songlines

by Kathryn Kulpa

The male indigo bunting is a proud electric blue, strutting and singing while his feathers reflect deep-summer skies, calm lakes, the frosted blue of sweet berries hidden among bramble. He throws back his head, swells his throat, and bursts into song.

As so often happens in nature, the male is the showstopper. The female bunting, nondescript as bark or dirt, hops and pecks along. Maybe you’d mistake her for a sparrow. Maybe a wren. Some brown bird, busy building nests, while its brilliant-colored mate swans the stage like Elvis in blue suede shoes, spinning like Prince in a neon cape, giving tongue to every purple dream, every wild and untrammeled yearning.

But this is not a story about birds. Although the indigo buntings were thick that year, flitting from tree to tree, singing their sweet, insistent summer song. My mother said their mating season started early. Maybe it meant we’d have a dry summer, or a hard, stormy winter to come. People always liked to blame birds for the weather, or at least my mother did. Birds weren’t birds to her but signs, usually of nothing good. Crows huddled on your lawn meant a death in the family. A bird hitting the window meant bad luck.

Bad luck for that bird, anyway.

My mother’s face had a cast-down look that summer, like a balloon slowly leaking air, and she knew it, and couldn’t wait to send that air wafting my way. She liked to show me pictures of her fine young self, even offered (tugging on the strings of my black hoodie, frowning) to make over her favorite dresses for me. She’d saved them, on puffy padded hangers with lavender-scented sachets, in garment bags that were starting to look more yellow than clear.

“You should have seen me on the dance floor in this,” she said, showing me something glittery and poufed. “When I twirled everything sparkled.”

Like a human disco ball, I thought, but didn’t say. I liked to keep the peace.

“I can’t picture Dad on a dance floor,” I said. “What did he wear, same flannel shirt and baggy jeans?” The worn back end of those jeans sagging down. His uniform, once he got home from work, where he wore Oxford shirts and a tie to do whatever he did. I found his LinkedIn page once and he listed himself as an “Experienced Information Professional.”

“I had to fight to keep girls away from your father,” my mother said. “Did you know he was in a band the year we met?”

Had she told me? My father never had. She dug out a photo of him onstage: long, lion-mane hair, pants I could have sworn were spandex, pointy-toed cowboy boots, and, most disturbing of all, no shirt.

He looked like he fronted the shitty band that beat out Jack Black’s kids in School of Rock. Like some hair-metal lounge lizard your mama would warn you to stay away from, only if Grandma had, it hadn’t worked. But the weirdest thing was, I could see what my mother saw in him; I could imagine her putting on her neon-spangled finery, glitter in her hair, and fighting her way through a crowd of other girls. To stand at the foot of that stage, and wait for him to dive.

“He played bass?” I said.

“And sang.”

“Dad sang?” He still did. With the car radio, and in the shower. But not well.

“His voice had energy! Not like what you listen to. All droning.”

An indigo bunting in the yard burst into song. Another, in the tree next door, took it up, repeating the same three notes. Each bird had its own song, I’d read, but they learned from the other local birds. Same patterns repeated, year after year. Neighborhoods of song, melodies passed down for generations.

“Why don’t you come inside for lunch?” My mother asked, and I said I would, in a while, but I lingered. Noah Gordon next door had a new band, and they practiced every morning while his parents were at work. From behind the garage door, across from our front stoop, I could hear them tuning up.

BIO: Kathryn Kulpa lives where Massachusetts meets Rhode Island and writes where poetry meets prose. She is the author of For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press) and A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press). Her work has been chosen for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Wigleaf longlist.