Florence, now a bird

The girl in the birdcage rises with the rest of the city’s street birds. They caw her awake. Squawking seagulls cry. Piping pigeons coo, picking beads of morning dew off their feathers, which shine brown and gray under the wetness. Other creatures scamper to cross the avenue while there still aren’t so many cars; a fox makes use of the last bit of dark to rummage through the slim pickings of an overflowing garbage can. Soon more of the city street’s inhabitants will rise, now from their places in front of stores and restaurants and the nearby church, where they’d laid down their cardboard the night before, or tarp if they had one; where they’d laid down whatever little or plenty they had, figuring it a good place to sleep, somehow always managing to get some small amount of rest, no matter the night’s varying shades of darkness, no matter its severity—though never without dreams, wild ones, oftentimes bad ones, dreams that blend with the real world and all its dark corners. They will cough and mumble as they wake up, as they gather their belongings and search for the day’s first cigarette, and they’ll cough as they smoke it to a stub and as they walk on to somewhere else, somewhere that might have a cup of coffee and a slice of bread with cheese or jam for free. In the half hour that follows, the city’s cars are moving along the avenue too, inching through, braking at the red lights, braking every damn block it seems, and they actually yell that. The drivers. They yell, “Damn it!” and other things too, and then they hit their dashboards and the sides of their vehicles, those who smoke ashing onto the street, adding to the caked layers, which stay caked on even between the cleanings that rumble through a few times a week, a whopper of a machine, with its whipping of bristles and soapy runoff that flows into the drains. But they can’t get all of the filth gone. Even with all the world’s bristles and soap, against all the world’s grime, and the ash off the cigarettes adds to the ever-layering layers, and the bit of ash that doesn’t fall to the ground floats into the city’s air, joining the layers of everything in that, along with the hundred million breaths of all the city’s caged beings. This same ash floats, joining the steam from the vents hooked up to the older apartments on this block, then blending with the dank cocktail stench of the way down to the subway—spoilt wine and spilled beer, shit and piss—but cutting through all that is the divine aroma of the roast that’s brewing in the cart at the corner, the type of coffee you pay good money for, with organic, specially sourced beans, and water at the ideal temperature, and it was in nearly this same spot yesterday that the water of 200 hot dogs simmered well into the evening, leaving behind the slightest salty lick to everything. The people stuck in their damned cars, many of them damned themselves, smell it and everything else, but wish not to, and they hit their horns and yell out “Damn it!” and other things, and it is these sounds, and those of the birds, that the girl in the birdcage hears first thing each morning.

The rest of her day is full of noise too. The screams of delighted children. The screams of frightened children. She understands. She is often frightened herself. She’s been out here for years, and it still scares her when she catches a glimpse of her shadow.

The feathers appeared first as concentrated patches of peach fuzz. Her mother compared its brightness to her hair: the soft, shiny fuzz growing from her forearms was the same near-white hue.

“The light catches the eye, Florence,” she’d say.

The light catches the eye.

Florence, who has not seen her mother for many years, and who has not heard anyone call her by that name, or by any human name, for nearly just as long, wishes, like so many mornings before, that she hadn’t woken up. She sits crumpled in as small a shape as she can manage, in her cage, which stands where it’s been this whole time, smack in the middle of the city center’s center. This morning she can’t get herself to stand upright. She doesn’t want to. Instead, she stays in the far back corner, away from the path. She knows full well that people might be looking in at her, that they have perhaps even come to see her. Though probably not. By now, most people in the city have had their fill. The type of tourist that typically came to see her would have done so already. They would have felt their wonderment and awe. Their disgust. They would have had their laughs. And the few tourists who still hadn’t visited her exhibit—their type didn’t typically venture into the city until later in the day. Whether they’ve come or not, she doesn’t care. She crouches and hides and may just stay that way, since it’s rare for anyone from the parks department to come by these days to be sure she’s doing what they decided she’s supposed to. This is how it’s been for some time now.

What passed for peach fuzz so long ago is now a pair of full-grown wings, white at the tips—the same shade of honey-white her hair used to be. A deep black paints the rest, the color of tarry oil, the kind that greedy folks get greedy for. They extend out from her arms to a mighty great wingspan, wide enough to touch both ends of her cage at once.

But she rarely opens them. Unless she’s made to.

