Birds and Time

They’re mostly blue. No, wait, it looks like there are white ones too. It’s hard to tell which colour the birds out there are with the window in the way. Maybe I should open it? No. It would start a fuss, and I wouldn’t want to get Henry riled up again. God knows, he’s having a hard time. The birds chirp in the background as I stare listlessly out of the dusty, unwashed window. Nowadays, the seconds all seem to come together after a while, like they’re made of water. What is time anyway? Recently it doesn’t seem to matter much. Not since Angela left. She was fun, more fun than Henry at least. I hear the sound of slurping behind me. The first sip he’s taken in a while. However, other than the slurping, he’s produced no sound. He’s been silent for a very long time, so long that I have lost count of the hours.

“Ethan, close the f*cking window or Angela will catch a cold!”

'It was never open, and I don’t plan on opening it any time soon.'

“Well, close it harder or Ange…”

Henry’s stubborn ignorance brought on by intoxication vanished as he desperately tried to avoid remembering the truth he had attempted to hide behind all the alcohol. The only other person in the room, his ten-year-old son Ethan, was sitting alone near the window of the room. He hated him, “it was completely his fault.” Those thoughts were the only ones he clearly recalled from beyond the heavy veil of amnesia brought on by Jack Daniels within his mind. However, he could not recall what Ethan was at fault for. He stirred in his dilapidated armchair, and a look came over his face as if he was trying to remember something just beyond the fringes of his memory.

“I need to call Mom, Ethan,” he said while he took another sip of the swill in his cup.

'Dad I..'

“I told you not to call me that, I’m not your dad. Not really anyway. I’m just someone who was nice enough to take someone like you out of an orphanage. Now give me the phone, I need to call Angela.”

The phone bills were unpaid. In fact, the phone hadn’t worked since April. They’re funny you know, the coincidences in life. The window hadn’t been touched since April either. Henry would never allow me to open it because the act would cause him too much pain. It would do so because it would cause him to remember that Angela wouldn’t come home from work. That in April last year she had become very sad and that she would never get well again.

I think she opened the window that night because, just like me, she couldn’t stand the smell of alcohol in the room any longer. She just wanted a breath of fresh air. A breath other than the stale air from her stale life. Maybe she also saw the birds and maybe that’s why she decided to step over the rail without saying a thing to me. Even if only for a moment, she flew just like them. I wish I could figure out the birds’ colours. They have been bothering me for so long that I have lost count of the days. But Henry, he would get riled up. And I wouldn’t want him to get riled up. The birds flew past my window again. It seems as if they were blue, however, some of them may have been white…

Haefner, Scott. "Abandoned Places." Pinterest. Scott Haefner Pictures, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2015.