Free Bird by Noy Holland

killer cat, rubs against Bird’s leg.
    â€œYou want my happy baby, don’t you? You can’t have her, not in a million years.”
    In a million years, Bird thinks, what will the planet look like? What, in another ten?
    She walks on, feeling lighter, sobering up. She shakes out her shirt in a sunshiny field and they lie on it, Bird on her back and the baby on Bird’s chest, one heart bumping into the other. She’d like to sleep here, wake in falling dew. The baby holds up her head to look at Bird, to gnaw on Bird’s chin, but now she’s tired—spent beyond wanting and soft all at once. Everything in that baby gives way.
    It is the dearest crushing feeling.
    Bird makes a roll bar of her elbows and rolls with the baby against her, gently down the hill.
    â€œDon’t be afraid,” she says, “like your mama. Love and be done with it. Let go. Hold on,” she says, “may you always.”
    The baby is lying on her back, batting at Bird’s face, the silver heads of the grasses nodding all around.
    â€œI’ll eat you up,” Bird says, “You’re too pretty. You mustn’t be ashamed to be pretty. Don’t be proud. People will envy you; you have to let them. People will hate you—you let them. Don’t let them take anything from you, my girl. They’ll take everything. You have to give yourself away.”
    Bird kisses the baby’s pinkening cheeks, the knob of her spitty chin.
    â€œBe good to yourself, my little lollipop. Never love a boy like Mickey. I don’t mean that.”
    She presses her mouth against the baby’s creamy belly.
    â€œWhat I mean, lollipop, is love him. Love him hard and be done.”
    Bird picks the baby up, puts her shirt back on. The ferns are withering, sweetening the air.
    â€œLove me,” Bird says, “you have to promise. Promise me you will write to me when you are all gone away and grown.”
    They go inside, the kitchen dim, hard at first to see. First thing Bird sees is the telephone and she picks it up to call Mickey, hangs it up again. A grown woman. Christ above. She’s got a baby. She shakes. She is shaking that baby too.
    She tries Suzie. She wants to tell Suzie the sound Mickey made, the girlish, dry, collapsing gasp when he took her. But Suzie will say, “I know.”
    â€œHe’s got pinworms.”
    â€œMickey?”
    â€œMy boy,” Bird says.
    â€œI’ll let you go,” Suzie says.
    â€œCome on, Suzie. You don’t want to know about pinworms? Quiet pale morsels you can see through, small as a grain of rice.”
    The pinworm eats at night, the pediatrician told Bird. “Take a look with a flashlight while he’s sleeping,” she advised. “They break apart as they leave the body—little fellows, friable, sliding out of the hole.”
    â€œI’m not all that wild about humans,” Suzie says. “Weeat each other. We don’t behave. We thought to send Mexican free-tailed bats into Japan loaded down with napalm in the second world war. Dragged them out of their caverns. Put them on ice so they’d sleep. Another shining human endeavor to rival the exploding harpoon.”
    Suzie takes a drag on something. Bird can hear it over the phone.
    â€œThere are too fucking many of us besides, and you and Doctor Said So just went and made two more.”
    â€œSo get your tubes tied, you don’t like humans,” Bird says. “Be done with it.”
    â€œRight. Never give blood again.”
    Suzie takes another drag and a swig of something that comes in a glass with ice.
    â€œWhen humans get wiped off the planet,” Suzie says, “do you know this? The subways in New York City will engorge with sea water in days.”
    â€œWhen?” Bird says.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œ When humans get wiped off the planet ,” Bird says. “Don’t people still say if ?”
    â€œMatter of time,” Suzie