Non-fiction by Linda Kohler

Yesterday evening, I caught the sky stretching its wings. They were pied pink, lit at the edges, and on the left wing was tattooed a smooth, crescent moon.

We were outside in the yard, snail vine slipping over the fence. Our words skimming the trellised moments before dusk, while briars made their colours in the freeing cool dark.

A trampoline had been baptised in the afternoon, on the lawn. A gift for my daughter. It was supposed to be a roller board, but with play parks closed, that manifest wouldn’t fly. The gift was destined to be presented at a sleepover with kinfolk and birthday cake. But our gatherings were banned, and destiny had wandered astray from our time and place.

What to embellish from balloons, I wondered? Thirteenth birthday ceremony: closed. We did what we could: lit candles, built the jumping castle, nibbled chocolate droplets, and I thought how my daughter had grown from infinitesimal. A tiny cell. I tried not to ruminate rivals to her cells — viral particles born lately, that given reign would assail her healthy sprout. I tried not to chew those elements. Or how the quiet peril had foiled our mingling.

Even when decipherable by microscope, she’d been small. Small as the aphids I bathed in the dawn. Small still, when she was roots enough for me to hold, and my stomach nectar no longer felt her weight.

One day, so very mite, she learned to speak. Her tongue tiny pink. Her words forming themselves like cirri, gleaning embers, stewing shapes. In the concoctions, a ritual — a circlet she strung each evening at dinner: “what was your favourite thing about today?”

Through horrors and monsters of childhood she asked us our flowers, and she kept her nightly list. Best things. Fun things. Favourite things. Goodness. Each evening the inventories spilled wide-limbed out of her. How had I never noticed they were wings?

I considered her while dusk prepared for its landings. Once a tiny ballerina, now a fierce young woman heading the air in her new vertical space, with the sky bird.

“I’m sorry it’s not the birthday you had planned,” I told her, keeping vigil to the fading feathers. So as not to let my eyes fixate on water.

“That’s okay.” She giggled. “It’s fun.”

Earlier in the week she’d said, “I don’t mind the lockdown. We still get to do stuff.” She’d nattered ten good things.

The bird soared but darker now, only its tattoo glowing. Shadows were stirring the pink in wafts, and I thought how it was time to go inside and stir a pot.

At the dinner table, she asked, “what was your favourite thing about today?” When it was my turn, I told her about unravelling air, splash of rain scent, sun in the lush branched plum. Fresh spinach, straight from the patch. I tried to make a list worthy of hers, all her childhood years. But I didn’t mention the cirrus bird the sky sent—for her, I think. What if its beauty escaped my open mouth? What if its hope was lost in the circlet? What if the bird needed to stay free?

Instead, I told her of other best things, and tried to glint light at the edges. The way she and the bird did, to banish beasts. Later, I tucked her into bed as if she were small and, soon after I edged back into the dark, I heard her music. Inside my chest, I felt a flutter.

You see, I caught a feather before the sky bird went, and pocketed the pink glow of it, the tickling fealty of it, just below the skin, near my breast. Today we are locked in with our fun and our feathers; our worries locked out. Birds with big, pink wings are jumping and laughing inside our little hedgerow, their songs flung high. Destiny, in her new dress, has snuck inside our gathering to acclaim how my daughter has learned so many ways with wings, how she has grown into her courage, and how she has sprung much taller than her mother.

Linda Kohler lives in South Australia, on Kaurna land. Her fascinations include water, cacao, words, and birds. Find her at lindakohler.com.

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