Another Bluejay - Notes

I took these notes on my iPhone. I've been experimenting with this lately so as to avoid transcription time. They'll be spliced into the end of a draft of Another Bluejay that I'm working on.

We didn't know why we were dying. Perhaps we were the unknown apocalypse. We chose the bluejays. The apocalypse of bluejays. They went first. There were no bodies. They just disappeared, like everyone else. There was a rumor they had all gone to one side of the globe with their string and were going to lift off and start pulling the globe towards the sun. They heard the beating of the wings. The ground would be white with excrement. It was a madness, maybe a fungus, maybe a parasite, maybe something else.

We were there, our lives and the plight of our species, contained in the sparse graphite scrawl on the back of the postcard. One of us spoke and one of us listened, and at last to tell the story I had to let go of the we.

Finally, the man was right, it was our turn, and our card was already filled out. Just a few short lines to tell of our lives and culture and death to the next ones, assuming we could find them.

After I would roll our gear together, and we would still be we, though she would be stripped and left uncovered so that the birds could maybe heal themselves and perhaps we would then heal from them too.


And here's the beginning of that same draft, with some notes from the same day starting to be incorporated.

Then his chest shuddered and deflated and his pupils fell open and the air was again silent and birdless at the beginning of the forest. The aromatics hovering around him tickled our olfactory bulbs with cinnamon and onion, replacing those of the dirt and moist bark and dying leaves. Already the chemicals inside him were becoming unstable, surviving their little ice age by becoming something other than themselves. We acted in concert and stripped him down, this man with his button nose and his red rain boots, and covered him with garbage bags weighted down with rocks. We grimaced every so often at our aching joints, but still we assembled his clothing in a package, bundling the smaller fabrics with the larger ones, and then searched his canvas pack and found a stack of postcards bound with strings of cotton and rubber.

We fanned out the stack of postcards, all the stamps and addresses and writing face down in the dirt, all the once-glossy images on their backs reflecting the weak moonlight that made it through the haze. Each card looked older and more worn than the one below. We knew almost nothing about their owner. We had been heading deeper into the woods to be alone. When we saw him coming towards us from inside those same dark clumps of trees we had stopped and stood, ready to run, or to attack. We were just a scrawny ex-postman and an ex-nurse, but we could be ferocious if threatened. The man grew and grew out of the darkness wearing flannel and denim. When he reached us he took a knee.

“Now it’s your turn,” the man had said. Then he smiled and we smiled, and that was it for him. He simply closed his eyes and fell over dead.

We reached for the postcard on top. It had a drawing of a perfect waterfall, the kind that you think of when you’re surrounded by buildings and automobiles but something makes you think “waterfall”; it was everything a waterfall should be. We smiled at each other and in our eyes were the semi-circles of the moon, waxing or waning we weren’t sure. Our voices sounded hollow and soft within the canopy and corridors of trees.

“Did you know him? He seemed to know you.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Shouldn’t we keep going?”

“In a bit. Distraction would be nice.” We weren't well. One of us was dying and slipped the leather medical pouch from a back pocket and sat on the cold ground. Inflamed cartilage slid across joints. She winced. Her blood now thinned again of analgesics. I covered her pouch with my wool hat and sat down. The stack of postcards was a fulcrum between us.

We flipped the postcard over and read it aloud to each other, and when we finished it we read the one below it, and then the one below that, from top to bottom, oldest to newest. The writing on got shorter and shorter, the handwriting of each starting precise, shrunken, covering every inch of the postcard, written by a hand trying to capture everything, wasting no space, then growing and becoming larger, showier, more confident, recording only vague necessities like the landmarks of false memory. We titled each only after finishing them, naming each after its own apocalypse. We read every one of them, and in-between we flicked sunflower seeds on the ground, still hoping to attract some birds though there weren’t any around.