My rejected short stories: Rare Bird Alert (Alternate title: Spotted Redshank)

“You guys looking for it tomorrow?” she said as soon as he picked up the phone.

Silence.

“April?” Jeff finally managed.

“Yeah, sorry. I got so excited when I heard a Spotted Redshank on the Rare Bird Alert! Aren’t you guys going? Can I come?”

“Yeah, kid, of course,” he said, sounding odd.

“Oh, I called too late. I’m sorry.”

“No, no. I’m glad you called, believe me. You just... you, uh, sounded just like your mother. She wouldn’t have bothered with ‘hello,’ either. Just cried, ‘When are we going?!”

Silence.

“I guess you know that’s the bird we were looking for that day?”

“Here, I brought you breakfast,” said Jeff, handing April a warm bag as soon as she got in the car. 

“McDonald’s?!”

“Yeah, didn’t your mom get you junk food on bird trips?”

“Yeah, but only after. She knew it wouldn’t work if we got it before.”

“Oh, right.” He laughed. “Well, we can get more later, too. I just thought you might be hungry, and that's the best breakfast ever.”

“Hamburgers?!" said April, smiling as she reached into the bag until she realized why Jeff brought her food and winced, remembering how embarrassed she felt when he stopped by to find her heating up a can of chili for breakfast because it was the only thing left in the cupboard.

But her smile returned as soon as she unwrapped a soft sandwich and saw melted American cheese, forgetting everything else as she began plucking off all the orange bits stuck to the wrapper so none got thrown away.

“Your mom used to do that, too.”

“She didn’t eat McDonald’s!”

“Not their hamburgers, but I got her hooked on those," said Jeff, waiting until her stomach was full of deliciously greasy egg, ham and cheese before asking nervously: “OK if we pick up Stephanie?” 

April moved the empty bag to her feet and looked at the binoculars in her lap, squeezing them to remind herself to be nice. She nodded and pushed out a “Yep.”

“And, uh, can I ask why you don’t like her?”

April looked out the window, wondering how much truth to tell. She decided on half. “It’s not her. It’s her Thermos.”

“I see,” Jeff said before a coughing fit. When he could talk again he said, “Sorry. Um, what is it about her Thermos exactly?”

“It’s so squeaky, I can’t think!” April said, still looking out the window as the words flew out. “I can’t hear anything else at the table when she twists off the lid and I just spend the whole time waiting for it to squeak again. And if she squeaks it in the car the whole time, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Jeff was so quiet she finally turned and saw he was shaking with laughter.

“It’s not THAT funny,” she said, deciding to go back to not telling any of the truth. 

“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing because your mother told me that’s what it was, but I thought she was crazy.”

When they pulled up to Stephanie’s house, Jeff hopped out though she was already heading out the door. They went back into the house, and when they got into the car, Stephanie was holding a big blue mug April had never seen before.

“Good to see you, April,” Stephanie said, twisting her hands on the mug. “Really glad you could come.” 

“Yep,” April said, squeezing the binoculars.

“Hey, you got a new Thermos,” Jeff said, meeting Stephanie’s eye in the rear-view mirror. 

“Nope, I... I just felt like using my dad’s travel mug. It keeps my tea just as hot. Almost.”

The car was quiet until April asked, “Why did my mom like birding so much?”

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “But I guess we all pretty much like it for the same reasons.”

“OK, why do you like it?”

“Well... I like being outside. I like being with other people but not talking much. I like how it feels when you find a bird, especially when you find one together.”

He looked in the rear-view mirror. “Steph?”

“I like knowing the birds are there,” she said slowly. “I like knowing that no matter what we humans are screwing up down here, they are always up in the trees, just living their lives above it all."

She took a shaky breath and squeezed her mug before she spoke again. 

“But I liked your mother first. I saw that story in the paper about her banding the Snowy Plovers at that remote beach, walking miles by herself just after dawn with no one else around, and I went to the next Bird Club meeting to meet her. I asked her to help me recognize birds by their calls, because she said that had been her goal for years, but really I wanted to figure out how to be brave like her.”

