CW: wound care.

The surgery is an aortic something-or-other—you don’t really bother to listen. You don’t need some surgeon barely out of Pull-Ups to tell you your heart hasn’t worked right since Sam died.

They put you under for it, and isn’t that a wonder: to sleep without dreaming. Or if you do, the propofol makes you forget, and that’s almost as good. You wonder if that’s what it was like for Sam—to cease to exist. A part of you hopes it’ll make you feel closer to her. Another part fears exactly that.

Instead, it’s one long, slow blink, and then you’re being shaken awake by a nurse who informs you that you’ve already repeated the same question three times, and she really doesn’t have time for it. They hand you printed instructions. This is your life now: a set of papers and the workaday smiles of people already thinking about something else.

You’re driven home by a medical transport service, a quiet young man of indeterminate ethnicity and overly enthusiastic aftershave. You feel a brief moment of embarrassment when the receptionist asks if you have a family member or friend to pick you up, but you have no close family (in any sense of the word), and your friends were always Sam’s—you’d only ever been borrowing them. It had never bothered you: just more proof that you’d been lucky to snag a woman so far above your grade. A woman who could command a room with a laugh. Who’d dressed like a movie star even as cancer cored her out. Who’d poke your overstuffed belly and call you a silly old coot and fuck you like the world was on fire.

The van drops you off at the apartment. Not your apartment, really. If anybody asked, you’d lie and tell them the move was to save money, that one person doesn’t need all that space. But the truth is that as pathetic as this bare-walled little squat might be, with its two-burner hot plate and yellowed vertical blinds, it’s not as lonely as a house where every surface is a memory, every photograph a framed scar. A shoebox diorama of your own life that you floated through, unable to bring yourself to touch any of it.

Sam might be dead, but you’re the ghost.

• • • •

The painkillers leave you loopy and forgetful. You imagine this must be what senility feels like, and think it’s not so bad: To exist in stutter-shot frames, flashes of instant mashed potatoes and mindless television. Only half-aware of what’s missing.

Before long, the prescription runs out. Sam’s imagined glare keeps you from asking for more. If you wanted to be a junkie, she whispers, you should have done it when you were young enough to look cool.

You’ve heard it said that the heart itself doesn’t have pain sensors—that you don’t actually feel damage done to it. You think that’s the biggest crock of shit you’ve ever heard. But it’s true that the physical pain has largely receded.

Over the next few days, though, you start to notice a pressure in your chest. At first you think it’s anxiety—a condition you know you have but have always been too embarrassed to talk about. But this feels different. As it grows, you start to get palpitations: twitching movement, a fluttering inside your ribs.

Still, you put off looking into it. It’s not actually that uncomfortable, and the follow-up is in three weeks.

That lasts until the morning you wake to a sharp pain in the center of your chest. You reach up instinctively, disobeying the doctor’s orders to slither an unwashed finger beneath your bandages.

Something sharp jabs you. You whip your finger away, checking the whorl of your fingerprint—no blood, but a distinct red mark. A medical staple, worked loose from the meat of you? The palpitations are going crazy now, your heart tumbling over and over itself like a Bond villain’s car run off a cliff.

You get up and walk into the bathroom. You rarely bother with the light, not wanting to see your half-melted candle of a body, but in the flickering fluorescents, you peel away the bandages to examine the stitches running centipede-like down your sternum. It’s almost cartoonishly what you’d expect. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

You probe lightly at the place that hurts—and again, a sudden pain pricks your fingertip. But when you yank your hand back, there’s still nothing visible on your chest except the scabby scar. You haul yourself laboriously up onto the bathroom counter, straddling the sink like you’re giving it a lap dance, and get as close to the mirror as you can.

Tentatively, you extend your twice-abused finger, pressing lightly against the puckered edge of the scar.

Something moves.

You jerk backward, barely catching yourself on the towel hanger. Your mind goes immediately to the drugs, but you’ve never hallucinated before—and besides, you’ve been on nothing but ibuprofen for days. You lean back in, eyes locked on the puckered ridge where flesh has been cut and sewn. Even slower, now, you place your finger near one nipple and drag it inward.

A little black point thrusts outward from between the stitches. It quests blindly, stabbing this way and that as if rooting about for something.