Instead, she hides herself beneath them. She shuts her eyes and thinks of her mother. Of the woman who would beam at the first sight of her each morning. Who’d hold one of her hands at a time, and stroke it again and again and again, doting on every inch. Calling it porcelain smooth. Her mother, who loved to brush Florence’s hair. Who’d sit with it for hours, humming faintly under her breath, just loud enough that Florence could make out the melody. If there were words, she never heard them. In nearly all ways, her mother was a quiet woman. She’d had a husband who made her that way—Florence’s dad, who stayed long enough to beat all the words and song out of his wife, but no longer. He left when Florence was five and then died a few years after. For most of Florence’s first life, it was just her and her mother and the little home they shared.

“I always wanted a beautiful daughter,” her mother would whisper. “You’ve made me so happy, Florence. My little bird. My beautiful bird.”

When she first saw the feathers, she trapped Florence in the bathroom.

It had been nine months since Florence had first noticed grains of keratin pushing through her skin—like pellets of uncooked rice, two symmetric lines of them starting at her wrists and ending under her armpits. Nine cruel, lonely months with this strange new part of her growing beneath the baggy sweaters and coats she wore every day to cover it. By the time her mother saw, it was nearly summer again, and several sheets of outer feathers had broken through. They were delicate at first, with a tender spine to them. A smidge of white at the tips, then charcoal-black the rest of the way down. The black deepened over time. It certainly had by the time the second row came. And the second row darkened as a third row appeared, then a fourth, and so on. When she first noticed the silk-like tots blooming from her armpits, Florence thought of pictures she’d seen in school, of the strange places she’d been taught hair could suddenly grow on girls her age, and for some time she let herself believe that’s what was happening.

Her mother’s reaction shattered whatever hope was left in that idea.

She walked in while Florence was bathing, and saw what looked like black threads, hundred-strand bunches all over her underarms and wrists, pulling to the surface, buoyant and oil-slicked in the water. Florence rushed to cover herself, but it was too late. Her mother screamed, realizing what they were. She screamed and closed Florence in. Screamed on the other side of the door, gripping the handle to keep it shut.

“What’s wrong, Mom? What’s wrong with me?”

Her mother said nothing. Only it wasn’t her usual sort of quiet. Not her having the words but being afraid to say them. No, this time she had no words at all. Instead, she went on screaming, holding the door shut as Florence begged to come out, wiggling the knob, tugging on it, pawing at it. Banging against the dampened wood of the door. Pleading.

Florence only stopped trying to get out when her mother began to cry. She went quiet and stood naked and alone in the bathroom, shivering horribly, plucking herself clean of feathers as fast as she could, bleeding where she yanked too aggressively. The grains that she couldn’t get to, she pinched out, scratched out, dug out, completely silent, letting her mother scream for the both of them. At her feet, in blood-tinged puddles, lay dozens of stripped feathers, some with tiny chunks of bone hanging from them.

Florence, now a bird, but no longer beautiful, doesn’t want to think about her mother anymore. Instead, from behind the cover of her wings, she counts the legs of a group peering into her cage, aligning them with the slots between the bars. She counts eight legs, so four people. Their shoes tell her they are all men, which means they are all dogs. Nearly a pack of them. The hem of their pants and where they fall on the leg tell her they’re of college age, which means they are probably drunk. Boys who haven’t found their way home yet, who want to ogle one last helpless thing before calling it a night. After a few laughs, and after one of the guys drags a stick along the bars so that the whole cage rings and shakes with sound, they head on.

Seven years, by her count, have passed since she was put in the cage. She’s kept track using the seasons. She thinks she is around twenty years old. The last time Florence saw her mother was the day they came to take her away. She had just turned thirteen. They dragged Florence out of the house, over the gravel of the driveway, and into a cart with a built-in enclosure, like what they used for transporting animals in the travelling circus she’d once seen in a movie. Her mother sat on the front steps with her head buried in her hands. She seemed to know that the people with the cart were coming, and Florence has always figured that was part of the reason her mother wouldn’t look at her when they took her away. Florence struggled so hard when they shoved her into the cart that she broke the top of one of her wings. She shrieked the pain of a bird. Still her mother did not waver, did not look up. Once again, she had no words. Not even goodbye.

Not long after, they sedated Florence, and she was out for the whole of the journey to wherever in the world they took her. Her broken wing was treated on arrival, and then a team of experts examined her, scientists and doctors who’d gotten wind that a girl from deep in the country had sprouted wings. Their poking and prodding took up the first three months of her new life.