So that’s why Stephanie was always glued to her, April thought, feeling the resentment bubbling up no matter how hard she squeezed the binoculars. But when she snuck a look at Stephanie’s face, the tears she saw melted all her anger.

They rode in silence until April heard Stephanie sip her tea.

“So, did my mom really drink tea and read Jane Austen novels on bird trips?”

Stephanie’s laugh was wet and hoarse. “More like beer and cigarettes!”

Jeff glared into the rear-view mirror. “Don't listen to her. Your mother didn't smoke!”

“Yes, she did,” April said, and Jeff pulled over, turning back to Stephanie. “How did you know?”

“I had a beer with her once. And she said she couldn’t drink a beer without wanting a cigarette.”

“That’s how I picture my mother, sitting cross-legged, talking and laughing, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.” April snorted. “Definitely not a mug of tea and a Jane Austen novel, like it said in your newsletter.”

“So you did see that?” Jeff said. “I’m sorry, it was already mailed. And I thought you didn’t read those?”

“My grandmother showed it to me. It’s OK. I’m glad they did it.”

Stephanie leaned forward, finally brave enough to ask April, “Those are her binoculars, right?”

“Yeah, my grandfather had them fixed. He said the focus is still pretty loose, but I can't tell.”

“That's great,” Jeff said hoarsely. “I was wondering what happened to them.”

“I found her coffee cup, too. It was under her seat. Not a scratch.”

She didn’t tell them about the sweatshirt on the seat, and the blood she hadn’t washed out.

“I’m really sorry she wasn’t with me that day,” Jeff said as if pushing the words out. “My car was in the shop and we just had Steph’s pick-up, so there was no room…”

His voice caught and he stopped. Stephanie patted his shoulder and he took a deep breath. “Damn, I just don't understand why she wasn’t driving instead of him.”

A boy barely older than April had been driving. 

She first saw him behind glass, a shape covered in bandages and tubes. His brain was swelling and they didn’t know if he would wake up again. 

But at least he could wake up, she thought, closing her eyes and imagining the beeps were keeping her mother alive instead. The front of the truck had stopped in her lap, so she would have never walked again. But maybe she could talk again. And April could talk to her.

“know why she wasn’t driving. She wanted to look through her binoculars instead, to keep scanning for the bird.”

“Of course,” Jeff said with a small laugh. “The Redshank was the last bird on her Life List. If she saw it, she would have been the first of us to complete it.”

“So maybe,” Stephanie said softly. “Maybe you could find it for her?”

April nodded, squeezed the binoculars, then looked at Stephanie in the mirror. “We’ll find it.”

“Sorry, kid,” Jeff said when they were driving home. “I really thought luck was going to be with us today. Course, your mother had the best eyes, she was usually the first to spot everything.”

“It's OK,” said April, who had found what she had been looking for. Because when the three of them walked together, she could hear her mother’s footsteps again, feel her fingers on the binoculars every time she looked through them. 

“Can I go with you guys next weekend?” she asked when Jeff pulled up to her house.

“Of course,” he said, his eyes wet. “But, you know, I really think the Redshank is gone, kid.”

“No, we'll find it,” said April, secretly hoping they never did, so they could all keep searching together.

Rejections: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Sun and The Paris Review

More with April: Bikini Strings and Coconut oil

The Bird Club: Chapter Three

 

Illustration conceived and drawn by Dell Linney

Chapter Two

A donut was enough for Wilder, which was only an hour or two of walking and visiting the ocean. But it was not enough for a birding trip, which was a whole day of long, boring car rides and long, boring walks that usually ended without anyone seeing the bird they were looking for. For those, her mother had to promise at least a cheeseburger and fries. Maybe even a sundae.

“And you have to give me a ride to work later,” April said as she pulled out her clothes. 

April never liked taking the bus to her job at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, but it was especially bad on Sundays, when all the flea market goers crowded on. She could never make the whole trip without someone sitting next to her. 

Evelyn agreed to drop April off, then got up to leave, since both of her daughters were too shy to undress in front of her. This frustrated Evelyn, who used to know every inch of these people she made, so much that she would “accidentally” come into the bathroom while they showered.

