You are not allowed to touch the birds. You are not allowed to place the little dropper above the desperate wide open beaks of the rescued infants, who are screaming for your help, and squeeze a few white drops of nutrition that you have prepared into their hungry throats. You are not even allowed to clean their cages, or come within 15 feet of the City Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, unless accompanied by someone else. You are most certainly not allowed to take in the type of birds that Margaret, a new volunteer, has shown up with at your door.
Small, dark, wet, with little bones jutting out of their broken wings, motherless mouths open and begging. Margaret helps you carry crate after crate into your soundproof basement because your daughter will be visiting soon, and you don’t want her to take the birds away from you.
By the time your daughter arrives, you don’t know who she is. She gives you a name that sounds nice but not one you recognize. She’s bringing out suitcases from your room you have never packed, telling you it’s time to go with her, like you planned. You quote the Quran: And they plan, and I plan, and Allah is the best of planners. Your daughter says just get in the car.
At her house you watch your reflection in the dead television, let her bathe you with harsh hands. Sometimes you remember the birds, and she tells you you’re thinking of the past. Sometimes when you don’t recognize her she tells you that she has a hard time forgiving her mother. Her mother who let her father soundproof a basement, because she didn’t want to hear the sounds of him beating her children, and doing things worse than beating. Stop, stop, you say. You can’t bear the filth of her life.
Your daughter takes you home a month later to retrieve prayer books you forgot in your room. She says she will help you carry them only if you go down into the basement with her and listen. She opens the door and the sound, the sound is nothing like you’ve heard before. Ya Allah, wails your daughter. What have you done?
And then you lie and say you don’t know how the caged birds got there. The children in the basement are shrieking and shrieking. They haven’t been fed. They haven’t been given water. On what have they been surviving? You have already begun to forget.
The core workshop of SmokeLong Fitness is all in writing, so you can take part from anywhere at anytime. We are excited about creating a supportive, consistent and structured environment for flash writers to work on their craft in a community. We are thrilled and proud to say that our workshop participants have won, placed, or been listed in every major flash competition. Community works.