The rest of it, since then, has been spent here.

For much of the morning, people have been passing right by, stopping only for a minute or two, if at all. Things had slowed down tremendously in the last couple of years. When she was first put on display, it felt as though there was not a second when she wasn’t being watched. Back in those early days Florence would wake up at dawn, if she managed to sleep at all. She’d receive food and water from the park employees assigned to the cage. Then once she’d eaten—if she could stomach food, which often she couldn’t—the day would really begin. Gawking strangers came from all over, busloads of tourists and schoolchildren, church groups. She’d several times overheard those sorts of folks speculating on the possibility that Florence wasn’t a bird at all, but an angel instead.

They never seemed convinced.

“She doesn’t feel like a miracle,” they’d say flatly.

At night she wasn’t alone either. Young people camped out and drank in the plot of grass and the small wood edging her confines, and smoked pot with their backs against her cage. Talked. About all sorts of things. About nothing at all. They watched the stars and the city lights dimming. Got together. Broke up. Got back together. Fucked right up against the cage, behind it, in front of it. She’d be visited by lovers on dates; by sad, lonely people on walks; by drunks and junkies, and “crazies.” True crazies, and also people who just saw things that may or may not have been there, many of whom sat beside her and said little to nothing. They seemed the least frightening of all the people who would come. They actually looked at her. Really looked at her so she felt seen. Even on quiet nights, Florence could usually sense someone peeking in on her sleep, the gutsy show-offs in a group sometimes pulling aside the entire cover to show their friends and stare. That was back when there was a cover.

The attendants usually put Florence away around midnight, and the next day it would all start over again.

Things slowed down the year they gave her the beak. She hadn’t grown one herself. In fact, throughout her transformation, large parts of her remained the same as before. Things like her toes, which she could still crimp and stretch. Her feet, which she’d walked to callouses over the years, pacing the dirt floor of her cage. Her hands remained too, though they were deep in layers of feather. Her mouth, too, was the same. More than that, it worked the same. She could speak. And for a while, she did—that was the problem. She spoke, and cried, and screamed and pleaded with everyone who passed, saying she was trapped here and needing out and dying. A lot of people found this unpleasant to hear, and in the three years when she still had a voice, hardly anyone did. Instead, they walked past with their discomfort painted on, as thick as the blush on their cheeks and as putrid as the sweat that gathered along their fat, hot necks. After enough complaints, the city tried to bind her mouth shut with fabric, but she could get that off by rubbing her face and head against the ground, which also put a damper on the whole thing for people. After the bird-girl pulled a little boy’s arm inside the cage and bit it with her human mouth, it was decided that “for safety reasons” they had no choice but to sew it shut. A few concerned citizens thought to mention how unseemly the stitching would be. So it was further decided that in order to hide the scar where her mouth used to be, a beak would be made. It seemed only appropriate, everyone agreed.

Everyone but Florence, that is, who agreed to none of what happened to her.

That same golden beak sits in the corner of the cage. A year or more’s dust dulls its shine. The attendants no longer insist she wear it. There’s no point in hiding her scars—not that many people see her anyway. The attendants still come, but only to give food and water, which they do through a tube, a system crafted to facilitate feedings after the surgery. And they only come every second morning. And even that gets skipped a few times a month. They never check whether she’s showing herself properly or behaving. They don’t even cover her up at night anymore. When the cover blew off in one of the city’s worst windstorms, at least two years ago by now, no one ever bothered to replace it.

It’s around lunchtime when Florence hears music from the other side of the park.

She misses music. Misses singing to it. Misses dancing to it. She misses dancing to it with her mother, who always looked so bashful and beautiful and would never do it for long, instead asking Florence to dance for her, which she misses too. The music grows louder, deeper, until Florence, finally feeling she has reason to stand, unfolds herself for the first time all day. Stretching, she spots a band marching up the path towards the park entrance. Banners slink from the lamps. There are balloons everywhere. Vendors selling drinks and sweets. A few tables giving out some sort of plush toy, black with small touches of white.

