Exile No Longer

It was 2:20, the time Dove had chosen to return from the confused wilderness of Brunswick Street, a time that shrugged at the yard’s Sunday lunch menu of cracked corn, for was he not a new bird?
     A time at which Swan would be lounging among the lilypads: was he not a bird whose counterclockwise swoop ’round the willow would showcase an empathetic right profile, kin to Mikael Blomkvist’s in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
     A time with two “two”s: was he not romantic?
     He swooped, he landed, and she was not there. A crazed shrieking split the air.

Image: alfonsdelfiner.blogg.se

Good

“And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas: and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:10)
     It was. Then along came clammy bathing suits. Cystic fibrosis. Darwin, voyaging on the Beagle. Humid air, leading to remarks like, “It’s 27, feels like 34.”
     “No,” God wanted to cry, “27 in Toronto feels like exactly this. Whatever happened to ‘In the beginning was the Word’? And Jesus, people, your punctuation…” He was beginning to wish instead of an olive branch, He’d given that damned dove a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Image: K. Bischoping
 

Dove, Alone

Swan wouldn’t even say why she wouldn’t talk to him. Raven offered to ask, but Dove had this funny feeling… He whiled June away at Future Bakery, eyeing the sweating buttercream and reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo over a Berlitz student’s shoulders. Dove felt his heart growing ever colder amidst the Swedish frost, so much like Swan. Nights, he nestled alone down the sticky street, avoiding the raucous, pigeon-kicking Brunny clientele, missing her. Until the night Carol Oya rocked her sweltering, no-holds-barred cover of “When Doves Cry” out the walls of the Tranzac and Dove, heart melted, wept.

Image: Courtesy Carol Oya. 
The sequel to this story is Exile No Longer.

True

The Owl chick perched on the balsam, querulously leafing through a Narnia book, notching the bark at mentions of her kind. The fluttering pages made the only sound in the yard.

     Sure, everyone had heard rumours of a long-ago Chicken, who’d gone on a job and never returned. But tonight Raven, flying by an Eraserhead screening at the Crescent Drive-In, had confirmed them. “It was Chicken! Head cut off. Feathers plucked. Aliens, stuff coming out her you-know,” he croaked.

     Dove looked uneasily at Swan. She had plucked most of the pinfeathers from her breast and shivered in the autumn breeze.

Image: 4.bp.blogspot.com
The sequel to this story is Dove, Alone.

Sure

“Wait a sec,” said Dove, “It’s not like we’ve been serious. We’ve just been hanging out.”
     “Hanging out,” Swan muttered. Or something like it; she was tearing out one of her pinfeathers with her beak.
     “I’m dealing with a lot. It wouldn’t be fair. To you.”
     “Fair to me would be you go fuck yourself.”
     Dove felt humbled by her certainty that between a mutual loathing of the yard’s corn-Thursdays and a mutual weakness for Depeche Mode lay the makings of a life together. A vista opened up… “I’m no longer sure,” he sighed. “Of anything.”
     “Oh, I am,” said Swan.

The sequel to this story is True.

Newspaper Koan

“I went by the hair,” Dove continued, “but it wasn’t Jackie Earle I'd met, just his stand-in. Sparrows said the guy had this ‘thing’ for birds. Can’t perform without us. I wanted to go home and take all my diet pills. But right that second, I saw Kate Winslet –”
     “Kate, or her stand-in?” Swan interrupted, surprisingly sharply.
     “In a newspaper. Blowing by. Geez! Saying she accepts her body. Herself. I realized: this is a koan.”
     “A –”
     “A teaching, Flamingo says. Ever since, I’ve been clean.”
     “I trusted you. You lied,” Swan hissed. “And my kind mates for life.”

The sequel to this story is Sure.

Me Time

“It’s not you,” Dove said, “it’s the weeping willow. I think I’m allergic.”     
     “That’s the best you can do?”
     “Huh?”
     “This is our future. If you loved me, you’d take Benadryl.”
     It was the first time the L-word had passed between them. Dove felt a strange foreboding. “Too sleepy-making,” he said, after too long a pause.
     “Claritin, then.” She was getting hissy.
     “Maybe,” he said, “I need some me-time.”
     Swan’s magnificent wings flared, catching Dove upside the head. “I did not just do that,” she said, slamming her beak bitterly into the willow trunk.
     “It’s not you,” Dove said. “Listen…”

The sequel to this story is Newspaper Koan.

