The yellow-bellied swallow has chosen me to facilitate her death. We are sitting on a concrete stoop under The Motel’s awning in the Midwest rain. I hold the bird in my hand and I do not think about bird-borne illnesses. She stirs, she is starting her final surrender.
I am wearing my ex-stepbrother’s hand-me-down sneakers, the soles are peeling off so they look like mucky rubber mouths with my wet-sock feet as their meaty tongues. The bird is blinking up at me. She is trying to tell me how it takes all of the yellow off her belly feathers to make this final journey. She is also telling me that I should take the opportunity to rest a little, to perch on the life that is leaving her, to maybe make it a platform to stand upon and watch the Nebraska slush wash away in the rain.
Everyone goes to Sarpy, Nebraska, once. It is not a destination, it is just a pitstop on everyone’s most important trip; it is part of the journey for us all; dying birds, migrating elk, emancipated minors, childless mothers, monarch butterflies, and adult children planning funerals; all of us.
Sarpy feels like it is a town haunted by some other place. It is wet and everything creaks in damp exhaustion. Fog and darkness roll through the streets and lap at your feet. The ground is muddy and, for me, covered in pine needles. Being here sort of feels like you are on the turned-downside of a coin, or in the broken mirror of someone you’ve never met. No one lives in Sarpy. There is The Motel, a gas station, a lone windmill, and a non-denominational chapel. When you are here, you stay in one of The Motel’s infinite rooms.
I wonder why the swallow chose me. Then again, all my life everyone has always seen me in a red canoe with an empty seat, holding the paddle; everyone has always seen me with my shepherd’s crook raised, a flock of cancerous sheep wandering wide-eyed behind me. The bird probably sees the same thing. That is probably why she limped over to my door.
The insides of her eyes are getting bigger. I can see Arkansas plains crackling in her pupils. I can see eggshells and brown down feathers.
No one works in Sarpy and it doesn’t cost the same to stay at The Motel for me as it does for you. For you maybe it’s a tank of gas, a text message, a grocery store hold up, a stillborn child, a dowry. For me, it’s my first round of brain damage and the future as I had always pictured for myself. For me, it’s the ability to drive a car and the promise of properly functioning hands for the rest of my life.
I am in Sarpy because I am having my first seizure. A few minutes ago, I was in Southern California on a balcony and then my brain started to feel like a muscle falling asleep. Now I am in Sarpy, Nebraska, and the bird in my hands is losing her warmth.
In Sarpy, Nebraska, there are as many rooms as there are journeys we must make. In the room on my right, a family of bison, who are making their first migration through plains that have been newly sliced through with an expressway, fight over the TV remote. To my left, an amputee is relearning to walk on their new prosthetic leg.
“How’s the journey going down there?” I ask the swallow.
“I’m worried this might be my final stop.”
“No,” I tell her, “There is always something beyond Sarpy. But maybe you’re getting close.”
She blinks and continues her ascent.
“Does it feel much like flying?”
“This is something I’ve never done before,” she says. “To get there this time my legs are heavy and so is the rest of me. My wings are thin and tendrilled at the ends. I have lost all my feathers so all I have now is what is cold and underneath,” she shivers.
“To get there this time, I am pushing down on the ground with one foot and I am spinning a wheel with my wings to avoid all the divots in the road.”
“So you are driving?” I ask.
“I think I am becoming something new.”
You might have already made your own Sarpy stop. That’s the thing about it; once you leave you can never remember your time there. In a few moments, my swallow will be fully gone. In a few more, my convulsions will subside, my eyes will open, and time will start again.
For my next seizure, I may go to a mountain town in a state of perpetual night, overrun by nocturnal animals that walk on two legs. I may go to an underwater cave, or down the gullet of a seabird or I may go to a seven-story department store. But I can never again return to Sarpy, Nebraska.
Sometimes, you may find remnants of your time there that followed you home. A key you find near the gutter that was once your Motel room key. A caking of mud on the bottom of your shoes. A gas receipt of unknown origins. But these are the only slivers of Sarpy you can take with you.
I open my eyes. I am lying down in Southern California. My head hurts and I cannot move. I am catching my breath. Someone inside is yelling and people start coming out, pulling me up, fussing over me. Someone plucks a yellow feather out of my hair and tosses it off the balcony, into the dry afternoon air.
Bella Koschalk is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. They have been awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Student Poetry Award. They are a recipient of a 2020 Anthony Quinn Foundation scholarship in literary arts. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Texas Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Denver Quarterly, CutBank, and elsewhere.
Image: nebraskarealty.com
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Heavy Feather Review 