There is a boy with 10 fingers and a girl with 2 hands. Ave and Ursa. Their dog is yellow, has toes on each of his paws that live at the end of his legs. They go for walks together — around the block skirting the park with cottonwood and red alder trees, blackberry, nettles, willow. He sings to her all the lullabies she could imagine and she tells him of the little secrets she is learning — like how sometimes the moon gets too drunk to make it home, falls asleep in the sky and wakes up still there in the morning. He believes her unquestioningly.
Their dog yelps melodies from the record player and the boy learns to imitate birds and rabbits and the critters that live in and around their lives. The girl builds palaces woven of moss and branches in the spaces between her and him with ink stained fingers. He plays the palace music with the deep lonely sides of his voice. She fingers through planets like strings on the mandolin. He learns the black bear, the heron, the fox. She sits in the sunroom, and plays with her organs on paper. He likes the colors left on the sheets, shades and strokes of red, pink, and magenta. She tells him about the colors inside him. Tells him how each one — the lungs, the skin, the heart… the rest — each one has a specific tone inside it. “A bird you could say. They all sing together on the page when they are plucked.”
“I know all the bird songs, but not which are mine.”
“I will choose for you,” she says. “You are a flock, of course. But also a trembling. A siege, a quarrel, an unkindness, a tiding. An asylum. And more I think too.”
He has so much of the world in his throat. A bird's nest of wild, unbridled diversity. But all it is is an imitation.
He loves her with a desperate, fervent, heart pounding, force. And he is afraid of losing.
With every voice he learns he understands innately what she is discovering. He does not know the words, just the vibrations through his bones.
She looks at him with willow eyes. “There is a chasm so deep I feel wind coming from it. When I drop stones I do not hear them land. You said there were cliff bees in there, you knew from the sound. You don't even think long enough to know what I'm saying so how did you know that? When I laughed I felt the tears like tiny stingers behind the hive of my eyes.” When he doesn't answer she continues “All these little knowings or askings are throwing stones”
“But I hear them,” he says. “They are stone in deep water, stone on soft moss, and so many more. I can make their songs for you.”
“I feel like a net catching water,” he says. “And I am rusty-bucket mind,” she replies. “The water leaks out all the time.”