Gulls
The season before my first broken heart, I often found myself on the castle walls, welcoming the sea breeze as heartily as I had the carmine berries my village eventually decimated. We love what we have until we can no longer. Or we ignore love until it is upon us, seen each year when the healers would tend to the wounds of the warriors and suddenly match eyes anew.
Atop the walls, I thought of her, each time coming to rest where the western wall met the southern wall, the old man would nap, and the gulls would fill the sky.
The gulls knew me by name. This I assumed, for it sounded as though we shared the same name. It is a blessing that we give names. It survives as the only token unable to be taken from us. The rich and the poor alike pass it on — a family heirloom with a final resting place, passed once in many ways; the wind through a parent’s teeth as the letters tumble into young ears, the moisture of a kiss atop a growing head as custody sinks into the skin, the ink pouring out of a child-rearer as they tearfully play archer with their mind’s eye, beholding their offspring’s call for the first time.
The gulls did not feel any of this. To them, my name was simply Breadbringer, son of Older Breadbringer.
This, too, was an assumption.
One afternoon, with the gulls sweeping and swaying above, I noticed a young crier tucked in a crack, its wing at a doomed angle. I leaned over and welcomed it into my palm, lifting its wing to anguish. My heart sank and I thought of her. I was no warrior. She was no healer. But we could make do.
I brought the bird to her that night, and she welcomed the broken animal into her home like music. Her care filled the dwelling. With her sweet words to the gull and earnest laughs to me, I thought the roof might rise like morning milkbread to reveal stars. She mended the bird like a doll and gave it sanctuary like a traveler. I stayed until morning and met my friends well after sunrise.
They were just as lovesick as me, so I spoke of the night before, my tongue a set of waves with a passenger ship. In return, their words came sparse with deafening eyes.
She found me then with Olg — “Our Little Gull” — in the recess of her arms, the warmest of all places, I should say. In only one passing of the moon, the bird had discovered her as I had after a basket of harvest seasons. The animal kingdom must surely be favored with more libraries than our village.
My comrades ran off. The three of us slept against a tree. When night came, we returned to her home, aglow.
At morning light, I went to my corner of the walls to inform the gulls we would not keep their wounded warrior. We would simply play healer, not surrogate.
When I arrived, all I could see was sky. I woke the old man.
“Where are the birds?”
“They are being tended to,” he sighed. “They have new homes.”
Furious, I kicked the pile of rocks my friends had left behind and watched the great nothing.
