If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky
by Alyssa Quinn
after Xavi Bou
How might it appear, the photographer asks, if birds left tracks in the sky? He films a herring gull off the coast of Iceland. He thinks they must wind like snakes through sand. The photographer’s dead lover, before she was dead, told him time is not an arrow but a block. They sat in their apartment living room, grey light coming in from the windows, a little rain. Imagine the past, present, and future are rooms in a house, she said to him. He had his coffee in his hands but it was too hot to drink. Under the blanket their feet touched. Hers cool and pressing his for warmth. Just because you cannot see the other rooms doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Doesn’t mean they aren’t as real. She swept her hand through the air in front of her. Then brought it to a stop so its profile obscured a slice of her face. You perceive my hand in one point in spacetime. But it exists—she swept the air again—in all points.
Then his lover’s car slid on a patch of black ice and she bled to death on the side of the road. This in the winter months when there was a scarcity of light across the country. He remembers little of what followed. Remembers watching water slide down windows, tracing the wet track of it, imagining this track as not the residue of a droplet lost but as the shape of a droplet in four dimensions, a droplet like a rope of water strung through time.
The herring gull flaps through time and space. He sees it suddenly not as a discrete entity but as a dark streamer across the sky. Its past selves and future selves strung together like chained paper dolls. The gull is joined by another and another and the three birds twist and loop the trails of themselves together.
He is on the dock where he and his lover used to come in the summer with sandwiches and wine and a little speaker on which they played Springsteen and Dylan and Waits. She would bring a book and he would bring his camera and he would snap stills of her and of the water and of the red rings the wine left behind in the empty glasses. Gulls and terns and other seabirds would bob on the slight tide and the sun would lower and lower but never sink.
He has not taken a photograph since she died. Films instead. Pulls stills from the film and superimposes the images onto a single frame. Past present future. All there. All equally real.
And sometimes, after hours and hours of this work, the present breaks itself open and the past and future reveal themselves to him. Like echoes made solid. Or like footprints if whole bodies left footprints, and if the prints were not hollow but fleshy and full. As happens now, on the dock, watching the gull’s many bodies unfurl in the air. And now here she is also, as he hoped she would be. Not just one of her but hundreds, a reel of bodies like the reflections produced from facing mirrors. The string of her stretches the length of the dock, dips where she sits on the edge. A fan of many legs from her feet swinging over the lapping water, and the water too exists in all times and he can see the wild shapes of its ripples and peaks, proliferating and superimposed, painted with the reflections of birds that twist and curl like long feathery snakes. He walks up to the river of her and puts out a hand and feels warm skin through the sleeve of her t-shirt. Walks parallel to her, dragging his hand soft through the many versions of the woman he loves. At the end of the dock he turns around. Can see the back of her a hundred times over. The many times she has left this dock, climbed back in their car, driven back with him to their home. The uncountable times they sat together on the couch, uncountable configurations of their bodies entwined. In the sky there are many many suns. The trees exist as bouquets of themselves and there are strings of snowflake and rain and hail and then there are other people too, other couples, families with children, with dogs, and the air is thick with all the past and future people who are as real as him and just as it is about to become too much, too crowded, he blinks and it’s gone. She is gone. Her warmth absent from the air. The day suddenly depleted and large.
The photographer turns and goes back to his car. Behind him wet footprints fall. He has to believe it will happen again. He will wait as long as he must—wait for the present to split apart and reveal her as she exists—wait for what is gone to gather.
Alyssa Quinn's debut novel Habilis — an anti-colonial mash-up of museum exhibits, haunted skeletons, disco music, and linguistic theory — is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in September, 2022.