She’s so busy watching the swarms of people entering the park that it takes her a minute to notice the two men standing by her cage. Men in vests. With tools. Men at work. One of them fiddles with the lock while the other looks out towards the street. He smiles and says something, but Florence can’t hear. Soon he’s jogging a ways off and has flagged a van from the busy corner. The driver pulls up and gets out, and as the first two work on the lock a bit longer, the other unpacks a bag he’s brought. They all laugh among themselves—talking about her, no doubt, though she can’t make out what they’re saying, and wouldn’t care if she could. She’s distracted and watches, stunned as they lift the steel door on its hinge. It creaks open. She can barely believe it.

It happens so fast, and she’s so badly weakened, that even as she gazes through the opening—the only way out she’s seen for a long, long while—escape doesn’t occur to her. Not before it’s too late. Within seconds, she’s yanked out of the cage. A new beak is muzzled on. It jabs at the pain that sits where her mouth used to. The band is tightened around her head. A sack thumps over her eyes, and soon it covers the rest of her body too. It’s tightened in repeated stretches, with what feels like canvas rope, tucking her wings shut.

But she is not there, not really. She’s not being bound like this, by these men, in this dizzying, demeaning way. She shuts her eyes and leaves the dull darkness of the sack for her own shade of darkness, the type that sits behind her eyes, somewhere she can disappear into, a place that’s her own. At least she is outside the cage, and therefore free, if only in her mind, and if only for a moment.

The men force her forward. The dream of freedom dies right where it was born. Soon she is behind the closed door of the van, still trapped but away from the bars of steel that had boxed her in, away from seven years of complete loneliness.

After a block or two, the van comes to a skidding stop, and she can feel them grabbing at her legs and hips, pulling her till she’s halfway out. From there, two of them carry her. Through her beak, she smells the dust trudged up from their work boots. The air is so thick with it she’s nearly choking. They carry her to a building with doors that clang like sheet metal. An elevator rattles up some fifteen stories, shaking and flickering with light every third floor or so. Then they move her out of the elevator, taking the last few stairs by foot. Two of the men are behind her and one’s in front, leading the way.

Heavy doors open. Then more steps forward before the men stop and let go of her. One of them loosens the rope, and they all scatter back the way they came, so fast it’s as if she’s explosive. She wonders if she is. If they put a bomb in her new beak. The ropes around her fall off. The doors squeal and clap shut.

She’s completely alone.

Wiggling free from the sack, Florence sees the world again. She sees the big, open, blue sky above, endless and immaculate. Something she has not seen for so very long. Something she has longed to see. The noise of the park is still in earshot. So is the music. She listens, feeling the air carting around her, a strange gust she hasn’t felt before. It’s only when the music stops that she looks straight ahead. Between two huge skyscrapers full of people who’ve left their desks in the middle of their workday to stare at Florence from the large windows that make up the sides of the buildings, a lone bird navigates the charged wind running between them.

She is so high up that she can make out the details on the cross atop the church that looms in the near distance. But God is far, far away.

The park is just as far below. The fountain in the middle is the size of a coin. Every bench is occupied. The grass patches are decked with all the colors and patterns of the picnic blankets spread out across them. People plug the path leading to the stage where the band was playing before. Where now a well-dressed man crosses to the speaker’s podium. He clears his throat in the microphone there—three times, real deep. The crowd riles before slowly settling again. It dawns on Florence that she’s standing on one of the buildings that’s been part of her skyline for the past seven years. The clunky eyesore from a few blocks over—the one that creaks in the wind. It’s creaking now.

“Boy, this is exciting, isn’t it?” the man says, chortling, and boy does the crowd agree. The residual echo of his voice booms through the strange air. The whole park cheers, along with the people in the surrounding streets. “We’ve all been waiting for this day for a long time.” More cheering. “And I don’t want to take up too much of your time before we get to it, but let me speak a few quick words about this city . . . and the girl in the birdcage that came to live here!” Some cheering, but not as much, out of solemn respect perhaps, for God knows what. “It’s been seven years to the day, seven marvelous years, since we opened our hearts, minds, and home to a mystical being. In that time, we’ve had the privilege of standing in awe of her, of wondering what made her the way she is, of observing both her beauty and her depravity. We’ve seen our humanity in her animalness. We’ve also had the privilege of welcoming spectators from all over the world to do the same, bringing delight to millions over the years and adding hundreds of millions to our city’s economy. That money, in turn, has helped us develop our programs for arts and culture even further!” Parts of the crowd cheer, and thin strings of it try to join, too late to start something particularly impassioned. “Yes, it’s been a marvelous seven years,” he says. “However.” His voice sinks lower, a performed sort of morose. “We do not feel that we can keep her any longer.”

