and the birds began to dance

by Holly Redell-Witte

The man was sitting on a bench, Central Park his background. The girl saw that birds were nuzzling the ground around his feet, in and out and around worn, dark, scuffed shoes, as if dancing a waltz. She heard the tiny pecking of their beaks on the sidewalk. She wondered if he was aware of the birds, because, although he was talking, it was to no one in particular. She thought she could see the words spilling out of his mouth, visible as if on scrolls of white sheet music paper unfurling from an endless spool, each word like a black musical note. She drew closer to listen to his word-music. No one will understand this, it sounds like riddles, she thought, but she could hear the words’ love and memory, their why and when. The whole thing was surreal.

He stopped when he seemed to sense her watching him. He did not smile, but he reached into his pocket and withdrew a little sketchbook and a black pencil, the kind you peel away at the bottom to increase the sharpness of the point. He began to draw, looking up at her, then down again at the paper. He’s sketching me, she thought. He drew for many minutes. She began to be edgy, wondering if she should stay still or could move. She desperately wanted to move. She also became aware of people walking by but no one glancing at them. Then he finished and handed her the pad, but when she reached out to grasp it, it vanished, leaving only a trace of stars, as if she had been holding a sputtering Fourth of July sparkler. She could not fathom what had happened and looked to the man for an explanation.

He smiled at her then, but there was nothing in his smile that offered an explanation. Then, he took another pad and pencil – these purple - from another pocket and handed them to her. They did not vanish when her hand touched them. She looked at him, and he indicated by nodding his head toward the paper that she was to draw him. Not an artist, she did her best to capture how rumpled he was, how tired but still with a light in his eyes. And the birds, she wanted to get the birds, so she drew little nubbins at the bottom near his feet, just gashes with the pencil and maybe a few strokes to look like feathers. Miraculously, the birds started to move on their own on the page, startling but not scaring her. She wanted to show it to someone else walking by because it was such a crazy wonderful thing, but no one noticed her, or the man, or the birds on the page or at his feet.

He kept looking at her and smiling. There was something in his smile, something she thought he had forgotten, or maybe she had, and he was trying to remind them both. Then she thought there was something, if not familiar about him, something she thought she should have known some other time. She knew her own forgetting was muscular; she could feel it squeezing her heart, pulling her shoulder wings back in a sharp and sudden spasm. The opposite of that seemed to be happening now, and as she handed the pad with her sketch back to him. She thought she felt her spirit lighten.

It was early Spring, so the air was cool but bright. The buds on the trees were swelling before they became tender green leaves. The quickening of spring had people out not because they had places to be, or were returning from somewhere, but just because there was promise in the air – a change in how it carried light, maybe a fleeting scent of a lilac’s sweetness. 

She began to understand that she and the man might not really be there. Had she been there before she saw him? Had he been there the whole time and she had just now seen him? Why were they invisible? Was she moving from this plane to the next?  Did the man have the answers she needed? Could she walk away?

A twinge of fear snuck up her spine then. Was she already somewhere she couldn’t be found?  The birds, she could still hear them singing and pecking on the page of the pad she had handed back to the man. 

In her reverie, she had been looking around. When she turned back to the bench, the man was gone. Only a slip of paper was stuck in between two slats. It was his portrait of her and hers of him, now on the same piece of paper. She sat down. 

If she was gone, she would have liked the man to be with her, so she knew what to do next.  She was still, just holding the paper, looking first at her face, then at his. His began to animate itself – blue eyes, she saw, and now they didn’t look so tired underneath fluffy white eyebrows; a flush to his cheeks that might have been from the chill air or from lifeblood rushing into his face; a lock of hair on his forehead began to take on a silvery hue. 

A man sat down next to her. “Lovely day,” and she wondered if they were there. “Are you an artist?” he glanced at the paper. “No, not really,” she said, “a man gave me a pad and indicated that I should sketch.” She said nothing about the purple pad and pencil or how the picture now seemed alive. “May I see?” She was a little scared to show him, but something made her hand lift the paper to him. “You’ve drawn me!”

She began to remember feelings she had forgotten. She began to remember Spring. 

Photo of Holly Redell-Witte

BIO: Holly Redell-Witte lives in a magical garden in a magical little town in Washington state.  She has been writing for newspapers and magazines for ages...started in New York, continued when she moved to the Pacific Northwest.  She tells her stories to remember.