of Lucy Van Brundt was lopsided. Her eyes, while both very large, were slightly different shapes and dramatically different colors: one, a pale color of interminable hue, the other, such deep brown it appeared black, as if she lacked an iris. One side of her mouth was perpetually turned down, while one eyebrow was always arched. She had a long line for a dimple on her right cheek, but it was neither cherubic nor endearing.
“Smell is the most potent trigger of memory, you know,” she said, unblinkingly. “Pleasant enough, should one wish to recall glimmers of the past.”
She shifted against the fridge, bending one knee so now her body was lopsided, too. “Though at times, I suppose there’d be some scattered inconveniences. For those moments one would rather forget.”
She walked past where I stood near the island, then pivoted on the balls of her sneakers, squeaking on the tile. “Still,” she said, tapping her nose, unevenly dispersed with pinkish-brown freckles. “You might want to get that checked out.” Her gaze, pejorative and impatient, lingered for a moment before she skittered out the sliding doors.
Her neck ought to be wrung.
From the window I could see Jim sitting next to Lottie, paper plates teetering on their knees. He was still wearing his stupid apron, When in doubt, add more sauce embroidered and emblazoned across the chest. He smiled his toothy smile, then raised one bushy eyebrow, looking like he was about to pour barbecue sauce all over her – like, if he could, he would hold her horizontally, one hand palming the crown of her head, the other holding her by the toes – and just have at it. He lifted a swath of her Veronica Lake hair and whispered something in her ear. Lottie threw back her head in laughter. Then her head fell on his shoulder. Fools. What goddamn fools they were making of themselves.
Some of the new wives had mixed up a pitcher of Long Island Iced Tea, which they now sipped through Minnie’s rainbow Krazy Straws. The old wives had put on a movie for the kids, now showered and pajamed, shingled like decorative pillows on the sectional in the den.
The hunk of suet on the butcher block glistened under the copper sauce pans and skillets that suspended from the pot rack above. I set the glass down and steadied myself by grabbing onto the pull of the utensil drawer. It was smeared with peanut butter.
“Something in here smells just – ” said Lila Dawson, standing at the threshold, hiccupping.
She walked around to the counter, her gin and tonic in one hand, and in the other, she held the braided rope of her new wife cover‑up, twirling it in a circle like a lasso. I wiped my hands on a tea towel, thinking how nice it would be to run them down her back.
“Bacon-wrapped dates? Is that what I smell? Oh, you are just awful.”
It was then that I saw Richard cross the lawn. He was giving Minnie a piggy back ride, heading in the direction of her swing set. I craned my neck but they fell out of sight. The air was dotted with the blink of fireflies. Minnie used to catch them with one of her old plastic baby bottles she’d pierced holes into with the sharp end of a meat thermometer. She’d found the bottles in the box with the pacifiers, a ladybug mobile, tiny nail clippers. That was last summer. We’d brought the box upstairs the day Dr. Strauss came to the NICU, and after checking Roman’s lungs, he said any day now, which is what Jim and I repeated to Minnie later that afternoon before going out for BLTs and orange sherbet, any day now. When we got home that night, our t‑shirts reeking of Eat-Rite, Minnie had sat cross-legged in front of the box and pulled everything out, unsnapping onesies, wearing the teething ring around her wrist as if it were a bracelet, pressing the plush butterfly until it began to play “Clair de Lune.” When she tossed a small cloth over her shoulder, she asked if she would be allowed to help feed him, or burp him, or give him a bath. Yes, yes, we said, from where we sat on the couch watching her, Jim squeezing my hand, never once, not even for just one second, letting it go. Yes, yes. Any day now. As it turned out, we were all wrong about that. A few days later, Jim had re-packed the box and returned it to the basement, but Minnie kept one bottle for catching lighter bugs, as she called them then. They’d glow in the bottle on her nightstand which she watched until she fell asleep. They’d be dead by morning.
“Ooooh, my oh my,” Lila said, her glass splashing as she hovered over the cooling rack. “What have we here? Well anyway, I shouldn’t.”
“No, you should not,” I said, piling the suet cakes into a casserole dish, then snapping the lid shut. Cornmeal dust blew up in a cloud when I tossed the wire rack into the sink.
Lila stuck out her tongue, and then with a little sound like a laugh and a hiccup, staggered over to the refrigerator and poured wine into her gin and tonic.
With blood thrumming loudly in my ears, I slipped my sandals back on, smoothed down my tunic, then rummaged through the junk drawer looking for lip gloss and a Tic Tac. Don’t go far, Richard. I’m coming for you.
Lila belched in a growl, wiped her chin with the back of her hand, then took a sip of her drink.
I found the tube of lip gloss, rolled it on, then closed the junk drawer with a swing of my hip. As I was about to slide open the doors to the patio, I felt a hand touch my arm.
“That Minnie is just a delight,” a voice said, as if this was a secret between us.
I turned around. It was Cecile.
Everything about her was soft: her pinky complexion, the washed-out fabric of her floral skirt, the way her hair always looked as if she’d just brushed it, the look in her eyes, her touch. Blended edges that disappeared. She was a watercolor.
“Thanks,” I said, looking at my feet. “She is really taken with you . . . and Richard.”
She rubbed the palm of her hand up and down the length of my arm, which I barely felt. Later, I would be overwhelmed with shame when I thought about what I’d said next.
“You really have a way with kids. You’re a natural.”
