Ross Feeler
Catch the little bird. My son chanted these words repeatedly, in a sort of falling-down-the-stairs meter poets have not yet named, as he raced across the mulch-covered playground. He wore the solar system on his peanut butter-stained onesie. A scythe of moon glistened, a blur of pentagonal stars. It took me a moment to find the object of his attention: a golden-eyed grackle with an animatronic neck, one of the ubiquitous, coked out-looking blackbirds that plague parks and parking lots and powerlines across Texas. It stood beneath an ashy barbecue pit, a limp fry cigaretted in its beak.
Catch the little bird.
Which hopped, then fluttered, then flew, just beyond my son’s grasp.
I adjusted my earbuds. Before the boy, I had read, traveled, visited museums, and experimented with drugs, sometimes all at once; now, I parented and listened to podcasts. For the past half hour, I had learned about an under-prescribed treatment for alcoholism, which Nerfed the pleasurable effects of drunkenness, frogmarching drinkers past euphoria and straight to leaden limbs, dizziness, disorientation. Along with low-key delusions, short-term memory loss, and extreme dry mouth, that’s also, essentially, how parenting made me feel.
Which is why I questioned what happened next.
My son had gone around the picnic tables into chigger territory: knee-deep grass, remarkably adhesive burrs. I had lost a moment to the podcast then fallen into the pattern of his onesie—is that Jupiter on his left shoulder? what is a red dwarf star?—and when finally I glanced up again, I saw that he had, in fact, caught the little bird. His tiny fist gripped its left leg while its wings flapped violently. I envisioned my son floating away, his light-up shoes flashing faintly through the clouds.
By the time I reached him, the boy was holding what looked like a detached foot.
A feather settled on his brow.
I did it, he said. Then he stored the clawed foot in the lower compartment of his stroller, beside his magnolia leaf, his collection of acorns, and a purple-petaled weed he insisted was a flower.
***
As we wheeled into the garage, I said, Big bump, though the bump was only moderate. Fatherhood had placed me in the habit of narrating, and exaggerating, life. My words had become simpler, less nuanced. My thoughts, along with my sleeping schedule, had atomized into a fine, useless mist. But I had grown proficient at creating nonsensical songs, and my speech often rhymed, almost.
I said, First we’ll get you unstrapped, then we’ll get you a snack.
Get a snack, my son said through a fox-stamped pacifier.
He, too, continually described the unfurling scroll of his psychological life. When I’d hoisted him from his crib this morning, he had pointed to my baseball shirt and said: Daddy have a cardinals. Daddy wear, he sometimes uttered in pure wonderment, no pants. Two days earlier, splashing in an inflatable trough on the back deck, he’d cried out: We’re at the beach! His voice had lowered then. Not the beach, he’d said solemnly, mimicking my dire-reality intonation. The pool. But a moment later, transfixed by a wind-up fish wiggling across the water, he began thrashing ecstatically, and even I could taste the salt on my lips.
More startling were his simple affirmations of being. We are walk-in, he would say. We are a fam-uh-lee. We are both here.
Sometimes I believed him. Sometimes I didn’t.
Even in the dead of night, he had faith in an audience, a listener, a sparrow-aimed eye. I knew this because I was, in fact, listening. He practiced words, recited the alphabet, counted to twenty only skipping nine and sixteen, sang maddeningly repetitive nursery rhymes, and fondled his collection of pacifiers while I watched the monitor. (My wife had a job. She earned her sleep.)
Though I rarely admitted it, I found this—the surveillance—more rewarding than our physical interactions. Partly, it was the distance that helped me relax. Partly, I think, it was the fraction of a second between his actions and the monitor’s imagery, the marginal lag which meant that, really, I was looking into the past. Something that had already happened, beyond my control. Starlight.
Standing beside the garage fridge, I unclipped my son’s safety belt, slid off the shoulder straps, and took a kick to the abdomen as I lifted him from the stroller. He grabbed the handle of the freezer door—Want ice—until I pried his fingers loose, one by one. He began crying then, the irrational tears one learns to identify, the performative horror, the disbelief that any desire—to wear a Cookie Monster shirt for six days straight, to subsist entirely on blueberries, to watch TV until the oceans boil—might be denied.
I placed him inside the house and closed the door. This was part of a new pattern. Two weeks earlier, his tantrum and my sleep deprivation had formed a frightening comorbidity: I had picked him up, held his shoulders, and contemplated how hard I would need to shake him to stop the noise. And he had gone silent. As though he could see his jostled body in my mind.
Since then, I had incorporated little islands of disconnection into my day.
I set a timer for three minutes.
Taking deep breaths, I surveyed the contents of the stroller: diapers decorated with Sesame Street characters, overpriced baby wipes, a seahorse sippy cup that leaked no matter how I rethreaded the lid, and a case for the headphones that connected me to the adult world of global horror and entertainment, environmental collapse, economic forecasts, advances in AI, the Oscars.