Here the people really lose it.

They clap and scream and call out.

“We are so excited to gather today, with what seems like the entire city, to watch on, as the girl in the birdcage is, at last, set free.”

Florence knows that the man at the podium is speaking about her. Still, she can’t comprehend it. That word free makes no sense coming from him. His laughter rings through the air as panic flash-floods her. It reaches the ends of her limbs, and even some of her feathers. She wants to run but sees nowhere to go. There’s a great deal of chanting, none of which Florence can make out with the wild, trapped animal blood pulsing inside her. There’s no way off the building but straight down, unless it’s back to the steps and into the lift. She knows the door is locked but tries it anyway.

“So!” the man on stage meanwhile calls out. “What do you say, folks? Shall we see if she can fly?”

The band starts up again. It’s playing a number with lots of trumpet and snare drum. On one of the floors below her, big enough that the whole building rumbles, an explosion jolts Florence. The crowd cheers. Something grumbles, and within half a minute faint smoke is rising from all sides but the one facing the park. She treads over the rooftop, back and forth on her shaky legs. She nearly loses her footing, stumbling on broken chunks of concrete and the dips and cracks they’ve left. Another boom blows through. More crashing, more snapping. The sound and feel of things breaking. Less hope than ever before. No hope, really. As fire licks the sides of the building and Florence for the first time feels its heat, the showman starts in again. “Come on, folks, what do you say? Should we give it a little more gas? Even the bravest little bird needs a push sometimes!” he says. She pictures him punching out the last words, his jubilant fist in time with the saxophone. Yet another bang, more of the building trembling. Deeper smoke scales the three sides. It’s a cement shade of grey, with black threads mixed in. Fire flicks like serpent tongues, the building seeming almost to breath from its many gaping and gasping mouths, spitting sparks, grinding its teeth. Everything is clicking, crackling. Pure-black smoke rises above the rest and dulls out the blue of the sky. Florence watches it crawl across the roof towards her, edging her further and further into the park dwellers’ view.

“Fly, birdy, fly! Fly, birdy, fly!” they sing in unison, unwavering. “Fly, birdy, fly!”

They cry out, caw out, more animal than she ever was.

The waves of smoke lap towards her, coming in like the tide. And it occurs to Florence that she’s never seen the ocean. She’s hardly seen anything. And all she sees now is fire and smoke and the long way down, all of the city’s people wanting her to plunge towards them. She knows as well as everyone else that she can’t fly. She badly wishes she’d learned somehow. But how could she have—all those years in a cage? She searches the sky for another bird, something to watch for guidance. Sees none. They call out to her from somewhere safe in the distance. Florence imagines herself there, closing her eyes to keep the thought. Pictures them flying and tries to note the currents of movement. Tries to mimic their movements. She extends her wings as far as they’ll go, farther than her cage ever allowed, ignoring the crowd’s oohs and ahhs. Their ecstasy. Their morbid curiosity.

But her wings have never felt heavier. They sit on her as if covered in tar, black like the stuff that colored her feathers. Like the oil that forms when living things die and end up beneath the earth, waiting several lifetimes to be found, and when they are, all that’s left is molasses-thick, a dark, dark black and as heavy as the whole world. She feels drenched in it. She imagines the oil heating rapidly, then catching fire. The flames singeing her feathers, the smell of it like burnt hair. The scorch reaching her skin. She thinks of incineration. Of char. Of a sheer, sheer heat.

Just as she’d done on that terrible day in the bathroom with her mother, Florence digs for every piece of bird matter in her flesh. She tears herself apart with a rapid, rabid urgency. Her hands, cleared of most of their feathers, tremble.

Under her fingernails, which, to Florence’s horror, look more like dirty talons, chunks of skin have collected, scraped from her arms and shoulders. Everywhere she touches, her pale, deathly thin fingers leave blotchy prints, like from a stamp with too much ink.

She is desperate, frightened and flighty.

Flighty, she thinks, dreaming, but it’s the sort of dream that’s really a nightmare. Any real dream she has is on the ground there along with what little hope she has. It’s somewhere out beyond all of these spectators, beyond any of this. It’s in the sunlit hallway between her mother’s room and hers. In the glimmering dust they watched in the light beneath the living room window. It’s along the walk from the bus stop, where she and her mother would kick gravel and charge ahead, bolting, sprinting and stalling, skidding in the dirt, making dumb faces, sometimes seeing people from the neighborhood, who’d point and stare. Florence and her mother didn’t mind. They’d run away, holding hands, the two of them nearly falling into the path ahead of their legs, bunched over from full-bellied laughs, as they passed the big, big tree that dropped chestnuts in the fall.