Cecile let out the tiniest sigh, interrupted by the crash of glass hitting tile, followed by the gurgling, guttural sounds of Lila Dawson vomiting in my kitchen. Without a word, but with a soft pat on my arm, Cecile ran to Lila, who was holding herself up by stretching her arms, hands clenching either side of the sink. The vomiting soon slowed, then transitioned into sobbing. Cecile ran my tea towel under the faucet and patted Lila’s bent forehead with it, shushing and rubbing her back in a circle as if she were a fussy infant. Cecile then suggested that fresh air might do some good, and that it would be nice to rest on one of the chaise lounges, maybe sip some ginger ale, if there was any, all while looking at me with her watery eyes. I nodded, cursing them both in my head as I walked back into the kitchen. Wait, wait for me, Richard. I will find you.
After Lila had cycled through three more bouts of sobbing and recovery, Cecile was able to walk her out to the patio where she arranged for her convalescence, leaving me alone in the kitchen once again. Alone with Lila Dawson’s vomit in my sink. Hunk of mutton fat on my butcher block. Broken glass, scattered ice shards, lime sections, mounds of cornmeal on my floor. Fuck. I turned the bottle of dish soap upside down and squirted half of it in my sink and pulled the faucet. Lila must have felt better as her shrieky laughter was breaking through the strum of the cicadas. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Then, sounds of the sliding door opening. I looked over my shoulder as I sprayed down the sink. It was Richard.
“Hey there,” he said, winking at me for the second time that day.
He looked so handsome, standing there in his alma mater t‑shirt and ridiculous swim trunks, which Cecile must have bought for him.
“Everything was delicious,” he said, thumbing towards the hallway. “Nature calls.”
That was a sign, I thought. For me to follow. My insides twitched.
I turned off the water and walked closer to the window. Cecile sat on Lila’s chaise lounge, looking over her as if she was keeping vigil. Jim’s teeth, as white and long as piano keys. Lottie’s head, still on his shoulder. Blue light from the kids’ movie flashed from the den. I tipped back my wine glass. It was empty.
The guest bathroom seemed further away than usual, and the hallway even seemed to elongate as I walked towards it. The light that outlined the door pulsed. I put my hand on the knob. It was hot and slippery, and when I put that hand to my nose, it smelled like Coppertone and hickory chips. I put my hand back on the knob and turned it.
Richard was at the sink, scrubbing his hands.
“Hey! You didn’t knock,” he said, smiling at my reflection.
No, I thought. No knocking. Not yet.
I sucked in my breath and then put my arms around his waist. This is it, I thought. Now. I let my fingers poke down the elastic of his swim trunks, then lifted my face at an angle towards his, not wanting to close my eyes though I knew that would have been the polite thing to do, but because I wanted to remember everything, I watched and waited for his face to bend down to mine.
But it didn’t.
Richard gently removed my hands from his waist and held them together, his palms flattened and tight as if offering a prayer, looking at me all the while with what appeared to be compassion, or worse. It was the worst look anyone had ever given me. No, no, no. This is all wrong, I thought. I wanted to leap up to him, put my hands behind his neck to bring his lips to mine, to pull him close. But then I heard Minnie running down the hallway, screeching about the woodpecker.
I left the bathroom first, running, trying to keep up with Minnie, who was carrying a croquet mallet, her flip flops slapping the floor. I wasn’t sure what any of this meant. I’d followed all the signs, felt everything. My senses had never been sharper, I’d never felt more alive. What did this all mean?
Then throngs of kids – who just moments ago had been bored or dozing, slouched on the sectional in the den – appeared in the kitchen, heading in the direction of the sliding glass doors.
The shrieking was shrill and piercing, but it was not Lila Dawson. It was a horrible sound. Though it was still an hour or so before sunset, the floodlights clicked on and illuminated the driveway, but not the patio, with its sharp, white light. What looked at first like small frisbees scattered on the asphalt turned out to be suet cakes, all of them intact except for one nearest the woodpecker.
Squawking and flapping on the driveway, the woodpecker stuttered and stumbled, as if it couldn’t understand things would never be right with it again. The crowd of kids merged together in a line, stopping where the fading day bordered the floodlight’s glare, leaning forward, looking breathless and insecure. What is this, what is this, they seemed to say. And then one of the boys, wearing footed pajamas patterned with basketballs, looked up at me, his face twisted. For one second, it was quiet as death. It was then that we saw the hawk.
The wings made terrible shadows against the light as they thrashed. The hawk screeched as it dove like an arrow, and once upon the woodpecker, its beak stabbed at the magnificent breast, and then shuffled the thing from side to side, like one does when kneading dough, stabbing at its breast again and again. The woodpecker’s red crown stood sharp and stiff, though the rest of its body gave way to the hawk, still screeching. The woodpecker squawked in gasps while it tried to knock the hawk away, but the hawk then tore at the woodpecker’s beak, silencing it. With its wings settled then folded, the hawk bore down and took from the woodpecker what looked like broken postal rubber bands that bounced and swayed as they were pulled from its body. The woodpecker twitched and its beak opened slightly, so though the thing was half dead, for a moment it looked as if what dangled from the hawk was a tangle of worms, bouncing and twisting, to be fed lovingly to this nestling that was missing half of its beak. The hawk looked up at us, spread its wings and cried one last time, as if to say it is done. Then its head dropped down, jabbing around the hollows of the woodpecker’s body. And then it was quiet once more.
Chatter among the adults resumed. Someone called for ice, and then there was the smell of cigarettes. The fan of the air conditioner rumbled to a start. But the kids remained at the light’s border, still as stone. It was as if they had glimpsed their adolescent futures with all their inevitable failures and disappointments, and were now weighted down, immobilized, by what they now knew and could never unknow. Just how bleak uncertainty could be, especially when stripped of magic. The futility of assigning meaning to something that was never meant for your grasp. To feel the loss of the thing that never was.
Jen Logan Meyer’s stories have appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Los Angeles Review, December, and Hobart.