BIRD - Nasim Marie Jafry
She thought at first it was dead – it lay flat in the middle of the garden, a triangle, its head lost in feathers. She’d need to shovel it and bag it, put it in the council bin on the corner. The stiffness always spooked her, the fear of something snapping. She stroked the burn on her wrist. It looked like a jewel.
At noon, she looked out again, the bird was fluffed up and gorgeous, cleaning itself. She smiled. She’d have to make sure the cats didn’t get it. She put her coat on and went down to the garden. She could smell she was unwashed.
The bird had started to half-walk, half-fly, crooked and terrified. A black and white cat – big as a Holstein cow – was padding along the wall, like an actor. The bird reached a tree, hiding itself into the trunk, small again, not breathing, its eyes dead as beads. She shooed the cat away. She crouched down: He’s gone now. You’re safe. She stood up and went over to examine the poppies. They had been battered by the gales. They looked like murdered ballerinas, orange skirts flopped over their broken necks. She slapped one of the flowers in annoyance. A petal fell.
The bird hadn’t moved again for hours. She’d been down to the garden four times now. She took some painkillers and fell asleep. She dreamt of nothing. When she woke, she looked at the coffee ring on the arm of the chair as if seeing it for the first time. She went over to the window. The bird was bravely positioned in front of the poppies, Holstein padding into view (again) like he was in a fucking play. It was wearing thin. She sighed and stroked her wrist. The burn was the shape of a diamond.
Originally published by The Istanbul Review, Issue 5, Summer 2014
Nasim Marie Jafry was born in the west of Scotland to a Scottish mother and Pakistani father. She graduated from Glasgow University in 1980s, though her studies were severely disrupted by illness. Her autobiographical novel The State of Me was published by an imprint of HarperCollins in 2008. She has had short stories in various literary magazines and was shortlisted for the RLS Award (2005), the Bridport Short Story Prize (2012) and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize (2023). In 2011, she appeared at Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Story Shop for emerging writers. In late 2012, she featured in a BBC Alba documentary in which she discusses her novel and her illness and in 2013 she read at ‘Dissecting Edinburgh’, a Medicine and Literature event at Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. She has also had short non-fiction in A Book of Banished Words, edited by Nancy Campbell (2017). She is slowly working on a novella, a fictionalisation of her late father’s life – a Pakistani jazz-loving doctor who died in tragic circumstances.
