The Birds of August

You sang the bird's song as ash fell like snow in the Midwest heat. They sing back—but not their normal songs. No.

The meadowlark's call came from your throat the way your grandfather taught you, summer of '04, back when Iowa meant corn and sky and the kind of peace that made the coasts seem frantic, seem ridiculous, seem like places where people had forgotten how to breathe without effort.

Spring of the year. Spring of the year.

Simple song. Six notes. The sound of prairie morning, of fence posts and wheat fields and a sun that rose clean, that hadn't yet learned to come up red through smoke, hadn't yet learned to hide behind the veil of what used to be cities.

The ash fell thicker.

Had been falling for two weeks now, ever since the missiles, ever since the retaliation, ever since the words "limited exchange" stopped meaning anything because fire doesn't understand limits, doesn't negotiate, doesn't care about the politicians in their bunkers drawing lines on maps that were already burning.

Des Moines went first. Then Omaha. Then the silos—all those Minuteman tombs scattered across the heartland like seeds, like promises, like the prayers we'd planted in the earth seventy years ago hoping we'd never have to harvest them.

We harvested them.

The ash that fell now wasn't forest. Wasn't wildfire. Was concrete and steel and glass and human beings, all of it reduced to the same gray confetti, the same thermal snow, drifting across Iowa in lazy currents, settling on the corn that would never be harvested, on the soybeans that were already wilting in the fallout, on your skin where it itched and burned and promised things you didn't want to think about, things the radio had warned about before the radio went silent.

Spring of the year.

You sang it again, standing in what used to be your grandmother's garden, the tomatoes dead on the vine, the zinnias brown and crisp, everything defeated by heat—not summer heat but the other kind, the kind that came from the west on the third day, that had peeled paint from houses and killed Mrs. Henderson's dog and made the horizon shimmer in a way that wasn't natural, that was thermal, that was the ghost of Denver still burning three hundred miles away.

The meadowlarks came.

Three of them, landing on the fence post—the same fence post where your grandfather used to sit and whittle, where he'd taught you the calls, where he'd said: Know how to talk to them, kiddo. Birds remember. Birds carry messages. Might need them someday.

Someday was here.

The meadowlarks cocked their heads in unison. Mechanical. Wrong. Their yellow breasts were gray with ash. Their eyes were filmed over, clouded, the way eyes get when cataracts bloom, when seeing stops being useful, when the world has shown you things that make blindness a mercy.

They opened their beaks.

What came out wasn't birdsong.

It was the civil defense siren—that rising, falling wail that had played on Tuesday at 2:47 p.m., that had given everyone twelve minutes to decide what twelve minutes meant, whether it meant basement or prayer or one last phone call to say the things you should've said years ago but kept putting off because there was always time, always tomorrow, always next Sunday dinner.

Arooooooo. Arooooooo. Arooooooo.

The sound came from their throats perfect, undistorted, as if someone had installed speakers in their small bodies, as if the warning system had survived the bombs and was now lodged in birds, was now mobile, was now flying from fence post to fence post announcing the end over and over and over.

You stumbled backward.

Your heel caught on something—a garden hose, maybe, or a root, or the edge of the world—and you sat down hard in the dead grass, the ash puffing up around you like dust, like the ground itself was rotting, was giving up, was deciding that solid was too much effort when everything else had already turned to smoke.

The meadowlarks stopped their siren song.

Tilted their heads the other direction.

And spoke in your grandfather's voice:

"They said it would be quick. They said we wouldn't feel it. They lied."

He'd been in Omaha.

Tuesday. 2:47 p.m. Visiting the VA hospital for his lungs, for the cancer that Agent Orange had planted fifty years ago in Vietnam, that had taken its time, that had been slowly winning when the flash came, when quick replaced slow, when cancer became irrelevant.

"It was light first," the meadowlarks said in unison, in his voice, in that rough whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp you'd know anywhere, that you'd heard at every birthday, every Christmas, every time you'd done something stupid and needed someone to tell you it was okay, that stupid was just another word for human. "Light so bright it burned through my eyelids. Then heat. Then—"

The birds' feathers began to smoke.

"—then this. Then the flying. They told me I could be a bird now. They told me I could carry messages. They told me—"

They launched themselves from the fence post, trailing smoke like skywriters, like those old biplanes at the county fair that used to spell out JESUS SAVES and MARRY ME LINDA and other messages for an audience that still believed the sky was neutral, was safe, was just empty space instead of the medium through which annihilation travels.

More birds were coming.

You could see them against the red sun—hundreds of them, thousands, every species mixed together in defiance of taxonomy, of habitat, of every rule that used to govern which birds flew where and when. Cardinals next to crows. Robins with red-tailed hawks. Hummingbirds keeping pace with Canada geese, all of them moving together, moving with purpose, moving toward you.

