Kitten Heels

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I was telling you how I’d never felt anything about birds for so long. I could not be moved by a sweet chirp or a confident arc of wing. When my father pointed out a swooping hawk, his voice broken by wonder, I would duck back inside a book after a brief glance upwards. I was almost indifferent to the parade of colourful costumes, to feathered masks and tendril plumes, to the tender toes branching three ways over a small berry. My nonchalance shifted on the occasion I found a felled fowl, and a small kitten licking its lips and batting a paw across the bird’s tiny fluttering throat. Her heart was a small seed pounding under a tear like a seam down her breast. I was an unwilling witness at the moment that it stopped, and something small but deep changed in me forever. You didn’t say much then, you never did, but I could always read what you were thinking. You wanted to share something from the gospel, a snippet of poetry about divine handiwork or the eye on the sparrow, and maybe a word or two about the gulf between glory and pain in nature. I kicked off my little heels and stretched out across your divan with your striped cat and a tumbler of Rioja. You drowned your own small splash in Evian and said you had to get up early. Moved my blue suede shoes to the Wayfair tree in the lobby. Well, if I sometimes wondered what you saw in me at all, it was only the flickering of old fears, small winged demons that sparked through my life like glow fly hummingbirds. I stayed up late watching them glitter across the night at your window.  When the sun came up, you were already up waiting for it. Your fingers were covered in paint and your rosary was in a heap on the table. You nodded at me, then, at the coffee machine. It was that space between here and morning, the only place I’d ever been able to find you.