I had one of the headphones in now. My podcast concerned a novel treatment for severe, trauma-related nightmare disorder. Patients with recurring nightmares—of, say, crawling through a corpse-strewn warzone—were instructed to practice imagery rehearsal during waking hours. Like the children’s books I read to my son, patients would transform violent realities into idyllic nonsense. Inside the war zone, a soldier might erect a forest. His dead friends would vanish, replaced by gentle streams, and elks bedding down, and various woodland creatures treating him like Saint Francis. To build an association, researchers would then release an essential oil—lavender, myrrh, or cinnamon—into the air. Once the soldier went to bed, a headband monitored his brainwaves. During peak dream activity, another burst of cinnamon would trigger the revised memory.
It seemed to work, sometimes.
My son rattled the child-protective orb we’d installed over the doorknob. You had to slot your fingers through two tiny holes, grip hard, and say a little prayer to just-the-right god for a chance at escape.
One second, I said. My podcast’s almost over.
What fascinated me was how the rehearsal technique mimicked my son’s behavior. He was obsessed with sequence. If, for instance, he fell, he needed his invisible injury kissed before he was dusted off and picked up. If you ruined the order, then you had to put him back on the ground, return the dirt to his shirt, and start over.
Ritual as revision. A similar, if not identical, impulse.
He screamed through the door: Daddy pick you up!
Daddy isn’t going to pick you up until you calm down.
I want my leg! he said.
Now that I examined it, the bird foot didn’t look like a bird foot at all. No blood, no feathers. More like a twig.
Are you going to act like a little baby, I asked, or are you going to be Daddy’s big boy?
He took a minute to consider this. Be Daddy’s Big Bird! he shouted. Before I could respond, he cried the phrase, punctuated by sobs, again. And again.
Fourteen times.
No, I told him, big boy, I need you to be a big boy, I need you to stop crying, stop fucking crying, I’m losing my mind with all this fucking crying, could you please just for the love of Christ—
Then he shrieked once, loudly, in perfect imitation of my mother, who had a similarly allergic reaction to the Lord’s name vainly taken.
I squeezed the twig or foot or whatever in my fist. I’m not coming inside, I said, until you’re a big boy for me.
After the podcast’s closing credits, a freakish silence fell over the garage. Though, perhaps, I simply regarded all silence now as supernatural, possibly divine. When I considered oblivion these days, I thought: It must be so quiet there.
I heard my son sniffling on the other side of the door.
Big boy, he said. His pronunciation was perfect.
Then I heard the deadbolt turn.
***
My keys were not among the essentials I had carried on our morning walk. Another deadbolt barred the front door. A swing-latch prevented the sunroom’s sliding door from sliding. Each window from which I removed an already-dented windscreen remained glued to its sill. Terror like a talon clamped around my neck. Or perhaps it was more like an arthritic hand, digging for my brainstem, a senior citizen pulling a weed and praying she can get hold of the roots.
Okay, buddy, I said. Turn it the other way. Turn the lock that you just turned back where it was. It’s up and down right now, but I need you to make it go sideways.
He said, Daddy do it.
Daddy can’t do it, I said. Daddy is locked out.
Clocked out, he said. Then he imitated the prison-break siren that played whenever his time-out alarm sounded.
Daddy has to think, I said.
But I couldn’t think. I could only react, curse, and remember.
I remembered how, the previous morning, my son had stared at my face, his fingers scrabbling over my cheeks, like that Carver character, until he found the mole beside my right nostril, which, in high school, a failure with women, I had tried to cut away using a pocketknife. Daddy little earth mark, he’d said. Why is Daddy sad? I remembered how, when he was younger, six or seven months old, he used to hold onto the crimp of my disfigured clavicle. Years earlier, I had, as they say, wrapped my car around a tree, though it was more like I’d forcefully planted a century-old live oak between my alternator and battery. The seatbelt had snapped my left collarbone. The pain I felt now was like the pain I felt that night. I had been discharged from the hospital with a sling. A sniffling policeman had taken my driver’s license and refused to give it back. I had stood on the deck, talking to a friend who’d been out with me, who’d picked me up from the hospital, when I felt the two fragments of bone shift, the inner portion sliding over the outer. Collapse. Agony infiltrated all of my senses. A bolt of lightning in a pitch-black sky. A siren amplified by a PA system. A chemical scent, like snorting crushed pills. Pain as the starting point of a panic attack.
I felt it all now, and tried to remember a cure, a way to cope, my probation officer’s advice.
I leaned—breathe, goddammit—against the fridge.
I called my wife, who didn’t answer.
I called a locksmith, who could be here in forty minutes.