La Femme Nikita

Jackie Earle’s Academy Award nomination rekindled the yard’s debate. Flamingo maintained that, as the tinfoil swan in the car masturbation scene, Dove had manifested a delicate butoh sensibility. “Props!” scoffed Raven. An Owl chick snickered. Dove hung his head.
     “Always the toilet paper ads for me,” Swan now murmured beside him,“never a dark night of the soul.” He had been noticing her silences, sensing in them not so much envy as an inchoate yearning to smash through boundaries of her own.
     He looked up.
     She twined her neck appraisingly. “Wanna come over, watch La Femme Nikita?”
     Raven watched them go.

The sequel to this story is Me Time.

Kate Winslet and the Blooper Reel

“Shooting the blooper reel with Kate Winslet tonight!” Dove lied, winging giddily over the yard. Oddly, humans couldn’t tell the bird talent from hoi polloi, so tonight, he could rove the Little Children set freely. Watch. And dream.
     Below, a mess of cameramen surrounding a grey car! Dove trod air. A short-haired man got out, holding — weird! — a tinfoil swan. The car squealed away, the very squeal Dove had heard yesterday, squashed inside his tinfoil façade. “Cut!”
     Dove flailed to earth.
     “Whuh?” He nudged a sparrow.
     “Jackie Earle Haley.”
     They’d reshot Dove’s big scene. Desperation clutched his heart.

Image: www.wildaboutmovies.com 
The sequel to this story is La Femme Nikita.

Jackie Earle

Dove pinched himself. (Or tried. He’d lost an epic three ounces since the call.) “Loved your work in Bad News Bears,” he offered. Jackie Earle Haley seemed shy, his now-middle-aged old-soul eyes intent on the Little Children props guy.
     “Here’s the thing,” Jackie Earle was explaining, “That tinfoil swan? It’s cheap. Sheila’s always denting it in the car. The mood is gone.”
     The props guy shrugged. “I guess.”
     Chin up, Dove nodded earnestly. Weren’t Jackie Earle’s struggles, after all, his own? The props guy said, “Hold still,” stuck a straw into his beak, and took out a roll of tinfoil.


Image: bleacherreport.com
The sequel to this story is Kate Winslet and the Blooper Reel. 

Helping

The amphetamines weren’t helping, Dove had gained another ounce, and here Raven had stopped at a Timmy’s on the way home from some voicework.
     The phone in the yard jingled. “Don’t you want to get it?” asked Raven silkily. Everyone knew for the last forty days, Dove’s agent hadn’t returned one call. Let alone sent a Christmas card. Dove shook his head, mired as it was in the cherry-filled. Raven sashayed over to the phone.
     He came back salt and peppered with dander. Dove's amphetamine-laced heart skipped. “The set of Little Children,” Raven said. “I said yeah, you were resting.”

Image: www.talktocanada.com
The sequel to this story is Jackie Earle.

Ghost

The green-screen shoot took an eternity. “Think benevolent,” the director had insisted. Two hours later, “Amidst the cherubim. Not above.” Dove stuck his chin out and tried resentfully for pious. He wanted his lunch. “Chin down, dammit!”
     “The years have been unkind to Dove,” said one reviewer; another drew a downright mean comparison to William Shatner. One of the CGI artists called to commiserate. “We tried to make the cherubim plumper so you’d look...”
     At dinner, Raven pushed the largest millet pellets Dove’s way. Dove refused food. He was gonna get himself on amphetamines and become thin, like a ghost.

Image by Juan Simón Gutiérrez

The sequel to this story is Helping. 

Dove

“What’s my arc?” he kept asking the writers, who kept changing. He didn’t have any action sequences in the sequel either, though reviewers considered them his strong suit.
     Instead, he spent his time harnessed against a green-screen, with not even an olive twig to shred.
     “Too literal. You’re, like, an avatar of God,” he was told. What he felt like was an awkward girl at high school graduation before diplomas get handed out; like a queen without her purse.
     He didn’t say so around Raven, who’d bragged for years about being in some cancelled episode of a B-grade Aesop’s Fables.

Image: by Rubens.
The sequel to this story is Ghost.
Or, for God's view of Dove, see Good.