The Dove

by Sofia Greenberg

I was lying on the bed. It was too hot but opening a window would up the chances of more carpet beetles, the latest plague on my apartment. I was lying there in my briefs, moving my legs around to find cool areas on the blanket. I had that thing where just the backs of my knees were sweating, long streaks of sweat that I felt turn into beads at my calves and then fall. I couldn’t decide if I liked or hated that feeling.

I had just finished masturbating. I was always masturbating on hot afternoons. I was listening to a recording of an Indian man talking about spiritual matters. I was probably bored with it and that’s why I masturbated. He was saying, “there is nothing to be done about believing you are the eye of the universe.” Then I started fooling around with my dick. He said, “you see everything in a great hall of mirrors” and it was hard. It takes it about 9 words (spoken slowly in heavily accented English) for me to get hard. I guess. I was really stroking it when he said, “when I die, reality will rip in half like a sail in a storm.”

Right before I came, I remembered that I should be thinking about Angela, but all I could think about was how last time I saw her she had gotten little rhinestones glued above her vagina. It’s called Vagazzling. She had asked if I liked them and I said her pussy looked so gaudy I half-expected it to be chewing gum. She didn’t think that was funny, and maybe it wasn’t. That was what I was thinking about the split-second before I came and then the orgasm tore me out of my head, thank god. Orgasms never get old. Every time it’s like a goddamn miracle.

My whole life does not consist of masturbating. That’s just what I happened to have finished doing when this bird flew into my window. It was so heavy and white and intrusive that for a second I thought it was a snowball, and then my brain told me No. And then my brain told me Bird. I got up and felt rivulets of sweat fall down my calves. I wiped my cum off my belly with a shirt and stepped out onto the glaring balcony where the bird had fallen. There was a baseball-sized grease smudge on the window where it had hit. Probably Angela would think it was from a girl’s back and ask if I was seeing someone else and why I never fucked her against the window. I decided that if the bird was dead I should put it in my freezer for evidence. But it wasn’t dead, it was something very similar to alive, and it was a dove. There was a dent in its beak from which dark blood was beginning to ooze. I picked up the bird as gently as I could and carried it inside. It kept opening and closing its beak very slowly and I imagined a tiny voice saying, “Ham, haaaam.” I sat down on the couch with the bird in my lap and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark room. The bird smelled like dust and wood primer. “Hi,” I told it, feeling dumb and helpless. The word “mite” came into my head so I got a towel and put the bird on it. I noticed that its filmy little eyelids only met half-way when it blinked. The Indian man was talking about the ashes of history and I got up to turn him off. I heard a shuffle and a thud and turned to see that the dove had fallen off the couch and landed on its neck in a bad way. Panicked, I called Angela.

“Hellow?” she said the way she always answered the phone when I called, as if she had just stepped out of the shower and was still aglow with steam.

“Hi, Angela. Can you come over? It’s a crisis.”

“Is everything ok with your dick?”

She was terrified of venereal diseases and always eyeing my penis when she thought I didn’t notice, the way my mother used to eye my blackheads.

“Yeah, it’s just a bird. It might be dying.”

Angela showed up about three minutes after the bird died. I was still holding it, it was still warm, as warm as everything else in the stuffy apartment, but with more emotional weight. When I heard her shoes in the stairwell I wrapped the bird in the towel and put it in the shower so if any mites came off, I could deal with them fast. Angela came in wearing a white blouse and sunglasses. Her hair was as blond as anything and a little windswept. She said, “Hi.” I stood up and pulled her by the wrist (thin wrist, nice wrist) to the bed. I started fumbling around with her shirt buttons, which I could never successfully undo, and she pushed my hand away and did it herself.

“What about the bird?”

“Forget the bird. Died.”

"Oh," she said as I worked my fingers through the obstacle of jeans, underwear, and "Oh," again, as I touched the rhinestones.

Sofia Greenberg attends the California College of the Arts in Oakland. She was raised in a small, rural town in New Mexico. She can be reached at sgreenberg@cca.edu.