Mrs. Bird

We knew nothing about Mrs. Bird except for two small things: She didn’t believe in God and she liked to walk alone. Even her name was a mystery to us. We only called her Mrs. Bird because the first time we saw her walking through our neighborhood, she wore a bird on her t-shirt. And we didn’t know if she was a Mrs. either but felt she needed a title and Mrs. just seemed to stick.

The first time she walked through our neighborhood, which was also the only time she wore a bird on her shirt, she was followed by a man who tried to take her hand. He called for her to wait—he was about her age, in his mid to late fifties—and every time he almost grazed her fingers, she pulled her hand away until he stopped, finally, in the middle of the road, his shoulders slouched, watching her go on without him. 

A few weeks later, we saw that man’s picture on the third page of the paper, like an afterthought, with the words “Local Man Gone Missing” in bold black ink underneath it.

Another time Mrs. Bird walked through our neighborhood, a man named Jim, who spent hours weeding his garden, smiled at her and said hello. She kept walking as if she did not see him, which seemed rude since Jim was the nicest man in our neighborhood. The next time we saw Jim outside, his dog slipped out from under his fence, and ran straight up to Mrs. Bird, yapping at her for a treat. It tugged on her socks and nipped at her legs.

The next day, Jim’s dog was nowhere to be found.

“She did it again,” we said.

The truth was, we were a little relieved it was just his dog. We thought he’d be the one to go missing, like that afterthought of a man from a few weeks before.

“I bet it was Mrs. Bird,” we said, and Jim looked at us, his head tilted to the side. 

“Who the hell is that?”

The next time Mrs. Bird walked by our house, we got on our bikes and followed her. We trailed her by a few homes, until she turned to us and said, “I like to walk alone.”

That night, we convinced ourselves she was coming for us. We bolted the doors, locked our windows, pulled the curtains closed in every room. We stayed together, the three of us, until our parents said we couldn’t share a twin-sized bed. We tried to sleep not knowing which one of us she was coming for, if not all three. In the morning, when the first light peeked through our windows, we ran into each other’s rooms, found each other awake. “Thank God,” we said, and in the foyer beneath the stairs, a voice said back, “I don’t believe in God.”

Mrs. Bird stood there, looking up at us, not quite smiling, not frowning, not really doing anything with her lips at all. She was expressionless, blank. Even her eyes stayed fixed on us as if they had always been there, watching our every move.

“You don’t believe in what?” we asked.

“God,” she said, and before we knew what to think, she opened the front door and left, continuing, as she always did, with her walk.

We asked our parents if they’d let her in. We asked if they’d unlocked the doors. We asked if they’d heard us talking to a woman who didn’t believe in God, and they looked at us with their heads angled just far enough to the side we couldn’t help but wonder if we were crazy. 

But the next time Mrs. Bird walked through our neighborhood, she paused at the end of our driveway. She hadn’t paused when Jim’s dog nipped at her feet, hadn’t paused when that man tried grabbing her hand. And unlike the times she’d kept her eyes laser-focused on whatever lay before her, she allowed herself a brief sideways glance, knowing we’d be in the gaps between our curtains, her eyes now locked on ours.

We almost hit our heads when we let the curtains go.

Our parents rolled their eyes when we told them. They insisted the next time we saw this “Mrs. What’s Her Face,” we go outside and say hi. “People aren’t scary when you know them.”

We doubted this was true for everyone, especially strangers who break into your house, but we figured we’d try it, that it was better than just waiting for her to return each night.

So, we stood in our yard and waited. Jim gardened across the street, still without his yappy little dog, and behind us, our parents sat in lawn chairs, staying with us, they claimed, for moral support, and not because they thought we might be right about her.

“Go on,” they said, miming with their hands to move forward as Mrs. Bird rounded the corner with her usual nose-in-the-air gait like she was better than us.

She stopped when we waved our hands. “Excuse me,” we said. Her long neck curled toward us, her arms stayed at her sides. Our parents nudged us forward with a slight nod of their heads. “Hello,” we said, mostly looking down. “Do you mind if we get to know you?”

“Know me?”

We nodded. 

Mrs. Bird glanced at our parents, as if looking for confirmation. Then she studied us with golden eyes.

“Why?”

Why. Wasn’t it obvious? Because our parents assumed we were missing something—that there was an explanation for what we saw. That our minds had simply wandered, and if we gave her time to reel them in, we’d understand the person who stood before us.

“I guess we want to make sense of things.”

Mrs. Bird stood there a moment, before repeating what we said. “Sense of things,” she said with a laugh. Or maybe it was more of a trill in her throat, a warning to get out of her way as she raised her feathered arms. She flapped them as we froze, angling her nose to the sky, her heels inching off the ground. For a moment, her body lifted before it crashed back down, and finding that she was stuck, her reptilian legs charged, her wings opened and flapped, and in the chaos, our parents scattered, running, we assumed, to save themselves.