There was hope in those places. Those were places to be dreamed of.

But there was something else, too, in the shadows that completed them. Florence shakes her head, trying to ignore it. A tear gathers, not from the smoke, but from the deep, deep pain in her heart. It’s pain she has for her mother. Her soft and soft-spoken mother, who’d get so low sometimes. Who’d stop talking for days at a time. Who’d stay in bed and not eat and only get up to make something so that Florence could. Who’d hit herself in the head again and again, hard, with the flat of her palm.

Everything else bad comes back to her too—like how her mother kept her head buried in her hands as Florence was carted away. The last flicker of light in her heart blows out, and hope goes with it, sinking like a balloon with a tiny hole, drifting steadily towards the city’s layer of filth below.

Florence stops yanking at her feathers. She wipes the blood off her hands, though they’re bleeding still. She breathes against the smoke entering her lungs, heaving oxygen in and out as well as she can, through the small breathing holes cut in her beak, into what they did to her mouth. So close to the end of her life, she asks every question she’s ever had, by simply asking one.

“Is there any love left in the world for me?”

She asks it as well as she can, which is not at all. Thanks to them. Still, she feels the words vibrate in her throat. The vibrations strengthen as she goes on.

“Because there is no love left in me, for the world.”

She says it again and again, that part: no love. Again and again, from her shut mouth, her sealed lips. She growls it, letting the small sound expand and stretch into human words, against the walls of her shiny gold beak. It was strapped on so hastily, without a shred of care—her very own dunce cap, a muzzle for the animal-ness which she’s never been sure was in her, that everyone insisted was there. From behind all those things, from somewhere lower, closer to the core of her soul, from somewhere angry, she speaks and feels heard, even if no words come out, even if no one can hear her.

Florence looks at the sky again, finding a patch of it untouched by the smoke. In it: the afternoon sun. It pours over her, heating her face. She chooses to focus on that warmth, rather than the blistering heat of the smoke and fire that surround her. With her hands now mostly cleared of feathers, she slips off her bird mask. Wipes the sweat that’s gathered beneath it, the condensation of her ragged breathing against its curve. The crowd is silent as she drops the beak over the side of the building. It makes a clean whistling sound as it drops. Clangs as it hits the ground, like the building’s doors had.

On the jumbotron set up behind the band, she sees herself for the first time in many years. Her face is gaunt. Stripped of its softness. All hard angles. Her neck a wishbone. Same with her collarbone, which sticks out, ripe for the grabbing, like it could be torn right out. Her cheeks aren’t much better. She looks about a hundred and ten. Frail beyond anything she’s ever seen. Frailer than any dying animal or person she’s ever seen. Her mouth, its stitched line, is a sort of faded light purple and bloated, the rest of her skin weathered and dirty, as if she was left outside all her life. Even the feathers that remain lack shine. A window shatters somewhere. Florence looks over the edge as several others blow out from within. From the windows, mouthfuls of smoke spout, flames flick. Looking toward the big screen again, Florence imagines herself as a dragon, as some strong, danger ous beast with wings that could carry her, and large, nasty teeth, and a mouth full of fire and smoke. She imagines spitting it on everyone watching, the whole damn park going up in flames. The whole damn city disintegrating. And Florence flying off and never looking back, not even to see the end of it.

She wonders if her mother knows about today’s festivities. She hopes she’s somehow left the Earth already—finding it, in this particular moment, a very ugly place to be. She hopes she’s gone somewhere where they can see each other again. At the same time, she dreads it, remembering her mother’s screams. At this thought, Florence begins to cry, no beast in her whatsoever. Searching for the place where they’ve set up the camera and staring straight into the lens when she spots it, she weeps. She wants everyone to see as she weeps for herself. As she weeps for her mother. As she weeps for each of the people below. Even for the showman. Even for the men who put her here on the roof. Even for the scientists who took her away. Even for those who trapped her. She weeps for all the people who trapped her. She weeps for all people. She weeps for those who are just as trapped as she is. Then once she has nothing more to give, she stops. Her tears stay where they’ve fallen. They cool her skin before dissolving against its heat.