They landed everywhere—on the fence, on the roof of the house, on the skeleton of the oak tree that had stood for a hundred and forty years before the heat wave killed it in ninety-six hours, on the rusted swing set where you used to pump your legs and believe you could touch clouds.

And they sang.

But not their normal songs.

No.

They sang in human voices—dozens of them, hundreds of them, a choir of the missing, of the gone, of everyone who'd been in the cities when the cities stopped being cities and became coordinates, became craters, became the places the maps would mark with asterisks that meant: here there be ghosts.

Mrs. Patterson from fourth grade music class, singing scales: "Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do. Over and over. That's all I remember now. The scales. Did you know your brain holds onto the strangest things when everything else burns away?"

Tommy Briggs from high school, the quarterback, the one who'd gotten a scholarship to Iowa State, speaking through a chickadee: "I was home for the summer. Helping Dad with the harvest. We saw the flash from the field. Dad said run for the cellar but the heat came before we could—do you remember when I threw that touchdown against Valley? Do you remember? I need someone to remember."

Your mother.

Oh God.

Your mother's voice, coming from a robin perched on the porch railing, on the exact spot where she used to sit and snap green beans, where she'd hum while she worked, where she'd been on Tuesday when you called her, when you'd said you were scared, when she'd said I know, baby, I know, but you're far enough away, you'll be okay, you're in the country, you'll—

"I wasn't fast enough," the robin said. "The basement stairs are steep. I'm old. I'm slow. The light came through the windows and it was beautiful, sweetheart. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Like every sunrise compressed into one second. I didn't feel anything after that. I just—became this. Became small. Became wings. They said I could fly to you. They said I could tell you—"

The robin opened its beak wider and fire came out.

Not metaphor. Actual fire. A thin tongue of flame that licked the air, that smelled like hair burning, like flesh, like the particular stench of protein breaking down under extreme heat, of hydrogen bonds failing, of meat remembering it's just carbon arranged temporarily in shapes called mother, called human, called home.

All the birds were burning now.

Small fires on every surface, their feathers blackening, their bodies smoking, but they didn't fall, didn't die, just kept burning and burning and singing and singing, their voices overlapping:

"We are the ones who were there—"

"—when the light came—"

"—when the world changed—"

"—when the cities became stars—"

"—we are the messages—"

"—we are the news—"

"—we are the announcement—"

"—we are what's left—"

You covered your ears but sound isn't stopped by hands, isn't stopped by walls, isn't stopped by anything except distance and there was no distance anymore, no separation between the living and the dead, between the burned and the burning, between the ones who'd been there and the ones who were still here, waiting.

Because that's what you were doing. Waiting.

The ash falling wasn't just from the cities. The radio—before it went silent—had explained. The retaliation. The doctrine. Mutually assured destruction, which was just a fancy way of saying: if I burn, you burn, if you burn, I burn, if we burn, everyone burns because fire doesn't stop at borders, doesn't respect oceans, doesn't care about neutrality.

The winds would carry it.

Were carrying it.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, the European launches had gone up. Somewhere over the Pacific, the Chinese missiles had answered. Somewhere in Russia, in India, in Pakistan, in Israel, in all the places where humans had spent seventy years building better ways to end everything, the better ways were being used.

The ash falling on Iowa wasn't just Des Moines.

It was London. Moscow. Beijing. Delhi. Tehran.

It was the whole world, rendered down, distributed evenly, democratically, fairly covering every surface in the universal gray of what used to matter.

And the birds—

The birds were carrying the messages from all of it.

A blue jay spoke in Mandarin.

A sparrow in Russian.

A crow in Hindi, in Arabic, in languages you didn't know but understood anyway because grief is universal, because burning is the same in every tongue, because the sound a mother makes when her child dies doesn't need translation.

They were all here.

Everyone who'd been in the light.

Everyone who'd become light.

Everyone who'd been transformed from solid to gas to this—this smoke with wings, this ash with voices, this final flock carrying the last messages from the last people in the last cities on the last day when cities meant anything.

The robin—your mother—flew closer.

Perched on your knee, its talons burning through your jeans, through your skin, through to bone, but you didn't move, couldn't move, because moving meant rejecting her, meant saying go away, meant admitting that this burning bird wasn't really her and you weren't ready, weren't ready, would never be ready.

"You have to write it down," she said.

Your voice came out cracked: "Write what down?"

"Our names. All of us. Everyone who was here. Someone has to remember. Someone has to make a list. Someone has to say: these people existed. These people mattered. These people were here before the light came and erased them."