The sense of dissociation is immediate: this cannot be your chest. Your chest is a thing of moles and hairs and occasional acne, not a thrashing black dart reaching like the leg of a spider, jackhammering obscenely in and out of your skin.

Then the needle splits in two, halves yawning wide and snapping shut. A screech of rage.

It’s a beak.

• • • •

The young surgeon looks over the scans, pursing her lips and nodding like the doctors do on TV. You wonder if she watches the same shows.

“It’s definitely a bird,” she says cheerfully. “Western bluebird, looks like—though of course these images don’t show color. But the shape is right.” She winks. “I’ve got a pretty good eye for these things.”

You stare.

“It’s uncommon, but perfectly natural.” She talks with her hands, sweeping gestures. “When material is removed, as in your procedure, the body tries to fill the gap. Sometimes that’s with fluid—what we call a seroma. Sometimes it’s scar tissue.” She holds out the images—the suggestive shadows, the bright lines of tiny, delicate bones. “And sometimes it’s something else. The body fills its gap, and the bird gets a home. Symbiosis.”

“But a bird?” you ask.

The surgeon shrugs. “They’re cavity nesters. They nest in hollows.” She lowers the scans and gives you a look of professional concern. “Do you feel hollow?”

• • • •

You go home with more papers.

The bird sings to you, each note a sharp little ache behind your ribs. The song is beautiful and painful, like memories are beautiful and painful. It serenades you in the middle of the night, as you lie there watching shadows thrown by the passing headlights of people with places to go. It keeps you company as you sleepwalk through the grocery store, remembering the time Sam hid a live lobster in your cart.

Tiny dirges. Tiny elegies.

• • • •

You go to the support group, mostly to keep the doctors from asking why you didn’t. The handful of other folks there are mostly old people, widows and widowers like you, though there are a handful of accented refugees, plus the young couple whose lost child is visible in the way they sit close yet never touch. The counselor is another chirpy young thing, all earnest eyes and undercut hair, for whom loss is still a thing one reads about. She runs you through the practicalities of your new situation—how to irrigate your wound with a squeeze bottle, so the bird’s waste doesn’t build up and cause infection. She also talks about the importance of not fighting your emotions, which strikes you as absurd. Everyone here has already lost that battle.

During the break, you stand next to the table of boxed coffee and grocery-store muffins, fingering the pain in your chest and wondering if it would be rude to pluck off some almond slivers to feed the bird.

“Insistent little bastards, aren’t they?”

The woman is roughly your own age, black hair going gray like cream poured into coffee. She nods to the muffins. “It’s like they can tell when we’re near food.”

You shrug. “Maybe they can.”

“Why not, right? It’s not like anything else makes sense.” She holds out her hand. “Carli.”

You give your name and shake, feeling awkward at the formality even though she started it.

“First time here?” At your nod, she says, “Well, welcome. The coffee’s too old and the therapist’s too young, but at least there’s muffins.” She takes a bite of a double-chocolate monstrosity and rolls her eyes, sighing in near-pornographic pleasure. “Tell people you ate cake for breakfast, they’ll look down their nose, but call it a muffin and they’ll serve it at a hospital. They’re just cupcakes with a PR team.”

It’s already the longest unpaid conversation you’ve had with anyone since the funeral. You gesture from your chest to hers. “You been coming for a while?” A part of you marvels that your voice still works, only slightly dusty from disuse.

“Fifteen months.” With a total lack of inhibition, she tugs the collar of her shirt down far enough to show the top of a scar running down between her breasts. “Car accident. I was dead on the table for three minutes.”

You widen your eyes. “How was it?”

“Being dead?” She wolfs down another bite of muffin, then pins you with a look as desolate as the one you see in the mirror. “Can’t complain.”

• • • •

You start out with sunflower kernels. Birds eat birdseed, right? It’s in the fucking name. But the literature is clear, and eventually the thought of Sam’s imagined disapproval forces you down to the pet store to get what you need.

“Living or dead?” the clerk asks. The universal question.

Back home, you sit down on the couch and pull out the carton. Through milky plastic, shadowy shapes writhe. You unbutton your shirt, distantly amazed by how you no longer even blink at the beak dipping in and out like a sewing machine needle through unhealed holes between stitches, little gaps between bridges of flesh.

