Read Online Winter Birds by Jim Grimsley - Free Book Online

needle raised. Mama stayed beside you day after day. Papa brought changes of clothes for her, told her stories about Amy and Allen and Duck, at home being taken care of by Mama’s sister Delia. Aunt Delia sent you comic books and a tin jet with an engine that sparked and crackled whenever the landing wheels turned. Mama didn’t like the loud noise it made. You set it on the table next to the bed, Mama saying, “You have to be quiet in a hospital.”
    You slept and woke again. Mama bent over you, parting your lips, an ugly look on her face. Behind her the first doctor talked to other, older doctors. Papa stood by the window smoking a cigarette. Mama spoke earnestly in his ear, touching the piece of arm.
    You dreamed of dark rivers lined with mossy trees, of dense undergrowth alive with small animals: monkeys with orange fur and curled tails, parrots with wings that burst like rainbow bombs in flight, deer with soft tongues and eyes like flower petals. You swam in the river, splashing water backward with your hands or upward with your feet. You dove underwater to watch the slow fish swim by, or else you swam close to the bank in the darkness beneath the arches of weeds, where the water moccasins nested.
    Or else you dreamed of clouds. You dreamed you were no longer a child, you were something other, something you assigned no name but only imagined: light-boned, colored like ivory, skimming the clouds on broad white-feathered wings that flashed in the clear air. The dream had no form or story, only the rhythm, the thick beat of your wings in the solid air. Your shadow skimmed the clouds. Sometimes you flew alone drinking mouthfuls of wind, reaching forward with your wings and scooping back, the whole sky empty around you—but sometimes there were others, sometimes thousands of you, above, below, from side to side, lost in mountainous hangs of cloud, wings beating up and down, endless pulse …
    Once during this dream you heard Papa’s voice, and then Mama’s answering: “I found us a new house already,” Papa said. “You can quit pouting around like I brought the whole goddamn world to an end.”
    â€œI’m not pouting,” Mama said. “I’ve got other thingson my mind.”
    â€œHe had it coming. No telling how he would have treated you this summer.”
    â€œDon’t act like a hero,” Mama said. “You did it. I don’t care why. All I know is you couldn’t have picked a better time to get thrown in jail, with your son lying in the hospital.”
    â€œThat fat son of a bitch had it coming to him. He can shove his house and his whole goddamn farm right up his own ass.”
    â€œYou’re lucky he didn’t press charges on you.”
    Papa said, in a new tone, “Delia wants to stay with you here one night.”
    â€œWhat will you do then? Who will you fight with that night?”
    â€œWell if you’re going to get smart, Miss Priss, maybe I’ll start with that doctor friend of yours, the one you’re always talking about like he’s Jesus.”
    â€œHe ain’t nothing to me but a doctor, and if you don’t know that by now I’m sorry for you.”
    â€œMaybe he don’t mean nothing but you sure do blush when I talk about him.”
    â€œIt’s what I ought to expect from you. You never quit. It ain’t enough you leave me here all day to watch this youngun bleed, and him laying here so weak he can’t say a word. No, you got to make me feel nasty about the only person that talks to me the whole day …”
    You listened, you heard everything, you knew the words meant something to them but none of it meant anythingto you. Nothing reached you in the dream, where you had become the other, flying with broad wings over continents of pure white clouds, not one stain of red. You listened to them talk as if they were a dream, and the dream of the other was real, the land of red lakes