Birdie by Tracey Lindberg

home that her mom had left and she sheared herself.
    It only took a second to wash her hair after that. Most of the time she didn’t bother.
    Lola had banged on her ceiling, the noise reverberating through the floor of Bernice’s apartment. Bernice knew it was a sneaker on a broom handle. She also knew it was approaching six o’clock. She lingered, the feel of Art/Al? dripping off.
    She hoped that she was careful and that she didn’t tell him where she worked.
    Lola was tap tap tapping her cigarette as she rolled herselfa fresh one. Bernice had come to value soundlessness. Some days, entire days, she would not speak to anyone. Not even silencetalking. She didn’t answer the voice that was moving around in her head. Regardless of where and who she was. It never occurred to her then that she might have been sick. That her silence was unhealthy. That her speech may have had value. That the pain of death needed to be released. Most of the time, when she did talk, it was in her bad Cree.
    “
Mah
,” she chided, when she had done something clumsy. The word floated like a willow seed to the ground. Sometimes she thought her words moved out of her way, light enough to be airborne, when she swept the flour, sugar and baking powder from the floor at night. Other times, like the day she felt her mom was gone, they sat heavily and would not move, no matter how much she swept. Her arms were leaden too, sawing at her hair for what seemed like hours, before the give of the final strands left her holding her braid and staring at it without recognition.
    “Go to bed, my girl,” Lola said to her that night in Bernice’s own language, and they had both looked at each other hard because Lola does not speak Cree. For that one gift, Bernice let Lola order her down the stairs today.
    “Did you hear?” Lola let her words bounce, like they had places to go, even though she knew Bernice had pulled the cord of the radio from the wall.
    “Some computer whiz kid shut down the radar at the Vancouver airport. Planes almost crashing everywhere.”
    To her, Lola had seemed dismayed that no one had crashed yet. Sometimes Bernice thought mean thoughts and didn’t takethem back. Other times she thought good thoughts and let them powder the room – just in case there was a running count on them. Also, it gave the ugly thoughts a soft place to land.
    It came to her that maybe she was losing touch. Not with reality – a place where she was often a visitor – but she was actually losing her sense of human feeling. She looked at her hands, soft from the butter and lard, and noticed that even though she had placed them on the oven door, they felt no heat.
    “… and I told the girls this would happen with all of that newfangled computer chips,” Lola pronounced proudly.
    “Hmmmm,” Bernice said.
    Other times she would say “interesting” or “wow” but on that day she couldn’t find any words to take the places of the ones she puts out there so she only hummed. On that day, the voices and the shift were hovering around her like summer fog on grass after a rain. She remembers thinking of Art/Al? puffing over her and of her fear that he would have a stroke on top of her. She wonders what she would have done then.
    “You have a nice time last night?” Lola asked her, unkindly, and would have been hurt if you suggested she was being unkind.
    Bernice tried to hum again, surprised by the question.
    “Yes.” She was living a secret life inside her head, she thought. She remembered when she and Skinny Freda used to wonder about the secret life of cows. Some days they would take Freda’s beat-up truck out onto the open road and honk to see if cows would respond. They never did until that last cold Sunday before she left. She was on a day pass from the San and Freda and she went for a drive in the country.Reaching a pasture, they were delighted to find that one cow looked up at them when the horn tweaked. She and Freda finished their Cokes and