Alone With The Birds...

When I was eleven I made an aviary for my bird Wally, who I had traded the year before- for a pair of too small roller-skates- with my little Sister. Before the dog died had died my Father had a garage built at the back of our yard, and the piece of fencing that was taken down so that the cement slab could be poured was left propped up behind the new shed for many years; so when I decided one day that my little bird needed a new house in which she would at least be able to fly, that wood looked good enough to do the job.

It took me a little while to draw a plan but the hardest part was definitely the sawing and nailing of the old hard wood. The saw was blunt and covered my hands in blisters. I bent countless numbers of the cheap weak nails that I had bought for myself at the hardware store and have no doubt they would've been the cheapest ones in stock. And once I had completed the heavy wooden frames I got chicken wire and used little horse-shoe shaped nails to attach it.

It wasn't a bad effort; the many birds that I went on to buy over the years escaped relatively seldomly. They were funny little things. I always got the same breed as I had this fantasy of making money by selling the babies that I didn't want for breeding stock. These particular parrots love to knaw on wood, a fact I hadn't known until after I had released them into my Creation, so it wasn't long before they would make their little escape attempts by trying to chew their way out. I think they must have been relatively happier than they were in their small cage though, for they did lay eggs even if they never hatched. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that they all managed to become lesbians- even when one new bird I'd bought was professionally sexed, and I knew he was definitely a male, the girls still rejected him. He had to sit on the swing all by himself and wasn't allowed anywhere near the little nesting box that I had also nailed together.

I later acquired a pair of brown quails that also lay eggs, but their feet were bitten off one day by the mice that lived under the floor of the cage and they died, and their eggs got too cold to survive. I spend many hours, sitting, alone with the birds. I twitter at them as if I can speak to them, and watch as they tear up the newspaper I provide them into tiny strips that they fold up under their wing-pits to take up for their nest. I spend hours hollowing out logs with a hammer and chisel for the quails to play in, but they stand unused on the aviary floor after the quails die.

In the mornings when I feed them, Wally always flutters down to bite me on the finger while the others look nervously on from their little wooden boxes. Wally has gotten out twice before but she always comes back when she gets hungry. My Sister's tell me that I am weird for spending so much time talking to the birds, when they noticed me at all, but I didn't much care at the time. The birds had a life that I was interested in watching and they were also like my little friends- so I really don't know why I stopped caring for them so suddenly one day.

My Mother would practically have to force me to even feed them and give them fresh water- and when I would run out of sunflower seeds, which happened all the time, I would only give them stale toast to eat- sometimes for days. Eventually I stopped repairing the holes in the wood that they made and they all eventully escaped. Except for Wally. In the end she could always escape whenever she wanted to but was the only one who ever came back- until one day the cat caught her when she landed near the swings and I found what was left of her little body, mashed into the mud.

I sometimes still have dreams about the birds, where I wake up in the morning and my Mother tells me that I haven't fed the birds or given them any water in years. I go up to the cages, where they still sit in my dreams beneath the pink-flowered tree, where the dogs are also buried, and pull off the night covers only to reveal all these straggly mangy birds with rotting beaks and feathers. There are many different breeds now; deformed galahs and other parrots and a giant golden cuckoo that is attacking all the smaller weaker birds. And then there are the thousands of baby mice that are nesting beneath the rotten floorboards that I throw callously over the fence.

I have had similar dreams about my Sister's and my horses starving to death from being neglected and abandoned for many years. I've even had a dream where I neglected my 'dream baby', whose name happened to be Samantha, for a week- and I came home to her starving and crying in the corner of the Red Room, covered in shit.

I don't understand why I should have such a guilt complex, but that's what it seems that I must have. At least to me and my tiny brain.