“Be sure and bring a sweatshirt. It’s pretty foggy,” Evelyn told April, who did not begin dressing until she felt the stairs shaking.

Once they were walking to the beach, April was glad she came. She loves the ocean and loves how relaxed her mother is when walking. Not rushing to get ready for work, buried in a bird book or telling April what to do. When they are outside walking, they can just talk.

“Are we still going to the Japanese Gardens Saturday?” April asks. 
“Yes,” her mother says, sighing but smiling, happy that April is eager to go somewhere with her instead of having to be dragged. “Did you remember to ask for the day off work?”
“Yes,” April says, mimicking her mother’s sighing tone, and they both laugh.

They walk in silence until they reach the bay tree near the train tracks, and Evelyn tells her to pick a few leaves so she can make spaghetti for dinner.
“OK,” April says eagerly, grabbing a handful of the fragrant leaves and pressing them to her nose, thinking only of the eating part, not of her bursting stomach afterward. 
Then she tucks the leaves in her pocket and runs to catch up with her mother.
“Think we’ll get to band one today?” she asks.

April only got to band a plover once, but remembers every second of it. 
That day her mother had found a nest, so she prepared to catch the mom. She laid out three long pieces of what looked like thick chicken wire with very small holes. On each piece, she had tied dozens of little fishing line lassos. 
With the traps forming a triangle around the nest, April and Evelyn hid behind a dune. When the bird came back and walked over the traps to its nest, one of the lassos caught its leg.
The bird panicked, hopping and tugging at the line until Evelyn picked it up and cut the line.

“Here, you can hold her. Be very gentle.”
April wrapped her hands around the bird’s squirming body, trying not to squeeze too hard and hurt her, or too soft and let her go. She was surprised at how warm the bird felt under its feathers and how fast its heart was beating.
Together, they put the bird head first into a tube to secure her, then her mother hung a scale from her legs to weigh her. After recording the weight and length, she prepared for the trickiest part — putting on the band. While the bird waited in the tube, her mother chose the proper color and readied the tiny bracelet in her pliers. She steadied the bird’s leg, then quickly snapped the band in place.
Two minutes later, they released the bird and she hopped off, shaking her leg to try and kick off the band.
“Let’s go,” Evelyn said. “She’ll never go back to the nest with us here.”  

April wouldn’t have to be bribed to go to Wilder if she knew they would be banding a bird every time, but it only happened once. This morning was like all the others: walking and waiting, waiting and walking. 
But wait, the donut!

Inside the shop, April heads straight to the glass cases displaying the donuts, careful to not get too close to the cash register so the clerk won’t talk to her. She inspects each row to make sure there are no new donuts to consider, which makes her anxious. She doesn’t want to miss out on something tasty, but she also hates being disappointed by trying something she won’t like. 

Like the time she fell for the jelly donut. Seeing one with no hole, she thought it would have more cake than the others. But as soon as she bit into it she realized it was a fruit pie donut. Yuck.

Or the time she chose one of the long bars of glazed cake with all the glistening frosting that look like they give you the most donut. And maybe they do, but after a few bites of the maple bar April got sick from the frosting, just like when she had finally gotten to try cotton candy at the fair. 

For years she had watched kids fill their mouths with those fluffy handfuls of pink and blue and imagined they tasted like creamy clouds of whipped cream. But they didn’t. 
As soon as cotton candy touched your tongue, it evaporated. It was like eating air; air that immediately made everything sticky. And then all the sugar made her dizzy and gave her a stomachache. Just like the maple bar. 

So now she just looks at all the other donuts before choosing a crumb cake: a dense, moist donut sprinkled with nutty, cinnamon-flavored crumbs that keeps her stomach happy. 
And she sat happily in the donut afterglow until she discovered why her mother dragged her to the beach.

 

Chapter four.

The Bird Club: Chapter Two

Chapter One 

The next morning when her mother wakes April up it is still dark outside.

“God, mom! It’s Sunday!” 

“Want to go to Wilder with me?”

