Matthew Thomas Bernell
The Finch
Once, my father brought home a blue finch. We kept the finch in a cage of thin gold wire. Being a child, I childishly believed a cage of thin gold wire as beautiful as that could have kept anything happy & alive, even a heart outside the body, a heart that would still beat like trussed wings of a fist-sized bird. One day, in my ignorance, I left the little door open after feeding time, & the bird the size of my young fist darted out, scrambling wildly around our house. The finch found another open door, the screen door to the uncaged world. We all chased after it, calling Come back, birdie! Come back, love! It grew smaller & smaller, the finch, my heart.
How to Miss a Ghost
The man who had never seen a ghost went to the boardwalk with some breadcrumbs. It was sunset and the clouds looked like layers of torn peony petals cast into flame. He didn’t see any ghosts at the boardwalk, but there were some starlings morphing and heaving in the sky like a big black lung on the verge of collapse. Truthfully, the man never grew tired of sunsets or birds, so he came here often. As the man sat on his favorite bench, he wondered for a while what the soul, if such a thing existed, would look like. Surely, it wouldn’t be as simple as a ghost, he mused. He remembered that two nights after his mother’s death, a steam-huffing fawn had awoken his father in the night by hoofing at the window beside where his mother used to sleep. Though, he only remembered this secondhand from his father recounting it over coffee a week after the fact. For a second, he wished he could reach a hand out to feel the soft, wet muzzle of such a frail, rare thing. As light siphoned from the sky and Earth turned her shoulder to the sun, the man shook his head, unconvinced his father’s story was anything other than coincidence. Suddenly, the man felt very small, very cold and very small. He shivered and began, hurriedly, to toss his remaining breadcrumbs for the birds, who converged upon them like a hoard of bloodthirsty ghouls finding a straggling, wounded human. Three ghosts, one with a wool cap, had stopped to admire the sunset, too. It’s among the finest I’ve ever seen, whispered the one with the wool cap, as he took it off and held it over his translucent chest. The other two remained silent, then they all disappeared into another of the afterlife’s boulevards, while the man who had never seen a ghost put his hands on his knees and stood.
At Dinner, We Eat Oysters on the Half Shell, and I Wonder
What if, because I so adore the entirety of this world, an anonymous deity gifted me perfect knowledge of everyone’s earlobes? How fitting, right? That I would be so intimately acquainted with the softest part of every person, as if we had all been the sincerest of lovers? As in, you could roll your grandmother up to me, raise her from her wheelchair, support her sagging shoulders with the tenderness of your palms, and I would say Ah, I will always remember you, that smoothed-over puncture wound just off center in the dazzling areolar flap where, long ago, you often let a pearl shine.
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Matthew Thomas Bernell is an emerging writer from somewhere near the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Chestnut Review, trampset, and elsewhere. Currently, he is working on a chapbook and a hybrid collection while pursuing his Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers. You can find him on the site formerly known as Twitter @ImmanentFlux.