The Death of Pinky (Song of the Broad-Axe Publication 2023 Short Story Contest 3rd Prize Winner)
by Laura Jeanne K.
Editor’s Note: “The Death of Pinky” by Laura Jeanne K. is the third place-winning story in Song of the Broad-Axe Publications’ 2023 Short Story Contest. Readers may find the 1st and 2nd place-winning stories in Volume 18 of our print journal, The Rialto Books Review, currently available for purchase.
It’s never been easy in Florida. In Chile, Bolivia, we are happy, footloose creatures. We mate and pine in the Caribbean. In Kenya we eat the reds off little crustaceans and listen to the jealous birds whistling after our feathers. I once heard of a fellow from Qatar of all places. Is that a place? I know it’s a hop and a glide from Orlando. I know that flamingo probably doesn’t know what it’s like to be ogled, to have latex ruffling his feathers. I’m used to it. I was an inseminated blueprint, ripened and hatched under the eyes of an expecting audience. The Busch Garden humans are credited for my birth, but can’t take praises for my gift! My gift is mine, a divine, indwelling blessing. I left the egg feet first and even before they found the ground, my appendages bobbed and twisted in curious performance. And it’s been up, down, up, ever since, dancing in the same square space for the peoples who come to watch me each day. Believe me, this is not a trained behavior. It’s a natural behavior that I happen to be very good at. What a talent for a flamingo, right? Let’s see the fellow from Qatar dance like I can.
The peoples call me Pinky and I don’t mind the moniker. I like the attention I get when I dance. It is fun to amuse humans. But sometimes, if I get close enough, I can see my own disquietude in their rayless pupils. They traipse by on days when the sun is arrowed right above me and the gardens are jam-packed. They don’t smile or smack their hands together when I finish a dance; instead they look upon me, aloof and spiritless. Loose-jawed, tongues twitching, scratching their bald flesh until they move on to another creature.
Living in these gardens has kept me insular. I ask the tortoise next door—(an ancient thing; they call him Harriet)—for history lessons. Harriet is always eager to brag about his wit. He schools me on my kind and the humans who hunted us back when Florida was wilder. For sustenance, for ornamentation, what have you. They would jerk the plumage from our backs to garnish their hats and coats. Our feathers still dotted in blood. Even our tongues were chopped from our beaks. Eaten like brainless fish! It’s all so barbaric. I may have been born into a clammy set of hands instead of my mother’s nest, but even so. I’m not so naive. When I dance, I can feel my ancestors rippling under my wings. It must have been a warning, looking back. I’m ashamed I didn’t realize in time.
I know one terrific fact that Harriet doesn’t. It’s that violent deaths bring extraordinary changeovers. All birds know this, actually. We know it the same way we know what to eat or which direction to fly at the end of a season. There was a day in my life a wayward grackle came to rest. While he stretched his wings, he told about his flock, gunned out of the Yucatan sky. The local inca doves had said they hit the ground hard enough to catch fire, wrinkling in the flames until their heads unfurled as marigolds. Flamingos will wilt where they feed and nourish the waters as new salt. Or so I have heard. I have spent a while now wondering if it’s all just avian myth. I fear what I left behind. I picture a black crust on the ground.
The truth is, I am dead. I accept this as best I can. I have only been dead, I think, for a short while. I try to lay anchors in this nothingness by tallying the faint thumps in the hollow of my chest. On the brink of my passing, one of the Busch keepers had set a plate of cold shrimp by my feet. A regular meal to keep me flushed with healthy pinks. I should have had at least another ten years. Flamingos are supposed to live a long time.
It was murder. A semi-frequent visitor, I knew his eyes like stones on my back. The day it happened, the man came tailed by his mother and two offspring. I watched them walk a calculated stride behind him. The air at the gardens carried a story membrane. My feathers prickled with static. Harriet was packed away in his hut, his backside exposed and stationary, anticipating rain. The man stood motionless, like a hurricane eye, waiting for me to finish my dance before leaning over the rails and delicately plucking me off the ground, as if to ponder my weight, my curvature, before setting me back down. I thought what an odd thing to do! I craned my neck to yawp in confusion and a venomous guise spread on his face. He reached for me again.
It was my left foot I saw first. I watched it there in front of me, torn and folded, whimpering with a shrinking pulse. I felt him coil my neck around his hands and hurl me down, wrenching the air from my long throat. Each impact made fresh injury, blood combusting at my wounds. My dear feathers fleeing from me! The peoples and the garden keepers cried my name, Pinky! Pinky! Until his last malicious blow sent me flying off the earth. Nothing but a bloody shell behind me.
I do not understand the behavior of mens. In the most profound solitude I have ever known, I am swollen with this desperate thought. I wonder if Harriet witnessed my spirit cracking its way out my body. I wish for him to reach his neck through the veil of this limbo so he can beckon which direction I should go. I try to manifest familiar bones and muscles, my left and right wing, something to spread and tap against something else. A flamingo. A bird, an insect. Nothing. I try to contract and feel the bends of the famous dance that made me Pinky. Nothing here. I’m just a wrinkle in the air. I don’t recall migrating from life to death. There were no flames or flowers.
No dead bird before me could say how long I malingered this peripheral gutter before I finally felt something stroke my shadow. Whatever it was began to orbit me, gathering speed and funneling downwards, bearing an open pit that kindled memories of hunger. In fact, I suddenly had a desperate appetite. I dove like a flailing eel, crashing in a downy pile of limbs and pieces. I was a new bird.
I wasn’t at the gardens this time. I can’t explain, but I knew it was a swift and temporary conjuring, self-willed and influenced by a dark itch. It stood like a quill in the ghost of my chest, pointing at my killer. He was there, lumbering awkwardly across a black road, that same sour knot on his face like the day he had killed me. His eyes were waxed and sunken gray.
Murder puts strange things in a heart. It doesn’t matter what kind of animal you are. I feel sure of this. I stood inert in the shadows until I heard the sound of his thick bones breaking all at once. The truck pressed him flat against the mouth of the road, his flesh chewed apart until a mangled heap was left, reddening like the body I had left at the gardens. Rain fell through me, pelting his corpse. I drummed my feet on the ground, but didn’t hear a sound.
The second time I left the earth, something insidious followed with me. It perched on my back, leering like a human eye. The killing had corrupted my spirit. Feelings and itches curdled in my vacant breast. After a long and quiet rising, I began to notice glistening chickasaw plums, shivering blossoms, and flamingos spearing tropic sunsets. I saw flamingos dip their glassy beaks in the waters of Qatar and Peru, Bolivia, India, and Argentina. Places I’ve never heard of! Things I have never seen! Tearing underneath me as I was towed away. Sublime, ethereal things. Things that I missed while I was looking behind me. I wish I could circle back and watch it all again.