Is there any chance—
Forty minutes, he said again.
As calmly as possible, I instructed my son to turn on the television, a trick he’d learned before taking his first step. When you finish watching the TV, I said, Daddy will have the house key!
A moment later, I heard Miss Rachel slowly enunciating from the living room. I heard my son babbling along. I heard him doing the breathing exercises I’d shown him at Mother’s Day Out drop-offs. He sounded peaceful, even happy. I felt like Tony Soprano watching geese.
***
Our two-car garage contained everything but the two cars. My bookshelves, excised from the office that became a nursery, collected dust and dead insects. My desk had become but one more flat surface upon which to balance stockpiled toilet paper and canned food for Next Time.
A crate of booze sat on top of the fridge.
In my inner ear, I heard the airplane seatbelt metaphor ubiquitous among Instagram parenting gurus, the moral being: self-care first.
Pocketing the bird foot, I dropped a handful of freezer-burnt ice into my son’s sippy cup, uncorked a souvenir from my Scottish honeymoon, and unfolded a Tommy Bahama chair. I had missed the sear of sophisticated fire on my tongue. I had missed the instant arrival of unearned dopamine. I had missed the silence. The geese and the hawk and the eagle and the grackle and the old gardener flew off together in a picturesque V.
Every two minutes I called out to my son, Marco Polo-style, to check in.
I comforted myself with memories. Watching him by myself, I never really watched him at all. There was too much to do, diapers to change, pacifiers to sterilize, crusts to detach. Rarely could I admire him as I had before he could move. For hours he used to lie immobile, witnessing the new world. He regarded the ceiling fan as a kind of spinning god. How misleading it is to call a pair of eyes brown, when in fact his eyes were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of colors, containing shards of gold and wells of ink, expanding when my hand passed in front of the light, contracting when I took my hand away, and I missed him so badly, this child my son would never be again.
I finished the drink.
Then I walked around the side of the house, to the back deck, where I could see into the living room.
My son had figured out how to work the controller. He was flipping through channels. He stopped on Scarlett Johansson. She was getting undressed, thumbing the buttons of a cream-colored chemise. She was collapsing on a bed. Silk sheets. Lace and lipstick. He went into the kitchen. The wire fruit bowl clanged against the hardwood floor. He returned to the TV, changed the channel again. Orange juice spattered his bare feet, the peel printing an ouroboros on the rug, while on-screen a soldier set fire to a school. He muted the television, then turned it up loud, then put on subtitles in Japanese, then changed the channel again, and there was old Jack Nicholson, wild-eyed and tossing a fistful of cocaine at a prostitute’s ass. The kid popped his pacifier back in, chewing the bell like a cigar. Either he was standing straighter, or he had grown taller. He tore into a packet of Cheddar Bunnies and put on the game. October ball. The Astros were in the playoffs. Horseshit, he proclaimed—correctly, in my view: the called strike almost nicked the batter’s elbow.
Now you know, I whispered. Now you know.
***
Back in the garage, unfastening an inherited tacklebox’s metal clasps, I imagined my father lying among the barbed hooks and bobbers, the artificial mayflies and neon worms. He had taught me to fish. We had never caught anything.
The smell hit me first. On the top tier lay a fossilized lump of catfish bait beside a jar of salmon eggs in a brine that had hardened into jam. There was a bundle of fishing line. The lower compartment contained a three-tiered grinder shaped like a wheel; a butane torch I’d bought during my high school experiment with terrorism; a zebra-striped glass pipe, the bowl heavily caked with ash and resin; a stoner’s version of a Swiss Army Knife with a miniature shovel, tamper, and rod; and an old film canister wherein lay three nuggets of what a masking-tape label informed me was an indica-dominant hybrid called Gorilla Glue.
Like the other accoutrements of my extended childhood, these items had been banished from my normal life. There had been an evening in the first six exhausted months of parenthood when, after the boy had gone to bed, and I knew that I had at best three hours to sleep, I had smoked by the light of the big dipper and a neighbor’s bug zapper. I pointed my phone at the sky and an app cast names and shapes over the constellations, and I recalled a classical myth about how stars represented our long-dead ancestors—I could see a spectral finger pointing toward the sky—and for a moment it all made sense. I had washed my beard and hands in the sink and climbed into bed and immediately my son had begun to scream. I had waited, prayed to no effect. Eventually, I went into the nursery, which we’d blacked out with Hefty bags and duct tape.
And I could not find him.
I could hear my son screaming, but, because I wanted to allow my wife to sleep, I had slid the monitor into my pocket, and so the screams followed me. I kept moving in circles. I had finally reached into the crib and turned up with Cookie Monster, his googly eyes just visible as my own eyes adjusted to the darkness. Which set off another epiphany: It wasn’t an ancient myth I remembered about the constellations. It was a cartoon movie about an ogre who discovers true love, despite his coarse habits and questionable hot factor. Thinking back on it now, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever found my son, or if, perhaps, he had finally cried himself to sleep.