Taking a deep breath, you lean down and pull the lid off the container. You’d assumed mealworms meant earthworms, like in the cartoons, but these are nothing like that: fat yellow grubs, segmented bodies, tiny legs at the front. Just the sight of them crawling over and over each other turns your stomach. You’ve never thought of yourself as squeamish—always the designated spider-squasher, the rat-trapper, the one to pull teratoma-snarls of wife-hair from the shower drain. Yet you can’t bring yourself to plunge your fingers into that roiling mass.

In the end, you go to the kitchen and come back with a pair of unused takeout chopsticks. You’re not the best with chopsticks—they invented forks for a reason, Sam—and almost shriek when your captured worm falls, barely missing your knee. But you manage to nab it a second time, lifting it up over yourself with the sweaty precision of a bomb tech. And really, if that horrible little larva touches your skin, you might explode.

The grub writhes. Slowly, you lower it toward the wound on your chest. You’re breathing fast now, some primitive section of your brainstem recognizing a parasite. I’m no neocortex, it mutters, but I know you don’t put bugs in a fucking wound. You imagine the feel of the worm working its way inside you, blind head seeking warmth, burrowing into meat. Penetrating, laying eggs in your flesh, thousands of them chewing their way free as—

The beak darts out. In a flash, the mealworm is gone, plucked cleanly from the chopsticks. The tiny beak opens in a screech of triumph so primal it pulls a laugh from your chest.

“Jesus.” The word comes out wobbly, and you shake out tense hands, aching shoulders. Then you consult the instructions. “Wait—you need eight of those?”

Another screech.

“Fucking hell.”

You lean back over the carton, chopsticks poised.

• • • •

After your third support group session, Carli invites you to get “some coffee that doesn’t taste like it’s already been drunk once.” You tell her about civet coffee, the fancy beans that get digested and shat out by little cat-possum-things, and she laughs. “People will eat anything if you charge them enough.”

You aren’t oblivious. You may be thirty years out of practice, but you still recognize a date when it hits you over the head. The thought twists you up inside, but it’s been a long time since anyone has looked at you with that sense of entitled expectation. It’s easier just to go.

The two of you sit across from each other at one of the café’s unsteady tables, holding unmatched and oversized mugs.

“Mealworms?” She shudders.

Your eyebrows rise. “You don’t?”

She taps her chest. “Northern cardinal. They’re mostly vegetarian anyway. If the little fucker doesn’t like it, he can stow away in somebody else.” She says little fucker with affection.

You pause, unsure if it’s okay to ask, but screw it—you just came from a support group. “Who . . . ?” You nod toward her, not needing to finish.

“Husband and son.” She says it matter-of-factly, and you’re amazed at the way she’s able to hold your gaze. “The accident. They were in the car with me.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Her lips go thin, but she nods back at you. “Cancer, right? Your wife?”

“Yeah.”

She shakes her head. “I used to wonder if that would be better—to see it coming like that, have time to make your goodbyes. But maybe it’s better to be happily oblivious right up until the last minute.”

“Wanna know the answer?”

She blinks, then sets her mug down. “Shit—that was insensitive, wasn’t it?”

“It’s fine.” And actually, it is. The world is full of people who politely ignore the smoking crater in the center of your life. You’re surprised at what a relief it is to have someone point directly at it.

“I’m not great at people,” she confesses. “I like people, I just never realize I’ve put my foot in my mouth until I’m licking my shin.” She smiles sideways. “We had a guest speaker a few months ago—a sort of Christian hippie talking about how the birds are the souls of those we’ve lost. The Q&A got, uh, a little heated. I thought they might actually kick me out.”

“You don’t agree?” You find yourself actually curious.

She rolls her eyes. “I mean, it’s a little fucking on the nose, isn’t it? Everybody in there is grieving something. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to realize there’s a connection. But that doesn’t mean the birds are our reincarnated spouses. They could just as easily be little demons feeding on our tragedy. Alien parasites from another dimension. If you’re gonna get weird, go all the way. Don’t assume this shit is a Hallmark card.”

You’re all the way in it right now. “What do you think they are?”

