fricatives
The first bird flew right into one of our sliding glass doors. It was Tuesday afternoon and I was home between my morning and evening classes. I heard the thunk from the living room and knew what it was before I asked Marshall what it was. I peeked over the lip of the house and the bird lay there in a twitching crumple. “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Marshall said, stepping back inside. He wanted to bury it but the internet told him to wrap it up and put it in the trash.
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That night, a writer visited workshop over Zoom and taught us about sentences. He told us about high- and low-frequency vowel sounds. The [u] as in mood is the lowest frequency and the [i] as in she is the highest. The low sounds make people sad and the high ones make people happy. All the other sounds fall along a gradient in between.
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Here is where an exploration of what it means for a bird to fly into your house and die would go. But I cannot bring myself to look into it. You cannot grow up going to church and not retain some belief in magic, both the good kind and the bad.
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The visiting writer also taught us about fricatives. Jokingly, he said that linguistics explain why “fuck,” with its low-frequency vowel sound and its hard k at the end, is the worst word you can say in English. He had the whole class saying fuck fuck fuck.
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There can’t be anything good about a bird flying into the window and dropping dead. Religion paves the way for superstition, which, if you think about it, is just a way of retaining all the scary parts of belief.
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After the bird flew into the window, we packed up the dogs and drove to Marfa. It was a planned trip, not a reaction, but the timing felt right. I took the first shift and put on some music. I was singing along and kept getting the words wrong and kept trying to cover for it but my fricatives gave me away, and I thought of how my dad used to sing loudly to music on road trips and make the same mistakes.
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There was not much happening in Marfa because I’m doing too many different things at the moment and I mistook one weekend for another, and so we ended up taking the dogs on long walks and laying around in our shipping container Airbnb. I was also “working on a short story” that is not coming easily. I am thinking too much about its content and not its form. I can’t get a grip on its sentences.
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Ever since the writer talked to us about sentences and vowel sounds, I can’t stop thinking about how certain words sound like what they are. “Pony” sounds exactly like what it is. So does “depression.” So does “sunrise.”
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From Marfa, we put the dogs in the car and drove out through Pinto Canyon to see the sunset and feel something. The sky turned to orange and red and the mountains looked blue by contrast. On the way back to town, a bird flew into my window and dropped. “Fuck!” (low-frequency vowel, followed by a fricative) I yelled. “That’s the second one!”
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At a bar the next evening, a friend asked about the two dead birds. If one bird flying into the window and dying is bad, what about two? Does one undo the other? There is no way I am looking this up.
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After it got dark and we could hardly see the desert road, we put on a song with one of those parts where you just go “oooohhh” and modulate the tone. You have to make your mouth into a circle like the O in God. I remember singing a lot of “oooohhhs” in church camp because I think, frequency wise, the “oooohhh” is supposed to make the vocalizer feel something.
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Every time I am depressed I think about going to a church but what if that made me more depressed? Over the weekend, Tom said it made things worse for him when he tried it once. Perhaps God, with its [ä] vowel, is the most neutral word of all. At church they would tell me how to feel about the birds I inadvertently killed.
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Instead of going to church, I am reverting to previous depression-based activities. I bought some cheap blush and eyeshadow yesterday and applied it in the strip center parking lot. I patted on red dye until my cheeks look pinched. The makeup isn’t so much a device meant to cheer me up as it is a thing I do when I know I’m depressed, because I must have done it one time, and now I have to do it every time. If you picked apart a person’s various superstitions, perhaps you could make a whole religion.
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It is unfair that I have the most desire to make a some major change when I am not supposed to be doing that. I lingered on the hair color aisle for too long at the makeup store. I could be a redhead. I browsed dogs on the internet. Merle could use a friend.
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We joked that Lyle, who we are dog sitting for the month, is the one drawing these birds to our windows. It feels better to blame it on something else than it does to look into it. This is called compartmentalization, which is a mess of vowel sounds and consonants, too many to break down here, too many to really look into.