Bird Land

She sat near on a limb near the top of the tulip tree. Her thigh muscles clinging hard to the branch, her arms stretched upward, her hands clasping the branch above her head. She spoke rapidly and intensely as if in urgent prayer. But she was not alone in the tree. She spoke to someone else.
A catbird perched on a branch in front of her. She kept her eyes steady on the bird’s smooth gray feathers and dark black cap. Its shiny black eyes that looked up at hers, attentive and listening.
Bettina had always wanted to live in the trees. She’d watch flocks of sparrows settle in for night in a maple or cottonwood. Their voices bantering all at once. She wished she could be in their society. Wished they would let her in and accept her within their tree. She knew her size would not work for that. So she wished she could actually be one of them.
The catbird who listened to her now had gotten used to her monologues and probably listened more out of politeness than wanting to hear. Because Bettina almost always talked about the same things. She always told him her most ardent wishes. Her fascination with the past. Not her past, but farther back, the past of the human, the past before the human created farms and tamed some animals. The past before the humans left the forest and the savannas. And she spoke of Enrique. She could never be sure if she’d ever see him again.
The catbird listened. Half listened. He knew the old stories. This human who was not happy with her own kind. Or her own time. It made him suspect that the large head this human creature had caused her pain in ways he will never understand. He sensed too that it didn’t matter if he didn’t know what to do with her confessions. She just wanted to say them. But today, on this day, a foreign thought came into the bird’s brain. Something he had never seen before. Words that made shapes in his head. As if her confessions had taught him to understand what is human. His thought was clear and singular. It had one message. A message that Bettina may want to hear, because it was about her.
Bettina spoke to the bird in a kind of fit or trance. But she knew who she was talking to. She spoke to many animals but not all of them stood still enough to hear. She hoped by telling the catbird her dreams and worries she could somehow break through and be understood. To hear answers without sound. To feel feathers against her cheek even as the bird stood still before her
She paused in her speech.
The bird flicked its head up and down. It jumped and turned on the branch giving Bettina his back. Then jumped and turned again to face her. He opened his beak and squawked his call, the sound of a cat whining. Bettina watched him sensing something coming for her. He was quiet for a moment and then a long trill of music came from him. A high pitched looping tune unlike anything a catbird had ever said before.
Bettina’s eyes widened. She felt her brain twisting and bending trying to fit this song into something she could understand.  Mashing it between cerebral folds, forcing it to be accepted, to work through her system to come out as something known.
The catbird repeated the trill. And then again. And then again. And then Bettina dropped her head, her eyes closed, her brain knowing something now. The bird became silent. She lifted her head and opened her tearful eyes and nodded to him. He meowed and then looked down and dropped off the tree branch, taking flight into the shrubbery, disappearing into the ground cover.
“I’ll go. I know it’s time to go.”
This time she spoke to the tree. There is no way of knowing if a tree is listening. It has so much it must hear. In one swift motion Bettina jumped down landing on the ground with a sure thump of her feet. And then stood up on the ground as erect as a good human can be.