Her legs, trembling, stark as stork bones, walk her to the ledge where she’s going to jump. The rest of her shakes too—all but her mind, which is now calm. One of her mother’s kind, wordless melodies runs through it. The crackling of the building’s hot insides sits behind the tune, steady as a drum. The band’s percussionist too taps into its rhythm, adding a long quick drumroll on his snare, a coaxing trill that drives Florence on, just as it does the crowd, who are mad with thrill.

Holding onto the railing, Florence is soon on the other side of it, clinging. She turns around, faces the crowd. They’re all on their feet, sheltering their eyes against the sun to see her properly. She can’t make out the details of their faces, and is glad for that, thinking she doesn’t need to see more of the world’s ugliness in the short time she has left in it.

Rather, she tries to see its beauty. There’s none straight ahead, so she visits some that she’s kept inside her all these years. She pictures a field of sunflowers several feet taller than her, their stems strong, rigid. Their yellows bright, bees buzzing all around. Then her mother’s dimples as she tastes the frosting on one of Florence’s birthday cakes, licking it from the tip of her finger. She thinks of the things she kept on her bedroom desk, the lamp she used for light, the many, many photographs she had of her and her mother. All her favorite books, and the things they imagined about the world. The things they promised about it. She goes over the passages she can remember, picturing the illustrations she loved as a child, imagining nighttime in her old bed. After that, she’s on her back in the yard, staring up at the sky full of stars. A soft wind matches the sway of the trees bordering her view, their feathery silhouettes against the dusk. She thinks of the birds that slept in those trees at night, always quiet until early morning, when they’d sing her awake to another new day. All her favorite birdsongs chime in her head. As she steadies herself, she tries to sing along, managing a muffled but birdlike melody, something she figures she inherited from her own unnatural nature. Florence feels warm all over now, but not from the fire. It feels like a wet warmth, the way a balmy bath felt in the fall and winter, or how it felt to slip into the swimming hole near her home in the hottest part of summer, off one of the big, smooth rocks that edged it. It’s the same warmth that came of swimming in her mother’s moony eyes, when she’d tell Florence how beautiful she was, while the moon shone outside. Seeing herself now, on screen, so big, so close up, she thinks she can see a small part of that beauty still. It’s there, along with grace, she decides, and the moment she feels it, she knows it’s grace she wants to die with. She owes that to herself. The world owes it to her. She sees it as grace that the world’s ugliness couldn’t truly change her. Sure enough, when she looks close, her eyes still shine like they used to. What feathers remain shine too, where the sun hits them just right. She stands as tall as a tree, looming over the ant-sized people on the ground. Each of her limbs is a branch, her feathers the leaves. Letting go of the railing, but keeping balance with her feet, Florence draws out her wings, insisting on their beauty along with the rest of her. They expand as if blooming and cast shade on the city. She takes in as big a breath as the pierced skin of her mouth will allow.

Eyes open, she steps off the ledge.

Florence, her body now a mangled heap on the concrete, but her soul a beautiful bird, flies away from the mess of gas and smoke. Away from the salty stink of hot dogs simmering, the corrosive cut of exhaust. She glides past the powerlines where several of the street birds have gathered to escape the afternoon’s commotion. They squawk and pipe out their goodbyes in their own tongue. A man on the street, one who supposedly sees things that aren’t there, waves to her from where he’s seated on the curb.

Florence rises high above the city, soaring beyond its tepid, stifling air, to where she’s free. She goes where the clouds are, so removed from all that’s happening below. So very far from what few earthly things remain of herself, back there on the ground, her human and bird bones all broken, blood leaving her in a rapid stream, the ring of feathers where she hit the ground. She leaves it behind. No longer in sight or earshot of the gasps and cries of the people who watched her die, who realized only as it happened how awful a thing it was. She flies high enough to feel the sun heat her skin. To watch the city ripple into different districts and boroughs, out to the industrial quarter, and then the countryside—past fields of flowers and wheat and corn; long plains of grass where livestock feed; then lakes of blue, blue water shimmering like crystal in the sun; and at last, over a deep forest lush with trees. Massive ones. Birds fly over the crowns. Dart in between them. And as the city that she left behind cries out at her death, Florence and the other birds call to one another, weaving among these giants of the forest, singing kind, wordless melodies, full of light.