“No, I want to sleep!” April whines, rolling over to face the wall.

Every weekend Evelyn goes to a beach about 20 miles away to help count Western Snowy Plovers, a small shorebird that was nearly wiped out because their nests of tiny, perfectly camouflaged eggs are built directly on the sand to be trampled.

 

A few birds were found surviving at Wilder Ranch because its beach forces humans to come by the water, or through miles of crops after crawling under a train bridge and over fences.

 

So the only people who know about that beach are surfers or banding volunteers like Evelyn, who usually goes to Wilder on Friday mornings when April is at school. But last weekend Evelyn went on a rare overnight trip with her husband to celebrate their 20^th wedding anniversary, so she was heading out to the beach on a Sunday, when she could drag her daughter out of bed.

 

“We can go to Ferrell’s for a donut afterward,” Evelyn coos, knowing April can’t resist.

“Alllriiiight,” April grouses, throwing off the covers.

April will do anything for junk food because her mother doesn’t allow anything that tastes good in her house. No sugar, white bread or creamy peanut butter. Except on Halloween or Easter, sweets and junk food came with barfing cousins, neighbors with nose drips or kitchen duty in the school cafeteria.

 

For a couple of summers when she was younger, April’s cousins began visiting from Denmark and created the childhood of her dreams. Her father drove them to fun places like Disneyland, and her mother couldn’t stop the visitors from buying candy and giving it to April in the back seat of their van.

 

And she ate everything they gave her, until one cousin threw up her sweets on the winding road to Yosemite, filling the van with the smell of sick for the rest of the trip. Even April didn’t feel like eating candy after that.

 

Another source of sugar came with a side of snot. The next-door neighbor was a WWI veteran named Bartlett who carefully pulled up his American flag at sunrise and back down at dusk, spending the rest of the day grooming the jungle of fuchsia bushes he won first prize with every year at the county fair.

 

When arthritis took over his hands, he started bribing April and Hannah with candy to help him prune, using their small, nimble fingers to pluck off most of the fresh flower buds to prevent all but a healthy few to bloom.

 

April enjoyed pulling apart the leaves and squeezing off the buds, she found it absorbing and satisfying work. But she didn’t enjoy that Bartlett usually supervised, because he usually had a drop of snot water glistening on the end of his nose. 

 

April would be reaching for a bud and see a drop slide to the bottom center of his large nose and became transfixed, watching the drop grow and droop until it became so big she could not believe it would remain on the tip of his nose one more second. 

 

Then Bartlett would finally take out his cloth handkerchief and wipe his nose so April could relax. But it was never long before another drop began forming, and she never would have been able to stand it if she wasn’t so desperate for sugar.

 

After about an hour in the garden, Bartlett would finally lead April and Hannah into his breakfast nook, a sunny room containing a round Formica table and his smiling wife.

 

He’d put a large bowl on the table and say, “Now, you can each pick two,” and the girls would look at the bowl, hoping each time he had gotten better candy. 

 

He never had. It was always hard candies like butterscotch or mints, and all colors of small, tart suckers. Never candy bars, chocolates or even fruit chews. But it was still sugar.

The most consistent source of sweets were actually the school lunches April started getting in the fourth-grade. 

 

The day their mother announced the girls would start eating hot lunches in the cafeteria felt like Christmas Eve, with April so excited she could hardly sleep. But instead of seeing presents under the tree in her dreams, she saw the woman in the lunch line refusing to take her money.

“Sorry, hon,” she said. “Your mom called. She changed her mind.”

 

When no one stopped April from paying the next day, she picked up a tray and stepped up to the counter, feeling like Charlie touring Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory as she gazed at the beautiful mounds of exciting new foods.

 

When she got her tray safely to a table, she nearly had to sit on her hands so she wouldn’t rub them together as she surveyed her bounty.

 

In the main section of the tray was a hamburger with a white, fluffy bun that April had only eaten in restaurants, plus some even more exciting french fries to the right. Above the fries were some boring carrot and celery sticks, but in the top left, almost hidden by the bun, was the most exciting thing of all: dessert. 

