In the monastery of words

The bird girl visits once a week. I know she’s here, by the woody cold unfolded from her jacket, before I see her. She smells like bird shit.

She says ‘Hello Eli’ and I say ‘Hello Back,’ still waiting for my brother to come and strap me into my harness and, when he finally does, swing me from bed to chair where I can see her.

Once in my chair, I edge the field of cold around her with my wheels. She opens a sleeve; a raven pokes its beak into the palm of her hand. ‘Hello to you, Bird.’

Bird girl spills her bags out on my bed, and I take the wheels of my chair in my hands and go to make tea, asking, ‘what did you bring me?’

‘Only good things, Eli.’

My hands are stiff and the tea spills into her shoes and over her knees as I serve her, but she says nothing, holding the warm cup to her face, steaming her pores.

Stimulants, tranqs, painkillers, and pure recreational substances. Three of the painkillers I crush into my tea – big, fat, white, rough-cut pills, they taste like crap, but do the job. The remainder of the tea goes down silty and bitter; my hands begin to loosen. Soon I am able to wheel myself to the window with ease, and my brother leaves us alone, taking the drugs with him.

‘Your turn!’

I raise the blind. Sunlight the colour of lemonade illuminates the dust, loose tea and feathers around us. The sleeve birds hop out from their place of rest and alight on the window, cawing, pecking for bugs on the sill.

The monastery gardens are dead, stillborn, never were, can’t grow in this muted light. Down below us, in bronze, a fox chases a badger chased by a monk in robes with a burning brand.

Bird Girl sits beside me, skinny knees and fluffy shins. ‘Which story is that one about?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not a real monk.’

‘You look like one to me,’ she says.

‘No. Real monks abstain.’

I lift the sash window from the bottom sill, reach into the cold air to pluck a browning leaf from the ivy and press it into Bird Girl’s palm.

‘One more, first,’ I say. She produces a livid pink pill and lays it on my tongue, bare fingered. I taste salt next to sugar. Swallow.

My turn, then. The leaf expands, contracts, flickers, buzzes like static beneath my fingers. Downy speckles grow at its centre. A beaky lump swells from its veins. The plucked stem splits in two, fades and fattens, and the whole thing inflates to life, and where the leaf was there is a sparrow. Bird Girl smiles and smiles.

Not for the first time, I wish I could still fuck. Wish I hadn’t been so young when it happened, that I could have fucked more birdy waify mousey girls like her first. To at least carry the memory of more than a teenaged fumble.

That’s what I pray for each morning. While in the monastery chapel my brothers and sisters pray for the power of good storytelling, better prose at the sentence level, and the gift of engaging characterisation, I bow my head and pray, oh God, at least let me have had sex, Angela Carter, 2:23.

She kisses me, at least, as always, before she leaves. After I have made birds from every leaf I can reach from my room, and filled her robes with their beating warm bodies. She tastes just the way she smells.

Then she should sign out, and does, and I should go to prayers, and do.

And I pray, and pray, and pray.