“I think they’re fucking birds, my dude.” She waves a hand. “Mine likes peanuts and shitting inside my thoracic cavity. If that’s what guardian angels do, I’ll pass, thanks.” She blows out a long breath, stepping down off her soapbox. “Anyway. Leave it for group.” She picks her mug up again. “So . . . what do you do?”

You shrug, self-conscious about it for the first time in years. “I was in sales.”

“Sure.” She raises the mug to her face, becoming just a pair of eyes peering over its rim. “But what do you do?”

You stare.

The thing is, you know what you used to do. You drove Sam to appointments. Cooked her food. Lay quietly beside her while she listened to her audiobooks. But since then . . .

Eventually the ancient VHS tape of your brain rewinds far enough to show you images from before illness became your shared identity. Color on canvas. The spill of warm light through a glass patio door.

“I used to paint,” you offer.

“Yeah?” She sets the cup down and leans over it, resting her chin on clasped hands. Eyes way too intense. “Tell me more.”

“What about it?”

“Anything. Everything.” She motions forward with her nose. “Go.”

• • • •

Like a reluctant lawnmower, the conversation sputters to life. You can hardly remember how to play your part, but each time you let it die she yanks on the pull-cord again, drawing you out. Pauses get shorter and shorter, then disappear. One coffee becomes two becomes splitting a scone.

You find yourself filing all details about Carli into two categories: Like Sam and Unlike Sam. Sam disguised shyness with art-punk aloofness, while Carli tells the barista how her day is actually going. Sam always looked like she should have been from Paris instead of Boise—tall, slim, a cigarette draped gracefully from two fingers. Carli is as round and dark as a cannonball, with the same velocity. Sam floated above conversations like a bemused philosopher, pearls dropping from her lips. Carli is all easy profanity and unsettling eye contact. Sam was a dragonfly. Carli is a bulldog.

Yet in other ways, they’re so similar. Explosive laughter that pulls you along in its wake. An interest in your thoughts that you can neither explain nor justify.

You think of your first date with Sam, walking around the lake once, then again when you couldn’t stop talking. You pluck the last crumbs of Carli’s scone from her plate, and remember how Sam stopped on the way to the church to give a homeless man the first slice of your wedding cake, because it’s just a fucking cake. You remember how you used to eat Sam’s unwanted pizza crusts, the edges still moist from her lips. How she’d cup your chin and call you her goat.

And then, as you and Carli transition from coffee to dinner, the most miraculous thing happens.

For five whole minutes, you don’t think about Sam at all.

• • • •

The box is still in the corner where the movers left it. It takes you long minutes of shuffling and stacking to reach it.

It feels like the paints should be dried out and dead, but it hasn’t actually been that long. A handful of years—that’s how long it takes a life to fade and flicker out. The brushes are still soft.

There’s no patio door here. No mattress on the floor, like there was in your first apartment, where she’d watch you work despite your perfunctory protests, hypnotized by the stroke of your brush. But there’s a window, and the light isn’t bad.

The easel’s edges bite into your hands, wood spattered with drops and nicks, the scars of loving use. There’s still an assortment of blank canvas, from back when emptiness meant possibility, a thing to be hoarded.

You don’t paint from memory, because Sam isn’t a memory. You’ve never stopped seeing her everywhere.

• • • •

You and Carli have sex, in her aggressively cheerful apartment. There are potted plants on every surface, windows open despite the winter chill. Her bird scratches bright lines along your chest as you rock together, IKEA bedframe creaking ominously beneath the weight.

Afterward, she cries. You understand. More than that—you appreciate it, wrapping yourself around her from behind. When she rolls back over and buries her face in your shoulder, it’s with a sense of relief for both of you. It’s nice to not have to pretend.

Before long, you’re both laughing.

• • • •

It’s two days before you realize the bird’s song has changed. It’s less frequent, quieter—you’re convinced you can hear the thin whistle of labored lungs. The mealworms you dangle go half-eaten, bleeding out on the pale tablecloth of your skin.

The doctor listens to your chest, sends you for another ultrasound, then reads out the results with a grin. “Good news! You’re healing nicely.”

You wave it off—yes, sure, but what about the bird?

