The Last Murmuration of Gwyneth
by Winnie Bright
Gwyneth is sitting on the edge of my bed again when I wake up. I don’t need to see her to know she’s there. I feel the pressure of her feather-light weight on the mattress beside me and I know that when I open my eyes, I will see Gwyneth’s back, ramrod straight, draped in iridescent black silk. I lie still, playing possum, feigning sleep, wanting to imagine my inaction could impact her daily reprise, but I’m deluding myself. We are of the same flock, but the peculiar sensitivities that connect us allow me to observe, never interact.
“Good morning, Birdy. It’s a lovely day for the beach.”
My breath catches at the sound of her voice. Gwyneth chirps the same phrase each morning, but her words are not what floods my veins with ice water; it’s the uncanny accuracy of her mimicry. When Gwyneth speaks, it is in my voice. I try to temper my unease by reminding myself we share the same instinct for thievery; we steal sounds from living things, steal food meant for songbirds, squat in abandoned homes or forcefully evict families from homes already occupied. Stealing and sticking together is how we survive.
I unfurl myself from the nest of thin quilts tangled around me, propping myself up on my elbows. As expected, Gwyneth is perched with her back to me, gazing out the open window when a squall sweeps off the rough winter sea. Despite its translucence, her unmoving form appears heavy and impenetrable as stone, while the wildly undulating curtains reach for her with cotton tentacles. I smell salt and decomposing fish and my stomach turns. Dawn stretches a weak beam of sunlight into the room, hitting Gwyneth and then passing through her, diffused but unbroken. The fuzzy light leaks through her abdomen like a thousand pinpricks, a dense constellation, finally landing on the wrinkled bed sheets across my legs.
“I told that boy not to shout from down there,” Gwyneth grumbles, standing. I mouth the words as she speaks them but I don’t answer her; I’ve learned there’s no point. Gwyneth is in my bedroom and also somehow not here at all. She is a palimpsest, the indelible mark of something time tried to erase. The translucency of her form waxes and wanes, except for the hole in her torso. Even in her most solid state, there is a void in her center the size of a dinner plate that seems to generate its’ own atmosphere. In the hollow of Gwyneth, I watch dust motes float in a stillness that exists nowhere else in the room.
Down there is Crane Beach and it is empty, save for sandpipers and stilts picking their breakfast from the frostbitten tide along the shoreline. There was no shout, no boy, no tourists caught in this tourist trap at this time of year. Sometimes I wonder if Gwyneth sees and hears another member of our Chattering, and if she is stuck behind a two-way mirror and forced to witness their looping downward spiral as I do hers. Migration season began in October and each morning since, I have awoken to Gwyneth settled on the precipice of my bed, squared off against the rectangle of the window frame to greet the new day. Dawn after dawn, she reenacts the scene with the regularity of a cuckoo popping out from her clock, and still, I am inevitably jolted by her existence.
In her daily ritual, Gwyneth approaches the balcony to peer down at the hypothetical caller, triggering a sharp corresponding tug in my solar plexus. Some remnant of the tether between myself and the absence Gwyneth has constructed herself around still holds tight. My arms twitch. Any creature who once flew but became flightless will empathize with her instinct to hoard air in the caverns of her gravity-bound body. I wanted the same, at the height of my grief, but I’ve mourned my fragile hollow bones. The reservoir of anguish over individuation I once housed has dried up and I’ve learned to balance my heavy skull, to speak gutterally when I once would have sang.
The injection of terror and sadness that floods my brain each time Gwyneth pops into my room like an astral projecting jack-in-the-box has begun to take root in my body. My still unfamiliar flesh is clammy and wet. Something frenzied grows behind my eyes, tangled and claustrophobic. In this room, I’ve willfully suspended disbelief while having no rational answers for the why or how of Gwyneth’s appearance. The dissonance of trying to reconcile real and unreal has become unbearable.
I try something new. Instead of acting within my reality and allowing the yank of our invisible connection to drag me behind her, I embrace Gwyneth’s reality. I wrap my hands around the empty air in front of my chest approximately where I imagine the threads that attach us extend from. Planting my bare feet on the hardwood floor, I tightly clench my fists and pull.
I expect my fingers to close around nothing, fingernails cutting crescents into my palms to remind me of my foolishness, but instead, my hands are sliced by searing heat, as if I’ve grasped a laser beam. I feel tiny barbs sink into my skin, anchoring. In an instant, the scorch travels from my palms, a white-hot flame running upward past my wrists, then elbows, and then exploding through me. I’m shaking violently as I stare down at my seemingly empty fists clenched oddly to my chest. I lift my eyes to Gwyneth in front of me.
If events were to proceed as usual, Gwyneth would lean over and yell into the wind, but today the coil of ethereal rope tightens around my fist and her body snaps back just before she reaches the balcony railing. A single, hollow pop, like the sound of a champagne bottle being uncorked, echoes loudly in the room. Instantly, the atmosphere feels pressurized, the air humming and vibrating around and into me. I am aware of the connecting atoms forming every tooth, tendon, vein, and cell. I can feel my neurons pulsing and firing across synapses. A high-pitched ringing in my ears grows louder and becomes a roar, like the infinite crash of waves pounding the shore. Something with wings has flown into my open mouth, filled my throat with its voice, forced its fragile bones and feathers down my windpipe, and now, frenzied, batters the bars of the cage my ribs form. A woodpecker’s staccato rat-a-tat-tat cracks me open and from every pore, light leaps out.
BIO
Winnie Bright is a queer writer and artist from Cleveland, Ohio, where she lives with her wife, child, and dog Hannah Beasley. When she isn’t having incredibly personal, one-sided conversations in her day job as a counselor, she walks in the woods, loiters at the public library, and scours Lake Erie for beach glass.
