Stringalong

In his study, James Nightingale wondered what there was to live for. Sex was out; he wasn’t very good at it. Love, too, was not the answer, because James Nightingale was very much the kind of man who conflated it with sex. It was probably the reason why he wasn’t very good at either. Finding nothing to live for in these precious few seconds of thought, James Nightingale resolved to live only as long as it took him to die, and not a moment longer. He shuffled through the papers on his desk, unaware which one he was looking for, but believing somewhere deep inside himself that one sheet had to be the right one.

He enjoyed the singing—though for the most part he tuned it out—of the goldfinch he kept in a cage by the window. He kept note of everything: the pitch variations, the warbles, the fry. Nothing escaped his notice, even if he didn’t actually notice it. The cage caught the sunlight from the window, cast the shadow of its bars across the hardwood floor and mud-stained rug that James never found the urge to clean. All the rug had was that it was stained by mud, he decided, and why should he deprive it of that? And the caged goldfinch had nothing unique about it, only that it was caged in his window. Without that, the goldfinch would be indiscernible from the rest, so why deprive him of that?

“As far as it will take you,” Imogen had said in the basement of a library older than time, in a fractured segment of a memory that James Nightingale only held on the underside of his recollection; she'd said it matter-of-fact, like the answer was there the whole time. She wore plastic flowers in her hair. Her lip balm tasted like vanilla, and then a young worker kicked them out because it was 2 AM and it was a little uncomfortable that someone’s tongue was down someone else’s throat at 2 in the morning in a library basement.

James Nightingale had an empty picture frame on his wall, the glass a little smudged from the one time his thumb brushed it. The picture that used to be in it was on fire somewhere in the past, in the fireplace of his old family home and every time James Nightingale glanced at the empty picture frame, he could see Imogen’s face in the fire, curling in on itself, twitching like a dying bird, and then becoming nothing.

On his way home with Imogen that one night, James Nightingale saw a dying bird under a frayed powerline. Imogen pretended not to see it, hid in her own hair until they passed it. Those nights were always starless.

No one taught him how to fall in love, or how to let people fall in love with him. James Nightingale often wondered how birds learned to sing, if they knew what it could lead to. Something crashed against the windowpane, leaving a colorless, meaningless smudge and choking up the song for an endless moment before the goldfinch sang again. On his way out, James Nightingale grabbed a shovel. He wondered if birds could sing themselves apart, or only each other.

In her formless improvisios of thought made words, Imogen told James Nightingale many things with blunt and drunken honesty. It was as if she sensed the directionlessness of his life, and with finality she told him, without a prompt in the world, “Follow the first bird you see.” As far as it will take you. “It worked for me.”

A goldfinch lay on the mulch beneath James Nightingale’s window, gently mangled, legs twitching like a burning photograph. He never knew what to do with the birds that seemed a little bit alive, but he always buried them, all the same.

“I can’t take you very far,” said James Nightingale the day the taste of vanilla grew stale on his lips.

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Stringalong is a part of a collection of unpublished short stories called A Bird on the Other Side of the Window. I wrote this in 2019. It has not seen prior publication, but a reader for a scholarship once described it as having "Next Great American Novel" energy, so.

If you agree with that reader and want to offer me money in exchange for the beauty I spin forth into the world, leave a tip. If you firmly disagree, and want to call me an idiot in whatever creative manner you so desire, leave a comment. If you want to quantify my worth as a human being and artist, leave a like. If you're in a relationship with someone who doesn't see you for who you are, someone who makes you feel like you're never enough, makes you feel like a dying songbird twitching in the mulch beneath a window, leave them, queen.