Flash fiction – Sumitra Singam

Bird Swallowers 

After the men cut our voice boxes out, women began swallowing birds. We had to endure months of fighting down a choking sensation, but perhaps we managed because of the words we’d swallowed for years. The trick was to know that the bird has no agenda of its own. We remembered what it was like to nest something within our bodies. We made sure to eat worms, grubs, seeds regularly. We no longer ate poultry. Finally, when the birds nested within our bodies, we were able to warble and coo in a language the men couldn’t understand. 

Those of us who had found our new voices were banished, and we made a compound at the wild, forested edge of the town. It was a ramshackle hut, wings added as new members arrived. We held them in the crooks of our arms until their shock settled. We found birds for them, helped them with the swallowing. Rejoiced when they opened their sweet trilling for the first time. Our chorus grew in complexity and timbre.

Occasionally the men approached with fists and daggers and words of hate. We let our birds fly out and answer with their hooked beaks, their sharp talons. Sometimes the men returned to hiss and pace our perimeter, but that was no longer relevant to us. We had the earth to till, water to fetch, children to teach.

There was a large, warm, communal kitchen always with a pot bubbling on the stove smelling of earthy cumin and heady lemon, always something in a tin in the oven, rising like witchcraft. The children ran in unruly, laughing packs. They approached any one of us with their cuts and bruises and we tended them on our knees, with our cooing, with a loving peck.

Soon all the women had joined us. Soon we were complete in our togetherness. Soon we felt at home. All it took was time, space, food, affection. At night, we would huddle in groups, arms winged over each other, a shoulder for every head. We slept more soundly than we ever had.

Today, we wake with the sun, and ruffle the sleep from our eyes. We run outside to offer the day our salutation. Our birds are the yellow of the happiest day of a child’s life, and the blue of a sky that knows it stretches to infinity and the velvet dark of blameless sleep. We stand, us women with our children. We spread our wings and murmur into the sky, twisting and rising as one. We dance and laugh and play as if we are the wind itself.