By Sarah Kelly
Winner of The Edward R. and Frances Schreiber Collins Literary Awards (Prose)
There was a cardinal who used to perch in the ash tree next to my apartment building. I could look out my window in the morning and see it as I made another ration of tasteless oatmeal. I knew it was the same one every day, even though my sister told me I was being silly. I can tell birds apart, they aren’t made on an assembly line. I was never brave enough to approach it. They tore down the ash tree three years ago to make room for another building, identical to mine. The relentless machines tore the tree down, and the scream of their brakes gave voice to the dying ash. I hid a splinter under my pillow. I never saw the cardinal again.
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I got a new neighbor, windows so close I could lean across the gap between them and tumble into the other apartment. I left a note on her windowsill, because it wasn’t her fault that the mechanical maw of the city chewed up my ash tree. I shouldn’t be wasting the little notebook paper I have left. As the trees are destroyed, books become more and more expensive. The only thing the government ever prints cheap is the Bible. I wished I worked at the factory that makes them, because it would have been so much easier to steal paper. Instead, I worked in making medicine. That was easy to steal, a pill folded into your battered shirt cuffs every day. I traded what I had for things I couldn’t buy with money. The girl next door didn’t know that, but I hoped that she understood the gesture.
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I found her reply when I returned home from work. It was cold then, the chill of winter turned my cheeks and nose red. Her answer was scribbled beneath my initial message, messy and rambling and so human I kissed it. All day I read the same typed warnings on the back of plastic bottles. To see another person’s handwriting was almost a spiritual experience.
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That night I traded ten pills for my landlord’s expired checkbook. I wrote the girl another note and left it for her to find.
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Someone important died last night. The pall over the coffin is more expensive than my yearly income. The person who killed him is dead too, body attached to a pole and dragged by two horses. Their face is pressed into the dirt, and wonder if it is even the right person. They pulled my upstairs neighbor in for treason two years ago, but I know she was too busy entertaining her sister’s husband to be holding a second secret. Maybe that was the treason. Marriage vows are sacred, and getting to make them is such a long process that I can’t imagine committing infidelity. People line up where the voting polls used to be and leave with a piece of paper and wedding rings. No one has ever asked me, so I place labels on pill bottles and pray that no one ever will.
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The day I officially met her is burned into my mind. She was soaked in the smell of formaldehyde. She worked with the dead all day, the rich dead who could afford to be buried and not burned. Everyone knew about the gaps in the guards, the holes in the wall that no one bothered to patch. We slipped out through one of those holes, and she showed me the graveyard outside the city. There wasn’t enough wood to make coffins, so the bodies were buried in the cold earth. Even in winter, there was grass. Evidence of flowers too. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It was then that she started to remind me of my cardinal.
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Rent was due, and I had to work at a relentless pace to pay it. I wonder if they started calling it rent after they realized that they were ripping money from people. To rend, to rip, to tear, I would tear this whole building down if I could have filled its place with grass and flowers. I wanted to plant a grove of ash trees. I knew if I tried to protest the taking of my money, I would relent before long. Relent used to mean soften, and my spine is as soft as a stick of butter in the sun. I haven’t seen butter since I was a young child. Maybe I am remembering wrong. My spine is as soft as my cardinal girl’s hair was.
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A Cardinal came to my door, a man in red and draped in a cross. It was wood, and between that and his stomach I knew he had money. All of them have money. We pay the landlords, the landlords pay the government, and they are the government. They are the enforcers, they are the moral rulers. The one at my door asked about flowers, asked about pills. I lied and told him that I knew nothing. He believed me, because I did not die that day. I am not important enough to threaten. He gave me an extra ration card for my trouble. When he left, I scribbled a note to my own cardinal on the last check left.
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Spring came slowly, and the graveyard filled with yellow blooms. My cardinal girl told me they were weeds, but weeds are something bad. These are beautiful. She held one up to her nose and pollen stayed behind when she tossed it away. I brushed it off, laughing, and then I kissed her. She was waiting for me, and I pulled back to trace the red of her blush with my index finger. She laughed in turn, and I felt rich enough to be buried, not burned.
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The began building a new levee by the pill factory before the leaves would have started sprouting on the trees the factory had replaced. The floods were higher every year, and last year they had gotten too close for comfort. When I left work, it began to smell like fresh dirt, only because they’d been forced to crack the concrete in order to begin the construction. I stole some soil one night and put it in a teacup my cardinal girl gave me for my birthday. I stole a dandelion from the graveyard and planted it. My water ration was small, but I was convinced I could keep such a little thing alive.
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I think I might be going mad. Time has melted away, and I’m approaching some kind of horizon in my mind. I perch on my mattress while the sheets soak in starchy water, and I carve my name into the bedpost. These scraps of paper are building under my pillow, and I taste ink in my dreams. Someone has to write this down. Taxes went up again today. I approach the window and consider throwing it outside, but I remember my empty cupboard and I eat it instead.
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My landlord comes for the rent again today, and I ask him what unspoiled food tastes like. He says he doesn’t know, he only knows what leaves taste like because someone is leaving yellow flowers on his doorstep. I know immediately that it is her, my cardinal girl, who must have seen something I have missed in my miserable daily routine. Then I remember that his wife was recently burned, not buried, and my girl must have been the one who brought the body away. I tell him I am sorry, and he looks surprised. The Cardinal who came to tell him about the accident that killed his wife hadn’t even said that. They were an old and childless couple, so I’m sure the Cardinal saw the death of a useless woman as a blessing. A small notepad is slipped under my door that night, and I wonder if any of the ash is saved, or if it clogs the river the way the factory waste does.
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I did not understand, before, what people meant when they said love gave them purpose. My cardinal bird is gone, and my cardinal girl has given me a place to look. I have stolen the name back from those who use it, those who dress in red robes and pretend that they own the rules of morality. The word for a member of the clergy has been bastardized by them. I preferred the one the people made, how the word carnal was a word for a bad cardinal, and then became a word meaning lust and bodily pleasure. If you believe the government, the cardinal direction of man is carnal exultation. I see it more as a pleasurable detour. My cardinal girl wants to drag down the walls of the factory, smash the new levee down and let the river drown the machines. I was content to stay home and let the world pass us by.
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My cardinal girl is dead. She and some others stood by the levee and screamed at the cold stones until the police came. A red-coated Cardinal asked them to leave, and my girl spat in his face. A relentless hail of bullets finished her and the others after that. They hung her cold body from the wall of the factory. Any loyalty I ever gave that place is null and void, they killed my cardinal girl. She is red still, the blood has not dried enough to be brown. I cry beneath her dangling feet before my landlord pulls me away. I didn’t realize that he cared.
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I am contemplating the splinter and a handful of pills I stole all those months ago. My cardinal direction is gone, my cardinal girl has become bloated on the factory wall. I have just pressed the sliver of ash gainst my tongue when I hear a chirp. The cardinal is at my window again, and when I bring it inside it knocks the pill bottle into the sink. I wash those pills down the drain and kiss red feathers. My cardinal has come home to me, and I cannot die before I find her another ash tree to perch in.