The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [103]
When I was born, heat licked her heavy lips and embraced me. Before my mother could take me into her arms, I smelled her. Before I could take in my mother's milk, I tasted the salt on her nipple. I tell this to myself, repeating it like a prayer to keep me safe, something warm to wrap around me. Overcoats are never thick enough for me. I would try wearing two, but I own only one. And wind would merely whip through the additional layers of wool, and then I would wish that I owned three. I get lost in this city only in winter. I am lost in this city today. Ice intensifies my lowest emotions, magnifies what I lack. Snow makes me want to sleep, not in my bed but on the corners of busy boulevards, in alleyways, underneath the awnings of crowded shops, wherever I happen to be when my body says, Please, no more. The desire is sometimes so strong that I return to my Mesdames' apartment exhausted from the struggle. It is not always a victory for me. Often I have lost the day on a park bench, sitting so still that pigeons were inspecting themselves in the shine of my shoes. How long I have been there, I can tell only by the stiffness of my limbs, the time it takes for blood to spike through my arms and legs.
Today I am watching a group of children playing on the stone steps leading up to where the cold has bolted me to this bench. I first notice them when a little girl with big eyes breaks from a circle of children and runs up the steps. She leaves the walkway and heads directly toward the trees. Once underneath, she begins to dig at the snow with her mittened hands. She dislodges a thin arm-length branch with one brown leaf still attached to it. She runs down the steps, and the ring of children splits open, their padded bodies forming the hemisphere in which the tragedy I had not anticipated would unfold.
The girl with the big eyes, now the only one obscuring my line of sight, breaks off the leaf and throws the branch to the side. She kneels down and begins to fan the leaf at something that I cannot see. My body leans forward, and my eyes focus on a sweep of gray, moving, barely. A pigeon, an ordinary, city-gray pigeon, stumbles between the girl's black boots and tries to spread its wings. The right one opens to its full span, a flourish of white. The left one collapses halfway, a crush of gray. The bird pitches forward and falls on this sloping left wing. It lies there while the children become excited. A boy is laughing and jutting his finger. The girl with the big eyes is still fanning but is no longer kneeling. Children passing by are now stopping. Their nannies pull them away, scolding them for looking at something dying. The little audience fluctuates in size, but all who join keep a wide ring of stone between themselves and the bird. There must be space enough for such things, an instinct that they all possess, except for the boy with the jutting finger and the girl with the big eyes. She continues to fan and is now on her knees again. Her face is down low, almost touching the pigeon's head, a head that picks itself up and drops itself down, a visible jarring each time it hits the cold surface of stone. The boy with the jutting finger remembers the discarded branch and runs toward it. He brings it back and pokes the pigeon on the back of its neck. The girl stands back, deferring to something violent, deferring to something in herself. The bird responds by rolling itself back onto its feet. Head wobbling to a quiet song, it hops down one step and attempts again to spread its wings.
A flourish of white, a crush of gray.
A flourish of white, a crush of gray.
Adults are now stopping. The spectacle has become