 

Thinking it was just a weird-shaped donut, she bit into it eagerly and ... Yuck! The outside was good, but the inside tasted like fruit cocktail, only worse, because it was warm and dribbling down her face. Whenever she saw a fruit pie again, she just nibbled the crust off the edges, even though that brought boys she didn’t know to her table asking eagerly, “Are you going to eat that?” Until they saw the teeth marks.

Her favorite dessert was the peanut butter bar, a dreamy square of everything she couldn’t eat at home. One bite made her eat anything in the dessert section first, since Hannah’s habit of grabbing things off her plate taught April to eat whatever she really wanted right away.

 

Her favorite main dish could have been a Wonka original: A crazy mix of tostada and pizza shaped like a Stop sign. It made no sense, but the soft dough topped with sauce, melted cheese and bits of hamburger meat was delicious and fun to eat. Once she learned its name, she circled every “Fiestada Pizza” on the monthly lunch calendar so she could get to the cafeteria extra early those days before all the other kids gobbled them up.

The magic of those lunches never wore off for April, even after learning she was eating them because of something called Aid for Families with Dependent Children, which required her to work in the cafeteria. 

 

Most days, she just presented a monthly punchcard and picked up a tray with no one but the woman who gave her the card knowing it had been free. But once a week, she had to go behind the counter and spoon up food or wash dishes like the other AFDC kids.

 

She always asked to wash dishes, because then you worked in a small room near the exit door where hardly any of the other kids noticed you as they hurried out to the playground, instead of facing them as you doled out their food. And you washed alone, free to just focus on cleaning the trays, which April actually enjoyed.

 

Her favorite part was rinsing off all the food bits by pulling down the hose hanging from the ceiling and blasting the trays with a jet of hot water, smiling as even the stickiest mess slid off. Then she’d stack all the trays on their side in a rack, slide them into the big, square metal dishwasher and push the big red button to scald them clean.  

 

Working in the tray-washing room was like being trapped inside a washing machine, but April found it soothing. All the noises and movements were predictable, unlike the constant chaos created by crowds of kids. And pulling all the warm and clean trays from the machine at the end always gave her a satisfied smile.

 

Of course she never told her mother how much she enjoyed washing dishes at school, because unless her father installed a hose that hung from the ceiling and blasted hot water, April didn’t want to wash dishes at home.

But April did want sugar delivered with deep-fried dough instead of barf, snot or a hairnet. So she got out of bed and headed to her dresser.

Chapter Three

 

The Bird Club: Chapter One

Chapter One

That girl who thought her first kiss was the worst thing ever? 
April would give anything to be her again. 
That boy who trapped her in a parking lot to get it? 
April would do anything else he wanted if it meant she could go home to her mother again.

She only went out with Randy because he wouldn’t stop asking. And when some waffle cone batter spilled on her jeans the tenth time she tried to get rid of him by saying, “OK, lick that off my leg and I’ll go on a date with you.”

She figured it would be like when she dodged a boy in junior high by agreeing to go steady if he bought her a purple pony.  
“A real pony, not a toy. And it has to have been born purple, not dyed.”

But Randy was given a pony he could deliver. And that feeling as he hopped over the counter, got down on one knee and licked her leg? If that was dating, April decided it might be fun after all. 

And riding on his moped had been fun. Until he parked it and he said, “We’re not getting back on until you kiss me.”

Stupid breasts. April blamed them more than Randy for this. Before they arrived, boys like him had just left her alone.

She tried ignoring the uninvited lumps until a girl ran past April during P.E. class chanting “boing, boing, boing” with her hands cupped to her chest. Once her friend Amy explained what the girl meant, April decided it was time to get a bra.

April also decides to just kiss Randy so she can leave the parking lot. And maybe picturing the kiss between Pony Boy and Cherry in The Outsiders like she does at the bathroom mirror will help? 

She leans her face toward Randy, hoping real lips might give her tingles like the movie does. They don’t. April freezes with regret and fear as soon as their mouths touch.

“You kiss weird. It’s like you’ve been practicing on the back of your hand or something.”

