MY PROPERTY by Mary Otis
James was the next one born after the first one died. His mother went sledding and crashed and lost the baby. Nobody knows where it went. Pin says the baby wasn’t hurt because it couldn’t feel anything. She says the baby was like snow, which also doesn’t feel anything. James will always be younger, no matter how long the baby is lost.
Please call James, King James. No one else does. He got the name from Pin’s bible TV show. Pin nixed it. But in his mind, he is King James. Pin is not his mother, but she does take care.
James didn’t mean to kill the birds.
Before the incident, James spent his days standing in the front yard, the words MY PROPERTY blinking through his brain. For something to not be someone else’s something was the best feeling in the world.
Before the incident, James’ biggest problem was fitting his name, James Orringer, on the top of his paper at school. Usually, by the time he hit the second r, he knew he was in big trouble. He’d shove the rest of the letters together, and what else could he do, because everyone knows you have to finish your name. The teacher said to give yourself enough space, but how much is enough? People think birds need a lot of room, that they need the entire sky, but that’s not true. Not true at all.
James knew a thing or two about birds from the man in school who taught them. The man showed them pictures of the red-flanked bluetail that lives in Alaska, the ruddy quail-dove from Florida, and the West Indian whistling-duck that wasn’t even Indian but lives in Virginia.
The man said birds see colors beyond human comprehension.
The man said birds have magnets in their beaks and that’s how they find their way home.
The man said some birds, like prey birds, are sneaky birds, and by the time you see one it’s too
* * *
August 13th, the day before James’ birthday, an eagle flew off with a baby. James saw it on TV – a terrible sight to behold. People said the eagle’s body was as big as a beagle, that its wingspan was eight feet. They said eagles have a talon grip twenty-five times more powerful than the human hand. The eagle owned the baby now. The eagle was a bad raptor. This eagle had to be stopped.
James knew the neighborhood nests, and it was possible one of them was the eagle’s nest. But none of them looked big enough. There were nests for barn swallows, sparrows and one bluebird. NO eagles. He needed to catch an eagle. But until he found one, he’d start with the other birds, and if you said James, why did you take these birds, even if you said King James, why did you take these birds that aren’t eagles, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you.
There were plenty of places for birds in James’ bedroom – in a shoebox he once used to collect scabs before Pin dumped them, behind his dresser where there was a hole in the wall, and in a little plastic bucket, one from the previous Halloween the supermarket gave him for free, a bucket too small to collect any decent amount of candy, a bucket for a baby, really. But the thing James hadn’t counted on was feeding the birds. It wasn’t easy because their mouths didn’t just snap open the way you see in cartoons. And if you have no birdseed, jalapeño Doritos are a terrible substitute.
Why James, why did you take the birds?
Why did the eagle take the baby? Where was his mother’s baby? Where do things go when they go? There’s never enough room to answer some questions.
Six of the eight birds died. Even though every bird had its own property.
“James kills birds!” Pin screamed into the phone. But in fact, James was already done, in fact he’d never do it again. Some people never know the beginning from the end.
* * *
A social worker came to see James. She wore a green cardigan and leaning down she parked her head near James’ ear as if she could listen to his brain. She stared at a stain on his T shirt where he’d spilled grape juice he tried to give to the birds. His thoughts smashed together, and it was the same feeling as running out of space on his schoolwork. James wanted to tell her birds have flat eyes and see invisible colors. He wanted to tell her eagles cry, and they sometimes sound like a monkey, but they don’t sing.
The police said James could go to jail. Except that he was too young for jail. A newscaster said that animal cruelty was the first sign of sociopathic behavior. If only James could have told him the eagle started it. For example, if he had caught the eagle, he would be a hero, but there weren’t any eagles, and once he found the other birds, he couldn’t stop taking them, because MY PROPERTY is a thing that will seize you and make you put birds in your shirt. MY PROPERTY will make you put a nest in a coffee can, a nest full of dental floss and mop string and even human hair! Birds will take babies – birds will take the hair off your head!
* * *
The day after the incident James awoke to birdsong – cool blue twirls and red and yellow pip snaps. The terrible wrong had been righted. His birds were back! But they weren’t. They were just other birds.
In the paper it said the boy had no explanation for raiding the nests.
* * *
James doesn’t leave the house now, and every morning Pin gives him a shade pill, the kind like a clean white legless bug. He drinks a cup of milk so the pill doesn’t get stuck in the cracks of his teeth or fall out of his mouth and roll behind the refrigerator. This shade pill is not candy. Then James lies on his bed until the soft gray animals begin to creep around. The ones who wait in the deep dark noiseless, the ones who eat up the light. They pull his arms and eat his nose off his face. But it doesn’t hurt. Because he can’t feel it. Because he is just like snow.
* * *
King James flies higher and higher and he can see the sky from beginning to end, not just a window’s worth, or a ceiling laced with leaves, or worst of all the silly blue sky from his picture book. He can see up and down and all the way around. More space than he could ever use. It’s all here and it’s all now, and who would have thought it could be this way?
A flock of birds flies toward him, glinting green and black and egregious blue. They surround him then move beyond him for they are heading home. They loop up and away from James and soon they’ll be gone for good. The flock becomes a line, the line becomes a tail, then the tail a single thread, one last stitch pulled through the sky.
Mary Otis is the author of Yes, Yes, Cherries: Stories (Tin House Books, 2007). Her stories have appeared in Tin House, Best New American Voices, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and McSweeney’s.