The doctor’s brow furrows. “Like I said—your body’s finally filling in that cavity.” She sees the look on your face and swings the computer screen out of the way, leaning forward in a manner meant to convey understanding. “Listen—habitat loss is just part of the process. The point is that you’re doing better.”

• • • •

“But do I want to get better, if it means losing the bird?”

You’re in the coffee shop, the one you’re already coming to think of as yours and Carli’s. Funny how you can live in a city your whole life, yet as soon as you meet someone new, there are all these undiscovered landmarks—places you’ve passed a thousand times but never imagined would become important. It’s like the dreams you had as a child, of finding a previously unnoticed door in your house.

Carli leans back in her chair, clearly picking up words and then putting them back. In the end, she settles on simply, “Do you?”

“I don’t know!”

“It’s not really a choice, right?” She grimaces. “This is what’s supposed to happen. We can’t just keep walking around with holes in our chests.”

“Why not? We’ve been fine this far!”

“Have we?” She bites her lip in a way you haven’t seen before, and that hesitation alarms you more than the words. “Maybe…” She takes a deep breath, but what emerges is still barely more than a whisper. “Maybe it’s time.” She holds your eyes, nervous but certain. “You know why it’s happening now, right?”

There’s no point pretending. “I just . . . There’s gotta be some other way. Why does everything have to come with a fucking catch?” You’re surprised to find yourself close to tears.

“That’s life.” She reaches out and takes your hand. “Things change. How long do you want to give this chapter?”

You can feel the heat of her—her hand, her eyes. The life in her. And through her, the world surrounding you: the bustle of the coffee shop, people stomping mud from boots, the grind of beans and fussing of babies. This world seethes with life, with color. You’d almost forgotten that it used to be like that. You feel on the edge of waking, atop a gentle cliff above the sea.

You could stay here. Could paint yourself into this scene.

You pull your hand slowly out from under hers.

“I don’t know.” You stand and grab your jacket. “I don’t know.”

• • • •

There’s a point in relationships at which flaws become endearing. Her atrocious morning breath is no longer annoying, because it’s hers. The overly wet kisses when she’s had one too many glasses of wine are now the ones you miss most. These things are not defects, but proof of love: a reminder that you’ve chosen her as is, in all her scuffed and asymmetrical glory.

You go over the painting again and again, reworking to keep remembering. Her face. Her smell. The bray of her loudest laugh. You whistle along with the bird’s reedy song, and tell yourself it’s getting stronger.

Yet Sam’s isn’t the only voice you’re missing.

You look to your phone, where it lies face down on the couch. The texts stack up unread.

• • • •

When you gesso over a used canvas, is the original image lost?

Or is it preserved safely underneath?

• • • •

How many times can you touch a memory before it wears smooth?

• • • •

The painting isn’t finished, but what ever really is? You hang it on the living room wall. She looks good there. As she stares out from above the couch, you see the rest of your sad little apartment the way she would. Still Life with Boxes.

“Working on it,” you whisper.

The window is already open to air out paint fumes, a cool breeze brushing across your bare skin. Below, cars honk and rumble on the street as you sit down beneath her on the couch and pick up the box cutter.

You hardly feel the razor go in, that little angled corner. It’s only as you drag it downward that the pain becomes real, a staggering saw-toothed burn as the blade tugs at each stitch, parting half-knitted flesh. At the bottom of your sternum, hand already slick with blood, you raise the knife back to the top and start again. Then again. Retracing the old wound.

The bird screeches in fear.

You never had kids, but if you had, if you could, maybe this is what you would have felt. Pain, yes. But pain in service of something.

Inside you, the bird thrashes, but you’ve been as careful as you can with shaking hands. The knife falls to the carpet in a soft patter of red as you reach up and worm your fingers into either side of the formerly neat incision. Your vision starts to narrow, but you breathe deep and pull.

The bird slides out, bloody afterbirth leaving a red trail down your stomach. For one horrible second, you worry you’ve cut too deep.

Then it shakes itself, shrieking. Bloody feathers fluff and flick. You try to wipe it off with your shirt, but your own hands are a wreck, and it doesn’t need you anyway. With a piping song, it flutters out the window and away.

In its wake, your chest feels empty. But it’s a new kind of empty.

Dizzy, you pick up the phone.