Free The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family by Kathryn Trueblood Page B

There’s a sound the heart makes just like dry twigs snapping. And I could look at him without recognition, blankly, as though a magic coat of paint had been rolled right over the wall where we once cast shadows.
    And yet his body dreamed with mine. I did an experiment one night as he slept—erect and pressed into the small of my back. I would contract my inside muscles, imperceptible, you would think, but for each contraction, he would pulse in return. I smiled in the dark. I still believe he loves me.
    After he left, I tried to feel what it must be like to be him. When I was Nigel, the sunset didn’t move me because I could tell a story of a much more beautiful one in a strange and far away place. When I was Nigel, I told the story to a young woman who’d never been anywhere, but my words didn’t paint pictures for her eyes to see, only rated sunsets, and reminded her of what she hadn’t seen. It was easy to convince myself that I was mysterious, unknowable even. Though the buoy lights at dusk were the color of blue roses and the sky was an orange exhalation soft as the sound of breathing, it didn’t move me when I was him. I still found a way to be lonely.
    I remember another time, early on, when Nigel wasn’t yet trying to rationalize us out of existence. But the distance between now and then is like trying to travel backwards on the sound of a train horn after it has passed—the Doppler Shift—when the velocity of approach suddenly changes to the velocity of recession.
    The bird we came upon in the sand was black and dull as charcoal dust on pulp paper. The news of an oil tanker spilling in the straits to the north had thinned the summer crowds. Nigel was the one capable of observation. The bird was not covered with oil, its undersides were green with kelp bloom, young with full flying feathers but not flying now, only blinking when we spoke and sleeping between.
    â€œThe oil is traveling south,” Nigel said, stroking the bird’s back. It stood up then and pitched forward onto its beak. “But I don’t think it’s here yet. Maybe he got storm-tossed all night.”
    â€œMaybe he’s just in shock,” I added hopefully, thinking of all the birds dying somewhere to the north and the headlines that daily gauged harm to humans and reassured. Sometimes I believe all humans should die; I believe it because part of me wants it, a consensus of recognition forced upon us at last, but too late and too bad our own indifference came to kill us off at last. When I was in the sixth grade, I was asked to write a saying for the school year book. I turned in “Man was not the exception, he was the mistake.” They chose someone else to write about “always growing, ever learning,” some sot. I fault myself for grandiose thoughts. You’d think I could stay with the situation for five minutes … in the sand on my knees with the blinking bird before us.
    â€œC’mon,” Nigel said quietly, “we can at least give the little guy a chance.”
    I didn’t tell him my feelings because supposedly it’s not very adult to insist on wondering why we create so much sadness. I followed him and he carried the bird like an offering cupped in his hands as we walked away from the dog tracks on the hard packed sand and the four-wheelers speeding by. It was in our power to give it at least a chance, if nothing more. I watched him walk into the heavy sand dunes, shifting a bit side to side on his slender legs and I was thankful that he was a man who dropped to his knees before small creatures and I was determined that we would not create any sadness between us. Before we left, I looked from the bird to Nigel. As he opened his hands to settle the bird in the sand, he winced. For a moment it was easy to forget that he’s older than me. All the baby birds he’d rescued to shoe box nests as a boy and fed with eyedroppers, and when they died