The Woman Who Was a Bird

based on a true dream

There was this woman. You may have heard of her, it made national news for a bit. Convicted of murder on evidence as flimsy as a single Bic pen found at the scene. It was inescapable for a while there, the trial, the appeals, the mobs of protestors. Even though it had been months of this, when her sentence was ultimately upheld, it still caused a bit of a stir. See, it wasn’t that the crime was so salacious, or that people cared so much about judicial procedure in the first place. It was because this was the first time that a new approach to crime was being tried. At least, the first time it was being tried on someone anyone cared about.

Journalists and protestors and civil rights groups gathered in order to watch the final injustice where she, deemed not a flight risk, was required to present herself to the prison. They were kept back a respectful distance of course. This was a sacred place. It was here where the state had decided she would be living out the remainder of her life sentence in the form of a songbird.

When it was proposed, it was thought of by some as a more humane alternative to the carceral state. How can something be inhumane, when the prisoners are no longer even human? And the songbird, so long a symbol of freedom, gliding through the air. How many of us have dreamed of the opportunity to know that power, to sing the songs of delight? That’s what people thought, before this case, at least.

On that sunny day when her heels clicked across the asphalt towards the nondescript warehouse at the edge of the city at 2:07 pm — she hoped she would not be penalized for her tardiness, but how could they take away more? — there was a hanging dread in the air. The building had no windows. There was no fence, no barbed wire, no walls. Only one guard stood out front with his gun, waiting to unlock the single padlocked door. Inside, she heard only the flutter of thousands of wings. A flock of hundreds, thousands perhaps. It was a loud flapping of so many wings it sounded from afar like a mechanical hum.

Would she be caged? Were there guards inside? No one knows. It’s all very hush-hush, you see. An invasion of privacy, of security, to ask.

She entered the building — being late was no problem at all, ma’am — and that was it. The journalists snapped their photos.The protestors slowly lost steam. And she was never seen again.

Why am I dredging this all up now? It’s been years since anyone’s discussed this.

The woman who would be turned into a bird, whose face had once been suitably young and white and attractive enough to grace the covers of tabloids in supermarkets across the country, would be finally, quietly, released.

She would stumble back into her life, not used to her high heels anymore, not used to her legs. She had lost her job at the law firm long ago. They send out mailing lists with her face, or they used to, when that was a good way to get donations. But her position’s been long filled by now.

Now, she spends her days slipping back into her life, her self. It’s not that it was so hard to learn to get back in the swing of things. It was easy in fact. She was who she had always been. She was a woman who used to define herself by her ambition, her drive, her bad habit of wiping her nose with a sleeve when no one was watching. She didn’t eat very well, nor exercise as much as she should, despite hating her body. But it had been her body. And it was hers again.

The problem wasn’t readjusting, it was adjusting to the fact that she had once had something else. She had been something else. She’d been a bird. Her body had been different, her mind had been different. When people asked about her missing time in job interviews, on first dates, she simply smiled and said it was nice to spend time in nature. When she flinched at bird song, she laughed and said she had heard enough for a lifetime.

Ah, you don’t care. The woman who was a bird was a woman once more. Justice was done. A book was in progress, would be ghostwritten within six months, when people still remembered to care. The rights to a miniseries sold, but never made. People were sorely disappointed by the lack of detail. They’d soon forget.