Songbird

The sight of piled up boxes is so goddamn depressing.

This was the most recent in a series of jumbled and frustrated thoughts running through Abby's head as she dragged an upright lamp across her living room. Her third move in five years had left her frazzled mind in a turmoil comparable to what she had wrought on her shabby apartment. She thanked whatever invisible deity might be listening that she’d thought far enough ahead to take the day off from work. She couldn’t imagine having that obligation on her plate today.

With a huff Abby leaned the lamp against the sofa and surveyed the pile of possessions stacked up in the now-empty room. She could still clearly recall the day she’d first moved into this place. The fresh white paint on the bare walls and the decent view from the bedroom window had given her hope that she’d finally found a place that would feel like home.

But of course that was never the case. The bathroom sink leaked, it was ridiculously drafty in the wintertime, and Abby would swear up and down to anyone who asked that a sneaky family of ninja mice had taken up residence under her stove. She’d never actually seen the little monsters, but she could her them laughing their squeaky mouse laugh at her whenever she had the nerve to attempt sleep in the quiet of her lonely bedroom.

So it was time to move on to greener pastures. Abby had recently been the recipient of an unexpected but substantial amount of money. A distant aunt had passed away and had left Abby $20,000 in her will. While Abby didn't know what she had done to warrant such a gift, she certainly wasn't complaining. That amount of money was enough to spur her onwards to a nicer neighborhood and a slightly larger apartment.

Of course, the choice to relocate hadn't only been about the money. Abby had always been somewhat of a nomad. She was antsy, impatient, and had intimacy issues. She wasn’t the type who got to know her neighbors or involved herself in the community. She was the type whose absence was noted only by the landlords who placed ‘For Rent’ signs in the vacant windows of her former apartments.

Abby often wondered what had made her this way. She felt sometimes that she barely existed. She floated from place to place, disturbing nothing and leaving no impact. Occasionally she wondered if, save for her work, her presence in the world made any difference at all.

Shaking her head to clear it of these thoughts, Abby focused her attention back on the task at hand. With a grunt she hefted a box of hardcover books onto the coffee table. She stared at them for a moment, before deciding to leave the issue of dragging them down the stairs for future Abby to deal with.

She collapsed against the pane of her living room window and surveyed the familiar streets she’d looked out over for the better part of two years. A teenage boy strolled by, dragged along slightly as his yellow Labrador strained against its harness. The wind whipped up a pile of freshly raked autumn leaves across the street, coaxing a string of profanities from the frustrated landscaper who had been trying to tame them. From somewhere a bit further off, an invisible songbird tweeted a jovial tune, undoubtedly hidden in the leaves of one of the large oak trees planted at the base of the apartment building.

With a sigh, Abby closed her eyes and listened for a moment. She recalled a fact she’d once learned about birds from a nature program. She couldn’t remember if it applied to all birds or only a particular subset, but it was about the way they learned to sing. Each bird has his own tune, fashioned from the typical song of his species with a few variations thrown in to make it unique. To do this, the baby birds first had to learn the song from their elders, usually in their first few weeks of life. If they missed that window, they’d probably never learn to sing at all, which meant they’d probably never attract a mate. No mate means no babies. No babies means no way to leave your genetic handprint behind, and when you’re a bird that’s really all you’ve got to offer. If you don’t manage to land yourself a wife-bird and a couple of chicks, you may as well have never existed in the first place.

A toppling stack of books startled Abby out of her Discovery Channel-induced reverie, and she cursed under her breath as she darted across the room to undo the damage. As she was attempting to replace the books into a slightly more stable formation, Abby noticed a small black notebook nestled among her assortment of Penguin Classics. Turning it over in her hands, Abby recognized it as a journal she had kept when she was a child. Curious, she opened the small notebook, and a photo that had been wedged in between the pages fluttered to the ground. Setting the book aside for the moment, Abby gently plucked the photo from the floor and studied it. It was a picture of her parents, looking about twenty years younger than they were at present and beaming as they held a chubby infant up to the camera lens.

Abby smiled slightly as she replaced the last of the fallen books and glanced back down at the photograph. It was one of the few remaining pictures of her younger brother. Her mother hadn’t saved many of them, and he wasn’t a topic of frequent discussion in their household. Six-year-old Abby had stolen this particular photo just days after the funeral. She was almost certain it was the only one she had.

Her brother had been born when Abby was four years old. It was a bit of an age gap, but her parents had decided a little late in the game that they’d wanted a sibling for their daughter. He’d seemed perfectly healthy in the beginning, a glowing baby boy. Yet there were problems lurking just under the surface. By age two her brother still hadn’t uttered a word, nor had he begun the clumsy toddling usually characteristic of kids his age. A trip to the pediatrician led to a series of tests, which revealed that the boy had been born with a genetic disorder known as Tay Sachs Disease. Essentially, a protein in his brain that was supposed to break down fats was defective, causing them to build up and crush his developing nervous system.

There was no known cure for the condition. Abby’s parents were heartbroken, but Abby was too young to truly understand what was happening. About a year later, just shy of his third birthday, her brother stopped breathing in the middle of the night and passed away. There was a lot of crying at the funeral, but Abby couldn’t understand why. Her brother was simply there and then he wasn’t any more. He’d never done anything more than lie around and blink. He hadn’t even been any fun to play with.

Eventually life had returned to some semblance of normalcy. The days went on and her brother’s name came up less and less. Her parents never had another child, both because they were getting older and for fear that they would pass the same terrible disease on to another baby. All that was left now was a handful of photographs and a few faded memories.

There was a faint rumbling noise from outside, and a quick glance out the window confirmed that the moving truck had arrived. Abby heaved a dejected sigh at the thought of lugging every possession she owned out to the curb. She moved to pack up her laptop, which she’d left out until the last moment in order to procrastinate in the midst of her packing frenzy. Her email was still open to a message from her supervisor granting her the day off.

Abby found there was always a bittersweet tinge to a day away from her research. Truly she needed this time off at the tail end of such a hectic week. Yet, on the other hand, she never felt more at home than she did around the cell cultures and beakers of the genetics lab. It dawned on her, as she glanced around the room at her packed up possessions, that her research was a bastion of stability in her otherwise chaotic life. Realizing she was still clutching the photo of her brother, Abby glanced down at it one last time before placing it on top of a nearby box.

With a click she closed her computer and shoved it into her backpack, rushing a bit now so as not to keep the movers waiting. Before she turned to leave, Abby paused. Outside, a songbird was still chirping somewhere out of sight. She lingered on the notes for a few moments, feeling a smile tug at the corners of her lips as she followed the subtle rise and fall of his melody. Then, with that, she turned on her heel, picked up one of the smaller boxes and vanished into the stairwell.