Wrenditions of Desire

I kneel by the base of a frozen pond, my mic hovering over the ice. Well, we’ve debated quite viciously as to whether or not it’s a pond—it’s sort of on that ambiguous scale where it could be called a pond or a lake. Which may seem pedantic, but trust me, when you run out of things to do out here, the small stuff starts to matter. I’ve never seen it in the summer, which might help settle the dispute. It’s only ever been a frozen expanse of cracked white-blue plates.

The ice is not singing much today. It’s been quite consistent in temperature, in that it’s been bloody freezing every day, but it’s those drastic changes in the freeze that make the pond-lake ring like an oscillating metal wire. I've tried to capture the sound so I can listen to it as I fall asleep, but it's been proving difficult.

My brother sleeps in the snow on the banks. His furry hood is speckled with snowflakes, and his eyelashes are thinly dusted with flecks of ice. His arms are folded over his stomach, the lines of his jacket culminating in huge, industrial-strength mittens.

I toss a snowball in his direction, and it lands closer to his head than I intended. Despite the sudden sound, he awakens at his own pace, blinking groggily and stretching his arms out in the snow—slowly, methodically, as if coming to terms with his presence in the waking world.

“Good afternoon, Rip Van Winkle. Have you retained all your fingers and toes? It’s been hours and you haven’t moved.”

That gets him jumpstarted again, and he sits up abruptly in the snow, a small shower of white petals raining off of his waterproof parka. He looks around, dazed. “What?”

“Kidding. It’s been about thirty-five minutes. I got the recordings. Went by fast today.” I give the headset and mic a pointed wave in his direction.

“Wren, you ass. Have some empathy for your friendly neighborhood narco.”

“Pretty sure narco is not short for narcoleptic,” I replied, offering a hand to haul him from the ground. He takes it, and with a dramatic groan, rises from his body-shaped capsule in the snow.

“You’re right,” My brother says with a leisurely grin. “It stands for narcomancer, obviously. You should be careful lest I decide to wield my Sandman powers for something less than the greater good.”

“How will you wield them if you’re sleeping?” I shoot right back, and Finch pushes me into a snowdrift, but not before a brief smile flashes across his faux expression of deep offense.

~ ~ ~

We stomp the snow off our boots in the coatroom before entering the house, going through the arduous process of divesting ourselves of our thick outerwear, which is quickly growing damp in the stuffy warmth of the house. My brother throws his wet socks onto the radiator on his way in and I do the same, scrunching my toes against the carpet to restore some sensation in my frozen feet.

“Finch, don’t just throw those on the radiator. And Wren, you as well now? Don’t copy his bad habits. You two are gonna burn the damn house down.” My mom’s disembodied voice floats up from around the corner.

Finch shrugs amicably, proceeding to strip down to his shirt and long johns in front of the fire. “Thus is life.”

“You got the recordings?” My father asks, peering at me from the kitchen table over his tortoiseshell glasses.

The two of them are quite a pair. They’re both well-respected ornithologists, so spare me the bird jokes about our names. I can assure you I’ve heard them all. Seriously.

The house is just as ridiculous as they are. My father once told me that scientists have obsessive personalities, and the interior decorating of this place is a testament to that.

Curtains with bird prints—a flock flying in the classic V-formation. Wooden hunting ducks (they don't hunt). Owl-shaped spatulas. Mugs with ceramic wings. Shelves of birding books. A cuckoo clock, complete with a species-correct carving of a cuckoo bird that appears on the hour, every hour, and ticks away above my father’s head. He squealed when he saw it. A fifty-year-old man squealed.

“Yep, I got ‘em,” I responded, handing over the bag of recording equipment. I perked up immediately as my mom rounded the corner with a pile of cinnamon rolls, half of them more than a little toasted.

“…Baking isn’t a science,” I hear my mom mutter as she goes to set the plate down on the table. “Because if it was I’d have some grasp of it by now.”

My dad eyes the plate from his seat with some amusement. “Can’t help you there.” Finch had always been the kitchen whiz. If it weren’t for him we all would’ve starved by now. We don’t even eat at our table, because it’s covered in grant papers and other spoils of academia.

My father has already plugged in the recording software to his laptop, playing back the content I acquired today. It is mostly silent, wind-buffeted noises of the forest, but in the lulls between breezes, there’s a descending bird call in the distance. It plays three chords in a cascading rhythm, and though we only hear snippets of its call, the room grows still for a moment. It is not that the bird’s song is particularly extraordinary; it sounds very much like the wood thrushes of the East Coast that occupied our old neighborhood. But out here in the snow-draped forest, where it is eerily silent, the echoing song is otherworldly, out of place.

We are not sure what it is. The call doesn’t exactly match with a known species in the area. My mom speculates that the changes in climate are affecting bird migratory patterns, pushing them further north. Hence, the tittering sounds of a sunny residential ‘burb out here in this icy wasteland.

