Fiction – Joyce Bingham

Multihued feathers

My school friends display their jewelled hollow navels; diamonds wink and shimmy like owl’s eyes in the night. They must not find out about mine. It’s a tiny scar as flat as the plains outside my window. The navel-girls display their gaudy clothes. They pair off with navel-boys and they coo into their prams full of naked children. They ask me when it is my turn. I’m not broody, never hope to be.

I hide my scars with long sleeves. The navel-girls nod to each other; they think they know what lies beneath. The blood of plucked and waxed feathers on my arms makes the skin grow coarse with infected follicles and the bumps of buds. My shoulder feathers sprout in discrete patches. No one can see them there. Athlete’s foot and verrucae are my excuses for non -appearances at the lido. I hide the down and guard feathers, which ripple under my clothes with my long brown feathered hair.

My tracts of pterylae are few but irksome. I am thankful I am not full bird. Feathers require care and buds itch in places I cannot reach to preen. I am bereft of a beak, long gone from my genetic line. Grandma helps me with her back scratcher; it is old, wooden with a chicken wishbone at the working end. She mutters about ancient symbols and phoenix feathers as she works into my itch.

Grandma kept a memory box of my egg shell. The pieces are song thrush-blue, black dots pitter patterned around the wider parts. She said it was because my father was a warbler, a scoundrel who wooed my mother with his delicate song. After mother ran off with a goldfinch, who displayed his gaudy colour and entranced her, Grandma took me home. Here I have nested since, but she plucked me and made me go to school, as a pretend navel-girl.

One day the navel-girls will discover my secret. Grandma says I should prepare to fly away, and head out into the wild countryside and live in a forest. Grandma likes me to explore possible nesting sites and sanctuaries. But there are too many twitchers; they scare me with their lenses and their notebooks.

If I grow tired of plucking and waxing, the multihued feathers of my starling face will greet the sun. Navel-girls will shriek and hoot with laughter. Instead, I’ll keep my feather-secret and watch them push out more navel babies. I soar around, enjoy my time as I move to the beat of wings,

When Robin comes calling, trilling his sweet words into my ear, I roost with him in the tree in our garden. Grandma says nowt good will come of this, and her hawk eyes watch us from her window. He leaves when the days grow shorter and my clutch of powder blue eggs lies warm in my bed.

My hatchings are so beautiful, I feed them well with chips and flakes of fish. But I hear the call of the raven rise on the wind. The wide-open maws of my children demand more time than I can provide. The raven’s darkness haunts me; he wants me to be with him always, and I dream of his power.

Grandma says I’m like my mother, flighty, a bird of many hues, a navel-less hussy. She reveals her hawk talons and I take flight, cawing three times. Grandma takes my brood under her wings, her quills raised. I climb the thermals, my shrieks indignant. Another clutch of my eggs, a raven hoard, sit in his nest in the castle tower.

When Grandma takes my children for a walk, she says I’ve moved out of town for work when she meets the navel-girls as they push their prams. They smile and ogle at my chirping babies with their rosy cheeks and brown eyes. The navel-girls say nothing about my babies’ feathered heads, but they raise their eyebrows and whisper my secret.