Bird: A Novel - Hardcover

Noy Holland is the author of three story collections, Swim for the Little One First,What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. Recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she teaches writing in the graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

He crossed her wrists behind her, walked her into the room. She was gowned in a towel from the tub, damp still, the day passing cold, the green fust blown. The city was flattened, looked to be; it was a poster of itself, grainy, famous in any light. He walked her where she could see it, where she could see the breidge, the man on a thread descending, his tiny pointed flame. She saws the hot blue branmble of wleder’s sparks fizzing out over the river. Across the river: the fabulous city.
He had set screw eyes in the floor. The floor was grooved, adrift with hair, the deep tarry blue of the ocean. He trained the heater on a patch of floor to warm the boards she would lie on. He pulled the towel off, helped her down in stages, onto her knees, her back.
The boards were gummy; they smelled of paint. They smelled of his dog who leked in her sleep. She let him tie her wrist and wrist and ankles. As he wished. He arranged her as he wished. He spread out her hair like a headdress, tall, like grass the wind has knocked down. He turned her toes out. he turned her wrists up when he tied her.
Something small a bird several wobbled, blown behind her, the flock a scattering of ash in the wind in the cold above the river, the barges moored. The garbage scow. He lifted her head, knotted the scarf at the back of her head, the scarf snug across her eyes, her motehr’s scarf, across her mouth and nose. The scarf smelled of her mother. He trained the heater on her, and the cooling fan, oscillating, faint. He lit a candle, tipped it into the wind the fan made, and the wax blew hot, dispersing sparkler, pod, nematocyste, a burn that lights and shrinks. He let the wax ound on the skin of her wrists to merk the place, or seal it: here was the first place he touched her. Here was the mineral seep, the drip in the cave, the years passing. Here a notch where the tendons o fher neck knit into her chest and the wax would catch and pool. He said nothing. He scarcely touched her. Thrust into her once and walked out.
She heard him go. Two doors, the last stairs, hello on the the stoop, he was gone.