3AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIRDS
Gloria
Texas, 2014
The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also known as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated and violent if caged for too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.
Every day at noon we are served lunch. This is how I count the time. We don’t eat with the children, because they are in classes; they eat together, at a different time. Our mud-colored trays are divided into five compartments. Today’s lunch: slivers of white onion, an orange sliced into wedges, white bread (two slices), baked beans from a can. The workers are other detained women who work for three dollars a day. Everyone wants to work, so there are TVs on the wall that list the names of who will work each day and where. Two of the usual workers speak Spanish. They tell me they are sorry to see me here. They tell me, hold on. You’ll be out in no time. One of them gives me my second book of bird facts. I forget how she knows I am interested in birds, but I assume I have told her. I don’t remember where she got the book.
I am friends with all the women. I don’t know all their names. But I know which ones have a sick child, which ones lost a husband in the desert along the way. I know whom to hug periodically, whom to gift extra rations of food. We don’t speak about these—the ones who lost children, who bear wounds of rape or police torture, who are sometimes hauled screaming in the middle of the night to see one of the staff in red polo shirts. That’s where we hope they are taken. They also deport people in the middle of the night. We are given no information, no answers.
Homer or Aristotle or Greek philosophers or Roman naturalists or all of them, I don’t remember which, believed migrating birds were warriors. They believed migrating birds were off to do battle at the end of the earth. I imagine them whirling in a spiral toward the sky, millions of them, millions of wings, one force pulsing, beating. Powerful enough to explode into fire, that beating bird heart, to break any wall.
I don’t know why I am here.
Here is for families. Here is for mostly mothers and their children. The lawyers call it family detention. The papers they won’t translate call it Texas Regional Residential Center. I am alone. I don’t know where my daughter is—I hope still in Florida, safe somehow, or on her way here, if safe in Florida is not an option. I pray for her every night. I pray on the concrete floor at the side of my bunk until my knees are raw and tender and I can barely stand. Some nights, my knees bleed. There is a smear of red beside my bunk. I call the smear Ana. Ana is my daughter’s name. I fear I, too, am losing my mind. I don’t know why I am here and I am alone and I am praying to a god I’m not sure exists but if she exists she is surely a bird, surely a migrating bird doing battle, surely she will break these walls.
Dear Ana, I am sorry. I tried to save you. Dear Ana, I am sorry. I thought I could give you a better chance. Dear Ana, I do not know if I made your life worse. I do not write any of this.
I found my first bird book in the craft room. The women can go to the craft room with their children. There are tables like the tables in the cafeteria. There are crayons, markers, yarn, paper in different colors, safety scissors, glue. There are flyers on the walls about sexual assault with bold letters spelling KEEP DETENTION SAFE! There is a bookshelf with books and puzzles on a floor made of foam. The first bird book was called El mundo secreto de los pájaros. El mundo secreto de los pájaros said it was for middle-grade readers. There were pictures of all the birds it described. I still come here, to the craft room, when I am saddest. I read the book on the foam floor. I read it on the foam floor and I lie on my back and I feel the foam give way beneath me. I think, how soft Ana’s skin. How like bird down, her hair.
At first, I couldn’t stop talking about the canyon wren of North America. The canyon wren builds a pathway to its nest with thousands of stones. Imagine it, a pebble stone path winding through the canyons, the desert, and at the end a nest full of wriggling baby birds crying out for their mother, their mother who is hopping in the distance, pebble to pebble to pebble. I am a mother. I am a pebble in the distance. Or just another person with a problem in a world too full of problems to care much about one more person behind a wall, sitting in a children’s craft room, reading a children’s book. I am a pebble.
After I couldn’t stop talking about the canyon wren of North America, the women brought me more bird books. They asked visitors to bring them—volunteers and lawyers and, for the lucky ones, family. The women have become my bird family.
The playground is the happiest place in the compound but it is not like other playgrounds. The slides are gray and made of metal. The monkey bars, the tunnels—they are made of metal. The whole