How could he tell? April feels heat rushing up her neck and hopes for once it won’t turn her ears red.

“I’m just kidding.” Randy pokes her ribs with his elbow, flipping April’s shame to anger. First he forces me to kiss him, then makes fun of how I do it? I gave up a night with my mother for this?!

Weekends are the only times April can relax with her mother. Usually when Evelyn sees her in the living room she says, “If you have time to sit, you have time to dust.” Or, “Is your homework done?”

But on Saturday evenings, April is allowed to just lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling while Evelyn reads. The only light comes from the desk lamp, the only sounds the turning of pages and a spoon clinking on her metal ice cream bowl.

Thinking of her mother gives April courage, so she stands up and demands they leave. Randy looks at his watch. 

“Yeah, we probably should. And I guess I can call that a kiss.”

April would kick him in the shin if she didn’t need him to drive.

Not until Randy parks the moped again does April remember that the last person on Earth she would want to see her on a date works at the theater.

“Hey, April,” says Seth, who will be sitting behind her in Driver’s Ed on Monday after watching Randy drape his arm around April.
 
“Two adults, please,” says Randy, grandly pulling a $20 from his wallet. “Don’t think she’ll pass for 12,” he adds with a laugh, giving April’s shoulders a squeeze and making her want to die. 

At their seats April slouches down to hide from anyone else she might know, which invites Randy to put his hand on her thigh after she props her knees against the seat in front of her.

“Be careful with Randy,” she hears Kim telling her at work before he came to pick her up. “Maybe don’t wear a skirt, you know?”

“Yeah, right,” said April, having no idea what she meant until Randy’s hand perched on her leg like a smug bird, but not asking any questions because she didn’t want Kim to find out yet that she wasn’t cool. 

Kim only talks to April because they go to different schools, so she doesn’t know to ignore April like all the other cool girls.

April also didn’t tell Kim that she doesn’t even own a skirt, because no one in her house wears them. Her mother used to, but all April sees her wear now are slacks to work, and jeans or shorts on the weekends. 

And her sister Hannah? She’s even less of a girl than April.

Hannah has one skirt she wore once after spending hours of red-faced misery at the mall shopping for her junior high graduation dance, finally settling on a long-sleeved white blouse and a long cotton skirt. 

When April went with her mother to pick Hannah up, she saw her sister “dancing” in a corner of the gym with another girl,. As she watched her long hair flipping from side to side as she hopped awkwardly from one foot to the other, April knew Hannah would never date a boy. 

Evelyn must have known the same, because later she asked Hannah if she had danced with any boys.

“No.”
“Do you like boys?”
“No.”

I don’t like boys either, April thinks as Randy’s hand begins moving down her thigh.

“Is this OK?”

She wishes she could say no and push his hand away but she doesn’t, and spends so much time tracking the hand’s distance from her underwear that when the lights come on, she can’t remember a thing about the movie. 

At least she wants to go home so badly that she has forgotten to care what Randy will think of her house, though he will only see it at night, when you can’t really tell how small and old it is, or see the jungle of weeds and blackberry bushes in the front yard.

Randy parks his moped behind her mother’s little Honda station wagon in the carport and April can see inside the kitchen, which has a glass door between two big windows. Her father is sitting on the wine barrel behind one of the windows where his transistor radio gets the best reception. 

“Is that your dad?” 

“Yeah,” April says as her father moves away from the window. She wishes he’d come outside to get her, but she knows he’s just giving them privacy. 

“Kiss me. Bet you won’t kiss me in front of him.”

Just wanting to go inside, April leans toward his cheek, but he turns his head.

“No. On the lips.”

April looks at the smirk on his mouth. Nope, I’m never doing that again. She turns and runs up the brick path to the kitchen door, calling over her shoulder, “Thanks for the movie.” 

She opens the door and breathes in her kitchen, vowing to never leave her house for a date again. 

“You’re home early,” her father says.

She wants to throw her arms around his stomach and bury her head in his chest, but she just nods and bounds up the stairs to her mother, who is sitting at her desk.

 

Chapter Two