The Letters: Prequel to Cenquizqui the Novel

The Parrots

Tonalco 1561

Niltze Atl,

The parrots scaled the bars of the cage and hopped over their sticks.  They flapped their wings and made the empty seed shells float.  The smallest of the jade birds squawked from a crook in the back.  He stayed back as the others darted out the door into the tall free sky.  Vasco closed the door and spun around to find me.

"Mamá!" he ran to me, seeds sprinkled in his hair.

My eyes sought the image of his urgent voice.  I made a quiet sound chewing the side of my tongue.  We both watched.  Dark emerald trees watched.  The sunflowers.  The rooster.  Cempohualxochitles.  The two birds flew up and up.  They squawked for each other trying to measure how many wings apart they were from the only others of their likeness in the only open eye dream they knew.  

They screeched and flew, high, higher still, Huitzilopochtli flinging the sun's rays, we had to squint our eyes.  In a frenzy of back and forth pacing the bird alone locked in his cage cried out.  His squawking more and more frantic as the voices of the others shriveled ugly smaller and smaller until silence.  We watched helpless, our faces hot with light.  

Too much space, too much freedom.  The birds twirled higher in the borderless blue.  They didn't know which way was up or down or side-ways or where went the forever steely boning that'd surrounded them like weighty feathers.  They spiraled up but I saw them spiral down.  The world flipped and they drowned in a sea of sky.

Still the caged one made much noise so loud I was sure the town was clucking at my carelessness, for it was me not Vasco.  My son was as heaven wrapped as the flapping green specks--blameless, so small not knowing they headed for a burning of their corners in the fire.

And I thought about it.  Even though the escaped birds had been the types to peck at this smaller one (who lost an eye for it) when they wanted to crack the seeds or push him away if he was too close during the night, there were the times they felt warm feathered too. They nuzzled into the neck of the small one.  I remember their beaks disappearing into his soft feathers.  Or how when he puffed his chest in song the bigger birds backed away and bowed.  The clutch were all they had and that was their bond.  Now this one's entire world sunk to the bottomless sky, he cocked his head, his remaining eye devastatingly tilted toward the unbarred unfathomable stretch.

Amo teicuh,

María