The locksmith would arrive at any minute.
Coarsely ground flower fell onto the blackened bowl. Blocking the carb with my thumb, I brought the pipe to my lips. With my opposite hand, I turned the childproof wheel of the butane lighter’s ignition button, then clicked it in. A two-inch flame hissed to life.
I didn’t inhale so much as gasp.
Daddy made a mistake, I sputtered. Daddy fucked up.
Eventually, after I stopped coughing, I felt the bird foot tense, the tips of its toes digging through the pocket lining of my jeans. Electricity ran up my belly, into my throat, accompanied by a vision I hesitate to call a flashback. I was in the NICU again. My son lay inside of a plastic case like a terrarium. He had a collapsed lung. He wore a breathing apparatus that resembled a small rhino’s horn. According to his birth certificate, he was two days old. According to his adjusted age, based on his due date, he was negative twenty-six days old. All of this had happened. I knew that. What I did not realize was that it was, on some level, continuing to happen. At that time I had thought that my son would die before we ever made it home. This was when the monitoring truly began. I stared at him. All night, I had sat in a chair in the corner while a machine measured his oxygen levels. If the numbers dipped too low, the machine beeped furiously, like a particularly harsh alarm, and I would be standing beside his cage, fists balled, when the nurses finally arrived to hit snooze and, if necessary, raise his level of artificial respiration.
When his breathing improved, the nurses would ask: Would you like to hold him?
Or: Would you like to try changing him this time?
My wife was still at the hospital where she’d given birth, recovering from an emergency caesarean. My son and I were at Dell Children’s.
And I could imagine crushing him. Or dropping him. Or—having, perhaps, contracted Covid during a brief interaction with a clerk at the liquor store—infecting him.
No, I said every time. Not yet.
And after the nurse left, my son had looked at me with a kind of distant judgment, a child abandoned. Beside that terrarium, two years earlier, I had known that, somehow, this would be as close as I could ever get to my son. There would always remain between us a pane, or perhaps a pain. I could never truly reach out and take him into my arms. I would always remain here, and he would always remain there, because of some fundamental flaw in my nature. I had whispered: You don’t have to be like me. You can let the world in. If there’s someone who offers to help you, I want you to take it. Don’t be like me, I said. Don’t be like me.
Now, inside the garage, setting down my pipe, I could see him there, once more, squirming inside of a DandleLION medical swaddle.
Get him out, I told no one.
A faceless nurse unhooked the tubes attached to his small body. My son looked like an old man, my grandfather. The nurse handed him to me, and he did not cry. I held him gingerly, careful of the hardware. I held him and remembered washing my hands at the check-in station, washing and washing, thirty seconds and then thirty seconds more, allowing the water to grow scalding, pumping with my foot, thinking: Burn it all away. His breathing settled. His small fingers clawed at the rhino horn bisecting his wrinkled face, and finally, I removed it. His diaper was the size of a single square of toilet paper. He was shorter than the length of my forearm.
It’s okay, I said.
You don’t have to not be me, I said.
You don’t have to not be anything, I said.
Then I walked out of the garage, onto the back deck and into the sunlight. I could still feel the newborn, a warm bundle against my chest, as I watched the toddler through the window. The toddler was stripping out of his onesie. He was naked, pissing on his Hot Wheels. He was wearing a pumpkin-shaped bucket for a hat. He wasn’t crying. He recited I’ll Love You Till the Cows Come Home to himself. He read through Are You My Mother?, his little finger following the lines of text. He put on a fresh pair of Pull-Ups, backwards.
His growth wasn’t as incremental as one might expect—more like the geological theory of catastrophism, whereby change happens with sudden violence rather than uniform progression.
I’m bigger, the boy said when he saw me through the glass.
I dragged the bird foot across the windowpane. Let me in, I said. I have your leg.
He called me silly. He said, It’s not a leg, Dad. It’s a stick!
Then he walked over to the door leading into the garage. He pinched the deadbolt between two fingers and a thumb. He glanced over at my face pressed against the window. He flipped the lock, then he flipped it back: horizontal, vertical, horizontal.
In a blur I bolted off the deck. I banged open the side gate and high-stepped over a coiled garden hose and stumbled into the garage. Then I plunged toward a place I’d never been, a destination that might not exist, a possibility on the far side of the door.
#
Ross Feeler is a writer living in Central Texas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Idaho Review, The Common, The Masters Review, New South, The Potomac Review, Story|Houston, Hypertext, and others. He has received the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Prize for a novel-in-progress, and he serves as an editorial consultant for CRAFT. He is currently at work on his first novel, entitled Something Like Life Goes On.