A Sweet Bird Called Home
By C.C. Parker

Mama sat out on the front porch with the sun blazing. It looked like her hair might catch fire. She took a short puff on a cigarette she’d rolled herself and mumbled something about how ‘the summers were too short, the winters too long.’ But everybody knew it was the deterioration of her spirit . . . her life juxtaposed with death’s unrelenting presence.

“It’s coming for me,” she’d say, and they all hoped, for momma’s sake, that it came in the summer when spirits were high and the land was draped in cerulean blue; when trees were greenest and school children were free to gather at her feet to listen to one of her stories. .

So death took her.

Everyone was grateful that it had been in the summer.

Herbert found momma first. He touched her cool skin. It was like touching a spider’s web. Then his mouth went slack and he cried real tears . . . they twisted down his sun burnt cheeks. “Oh momma,” he said. Nothing at all could have prepared him for the dilemma that raked against his insides.

Herbert discovered that he loved his mother more than he’d ever thought possible. Everybody did, but his love for her bordered on the supernatural.

I can see your ghost, he thought. I can see it stroking the hair of your corpse. And he cried even harder because this was happening to him; the deterioration of his own spirit.

Herbert reached down to feel the umbilical protruding from his belly and assumed with all rationale that this, too, was a ghost; the ghost of his birth.

Although it was impossible for Randolph to ignore the details of comic sadness he would do his best to be respectful to momma. After all, he’d driven over five hundred miles to be here. That was a long drive, especially having just started A Sweet Bird Called Home, his third novel; and on the heels of two moderately successful novels.

Herbert stood next to him. Randolph thought his brother looked tired, even exhausted, possibly horrible. He knew that the world must look pretty bleak for his brother right now. Herbert had lived near momma his entire life and although they seemed distant at times Randolph knew that Herbert’s ties to momma were much greater than his own. Hell, these kids had probably been closer to momma than he had. It’s not he hadn’t loved momma because he did . . . it was just hard sometimes.

Herbert howled as they lowered her into the ground. Children looked around with fear in their eyes; they had never known pain as great as that. They loved her for her stories and the lilt in her voice, but they never once thought of her as vanished.

The coffin went down smoothly into the guts of the earth. The sky was fleckless while birds twittered. Tears filled Randolph’s eyes, but mostly he had dreamed this. Other family members turned to him, to embrace him and he remembered their touch, their smells, but never their faces. It was the dream again, but more real than it had ever been. He listened to the birds and thought for a minute that he could hear them say . . . something.

How many ghosts could occupy the world at once?

He would have to remember that so he could write it down.

“You know I’ll have to be getting back soon.”

“What will you do?”

“What I always do.”

“Have you started a new book?”

“I told you I have.”

“What’s it called?”

“I told you that, too.”

“I forgot.”

“A Sweet Bird Called Home.”

“What’s it about?”

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