"I don't have paper. I don't have—"

"The ground. Write in the ash. Use your finger. Write our names in what we became. We'll help you. We'll tell you everyone. Everyone who's arrived. Everyone who's flying. Everyone who's found a voice again."

The birds began to speak faster, overlapping, a cascade of names:

"Jennifer Martinez—"

"Robert Chen—"

"Sarah and David Thompson—"

"The whole Morrison family—"

"Everyone at St. Mary's Hospital—"

"Everyone in the school—"

"Everyone at the mall—"

"Everyone—"

You knelt in the ash.

It was ankle-deep now, drifted against the porch like snow, like a blizzard had come in August, had come on the same thermal wind that had carried the heat, the radiation, the end of everything.

You dragged your finger through it.

Wrote: Jennifer Martinez.

The ash was warm. Soft. Like flour. Like talcum powder. Like human remains because that's what it was, what it had always been, what it would always be until the wind scattered it, until the rain came—if rain ever came again—and washed it into the soil, into the water table, into the food chain, into everything.

The birds kept talking.

You kept writing.

Name after name after name, your finger moving through the ash, through the people, through the tally of the dead which was also the tally of the transformed, of the ones who'd found a second life in feathers and flight and fire.

Hours passed.

Maybe days.

Time didn't work right anymore, didn't flow in the orderly way it used to, had become something elastic, something unreliable, something that stretched and compressed based on horror, based on how many names you could write before your hand cramped, before your mind refused to hold any more grief.

The sun set.

You could tell because the red got deeper, got darker, got closer to black.

The birds were still burning.

Still speaking.

Still landing on every surface, covering the house, the yard, the world in a living quilt of fire and voice and desperate message.

And then you heard it:

Different song.

Not human voice. Not siren. Not language at all.

Actual birdsong.

A cardinal—whoit-whoit-whoit—pure and clear and normal, the sound of January mornings and snow and a world that still had seasons, still had rules, still had some separation between the living and the dead.

You looked up.

On the fence post where the meadowlarks had been, a single cardinal sat. It wasn't burning. Its feathers were red—actual red, not gray, not ash-covered, but the deep crimson that looked like joy, like defiance, like the opposite of fire.

It cocked its head.

Sang again.

Whoit-whoit-whoit. Purty-purty-purty.

Just a bird. Just a normal bird doing what birds do, which is sing because they have voices and the morning comes and what else is there?

The burning birds went quiet.

Turned toward the cardinal.

Watched.

And slowly—so slowly you almost didn't notice—they began to dim. The fires guttering. The smoke thinning. The voices fading like a radio station drifting out of range, like the signal was weakening, like the dead were losing their grip on the living world and falling back into whatever country they'd come from, whatever message-service they'd been enlisted into.

Your mother's robin was last.

It sat on your knee, barely smoking now, barely there.

"I love you," she whispered. "I'm sorry I wasn't fast enough. I'm sorry I—"

"I know," you said. "I know. I love you too."

The robin faded.

Became smoke.

Became ash.

Became part of the gray blanket that covered everything, that would cover everything, that would keep falling until the sky ran out of cities to burn, until the fires consumed every last thing that could burn, until the world was ash and the ash was the world and there was no difference anymore.

The cardinal sang on.

You sat in the ruins of your grandmother's garden and listened to it.

Just one bird. One voice. One small red defiance against the gray.

And you understood:

This was the message.

Not the names. Not the voices. Not the burning.

This.

This single bird that hadn't been in the light, that hadn't been transformed, that was still just itself, still singing its own song, still proclaiming that life—stupid, stubborn, senseless life—was here, was now, was continuing despite everything, despite the ash, despite the dead speaking through smoke, despite the world ending in the most predictable way possible.

The cardinal flew.

You watched it disappear into the red dusk.

And you went back to writing names in the ash, because someone had to, because the dead had asked, because memory was the last thing humans could offer when everything else had been taken.

You wrote until your hand bled.

You wrote until the ash covered what you'd written.

You wrote until the birds stopped coming.

You wrote until you were alone.

And above you, the ash kept falling like snow in the Midwest heat, covering Iowa, covering America, covering the world in the democracy of destruction, in the equity of annihilation, in the final answer to every question humans had ever asked about what happens when we finally, fatally, get what we've been planning for.

The birds had sung back.

But not their normal songs.

No.

They'd sung the only song left:

The one that says goodbye.

The one that says we were here.

The one that says remember us when we're ash, when we're smoke, when we're nothing but names written in dust that the wind will scatter and the rain will wash away and the earth will absorb until there's no evidence we ever existed except the silence where our voices used to be.

You wrote one more name:

Your own.

Because you were already dead too.

Had been since Tuesday.

Since 2:47 p.m.

Since the light came.

You just hadn't finished burning yet.

But you would.

Everyone would.

The ash would see to that.