“Next step is photographs,” my dad starts, running his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. “If we can get some vague idea of the genus, even, an argument could maybe be made for further funding. Who knows what sort of ecological disruption a change in migration patterns would bring.”

It’s funny my dad should say that. That’s what our whole life has felt like, or at least mine and Finch’s. An abrupt ecological disruption due to a change in migration patterns. We’ve moved so many times in the past few years that neither of us has really bothered to make long-term friends. Out here in the woods, there’s no one to talk to, anyway. The thought dampens my mood immediately.

“I’m going to have a bath,” I announce before seeking refuge in my room. I can hear my parents conversing faintly over the recordings in the room over.

I pick up my guitar from its stand and strum half-heartedly at it. I used to write songs, something to help cope with the isolation, but I could never quite get the singing down. It always felt strained, or pitchy, or flat. I was enrolled in a choir for two weeks at our last school, but then we moved again. So much for that.

I move to my bed, booting up my computer. I play back my previous recordings of the ice, now caught on my dad’s professional equipment instead of my shitty phone mic, and let the dancing, metallic chorale of the lake-pond take me to another planet.

~ ~ ~

The ice sings to me in the dark.

I don’t remember falling asleep. My laptop emits a faint light, but the playback of my recordings has long since finished. The sound of the ice still rings in my ears, from somewhere far beneath the surface.

I can hear it, just beyond the frigid boundaries of my dreams, like whales calling out to one another, or perhaps to no one at all, in the vastness of an uncaring sea.

Have you noticed that a whale’s song never sounds off-key? Or a bird’s? Dissonant, perhaps, or rollicking, or cacophonous, like a flock at dusk, but never off-key. The songs they sing are their birthright, and the notes flow through them like water. Not one chord out of place.

No, that is reserved for humans, trying to mimic what we are not. I wonder what our song is, the human song, if we are cursed only to echo and never to find our voice. Or, perhaps, we are the most blessed of all, to be the recorders and the scribes of the natural world, the greatest mimickers known to this planet, far exceeding any myna or songbird.

I creep out into the living room, my socked feet quelling the sound of my footsteps. My brother is sprawled face-down on the couch, dead asleep by the fire. Not an uncommon sight. We are the mirror image of each other, in so many ways—whereas he cannot stay awake, I cannot seem to find sleep for very long. The rest of the house is quiet and dimly lit. I glance at the cuckoo clock. It’s somewhere in the ballpark of 2:30 am.

I dress and trudge out into the snow with a headlamp. This far out in the woods, the sliver of moon hanging in the sky is more than enough light to see in front of me, but I feel naked without a torch. Some nights, when the moon is full, it feels bright as day, though the forest is bleached in monochrome.

The wind has calmed since this afternoon. I sit by the lake-pond as if in quiet contemplation, and the truth is I can hardly feel the cold. Now that I am here, I can hardly hear the ice. It feels as though my dreams bleed together with reality.

I purse my lips and whistle, vocalizing the wistful, high-pitched trill of a nightingale. One had nested near my window one year, back in the ‘burbs, and human whistles failed to garner its attention. So over the course of a season, it taught me its song, and I learned how to sing it fluently. Softly, in the morning, the nightingale would draw me from sleep. After school, I would rest my head on the windowsill, a cold breeze blowing through my room, and sing it gently into dusk. And we sang, back and forth like this, for weeks.

My whistles ring out through the valley, unanswered. I am suddenly hit with a deep sense of melancholy. I guess I had assumed the bird, my partner in chorale, would be the first to leave. But it was us, when we moved away. On my last morning at the house, I finally saw the nightingale, and it saw me. I sang and it did not answer.

I wonder if it sings to no answer now, too. A duet without a partner. The nights must be quieter for both of us.

I hear the crunching of footsteps in the snow behind me and startle. My brother emerges from the dark, his eyes half-open. Finch rubs his hands together and brings them to his lips, blowing hot air onto his fingers and flexing them twice before replacing his thick, woolen mittens. He shudders in the chill and I reflexively do the same.

“Figured you’d be out here,” Finch’s voice is gravelly, as if he’d only just risen from sleep. Which, I suppose, was likely exactly what happened.

“Yeah,” I answer, and he sits down beside me. We look at the lake-pond, lonely and bare in the cloud-diffused moonlight.

“I miss the old house too,” Finch says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I can’t sleep well either. The days are too short. My REM cycle’s all out of whack.”

“Yeah,” I answer again. But then I laugh. “Your REM cycle’s always been out of whack.”

“Says you.”

A single call rings through the forest as if answering my trill, and our attention shifts to our surroundings. The call rings out again, searching, whistling into the dark like whales in the blackened night sea.

Undeniably, it’s the bird in my recordings. I have never seen it, and I know I will not see it now, bathed in the looming forest shadows as we are. Finch sits up beside me, and we stare across the lake-pond, listening.

I whistle again, tentatively, my practiced nightingale tremolo. It sings across the ice, sharp and decisive as an arrow.

We wait together in silence.

My call goes unanswered.