Avian Couvade
- Oct 28, 2022
- 2 min read
by Avra Margariti
We listen to the heartbeats of the walls. The hummingbirds trapped inside wood panels and wainscoting. Apotropaic mummies, you say. Gods-in-the-making. We don’t know who suffers the most splinters: your earshells, or my fingertips.
Soon your belly bulges like the moon, like the new house expanding with nightfall. The tocking creak of tick-infested wood. Condensation covers your stretching skin, an atavistic, immaculate conception.
You tell me, as a young boy, you would often dream yourself giving birth to flightless things. A somnambulist, you used to eat all the strawberries in the basket, hoping their seeds between your teeth gave way to something growing, something greater than yourself.
I go to work; I read about the Victorian custom of bricking up dead animals as house spirits, desiccated defenders against harm. I bring you back crumbs to sup on, mud to nest in, molded into precious shape. My back aches with the carrying, the caring. My stomach growls as yours grows, as we diligently split our duties: me, with the hunger, you with the birth pangs.
I concave while you convex. I was hoping the hummingbirds were crows all along, oilslick in undeath, sturdier than their colibri counterparts. Crows, with their powerful caws and claws; children’s needful protection against the world.
Now I know they are dodos. They are rare, and they are rearing their heads into re-existence from inside the walls of our house, your stomach.
Mine, too.
A full-plumed fluttering of the gut. A heartbeat we share with our home and each other. The truth is, our tongues are scoured with the splinters, too. We wanted to lick something ancient but extant clean like powdered mummia. Wanted to keep it cradled and germinating inside us, for who would dare call us hollow, call us anything but holy, then?
We lie in our nest at night, our bellies slotting one into the other. Our dodos beaking, breaking the amniotic waters of extinction.
Avra Margariti is a queer author and poet from Greece. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).
