(7) Bruce Meyer: Rats with Wings
Charles was told yoga would be good for his nerves but most of the poses made his heart race.
What if he tore his yoga pants?
What if he farted. Should he look around and blame it on someone else?
What if his back seized, as it often did, and he could not exit from a Downward Dog and he’d have to walk around the rest of the day explaining he was not doing the pose for his health or looking for change that had fallen out of someone’s pocket but that he was in pain?
Why didn’t his chiropractor have no appointments available until late next week? He decided he would not attempt the pose, especially the Downward Dog. He had more respect for dogs than to claim he understood what they were all about.
A mystical sitar played in the background of the studio as the teacher spoke.
Why did the teacher not know that parts of Charles were ripping? How could the teacher know his pupil was failing?
Failure, Charles asserted, is personal. It is not what one shares. And why should he? No one wants that kind of lousy truth to get out. No one wants to know that his body could not pose like a dog. What would he say if he met a friend in the street on his way home?
“Hello Charles, what’s new with you today?”
“The dog just wasn’t in me.” Would that be a suitable reply? Would the friend think he’d lost his mind? The idea of the Downward Dog made Charles anxious that there was a dog inside him, that it would be healthy to find it. He closed his eyes and saw trees and fire hydrants and wanted to go to the change room as soon as the lesson ended.
“Practice this at home,” the yoga master told him.
Each day, Charles began his yoga by opening the balcony door. His yogi had told him that he should feel the animal he was assuming, embrace the pose, feel the limits of his human form, and press against them, exceed himself in both mind and body. Only then would grow. Only then would he feel the benefits of his lessons and the three hundred dollars he paid to sign up for ten sessions where he was surrounded by lithe young women whose bodies could contort and alter as if they were shape shifters.
If Charles was self-conscious among a room of fellow practitioners of the twisted art, he felt more uncomfortable every morning as he practiced his poses. He didn’t want his neighbours or the people in the opposite block of apartments to see him struggle to bend over his belly. Even with the door open, people would talk. They’d say, “There’s that man contorting himself again.”
But he had to have the door open. Yoga works up a sweat.
That’s why he hated the seagull. The seagull watched. It not only watched, it was there every morning and tilted its head almost upside down not just to look Charles directly in the eye but to express an inquisitiveness, to express the thought non-verbally, “I have no idea what you are doing and you look really stupid doing it.”
The bird perched on the railing and looked as if it was going to share Charles’ secret with the world.
The first day, Charles threw a slipper at it. That was stupid. The slipper fell five floors from his apartment balcony and was run over by a lawnmower.
The second day, Charles tried to wave his arms. The bird mocked him, waving its wings back. Charles felt like an idiot.
On the third day, Charles held out a crust of bread. When the bird reached to take it, Charles pushed the gull off the railing, thinking “That’ll fix him.” That didn’t work. The bird fell a few stories then flew back with the crust in its mouth.
Charles decided to switch to hatha yoga.
He closed the balcony door. He turned on the hot water taps in the kitchen and bathroom. He turned up the heat, turned on the open oven full blast. Sweat poured down his face. The balcony door fogged. He fainted.
The apartment might have gone up in flames.
What saved Charles was the sound of the seagull slamming into the door again and again. The bird didn’t want him to die. The creature wanted Charles to stay alive and be amusing.
When Charles got up the strength to open the door the next day and let the summer breeze come in and cool him as he stretched and posed, a dozen gulls gathered round to watch.
Charles knew exactly which one the ring leader was. He had gathered an audience, and the longer Charles posed and bent, the more the other birds tilted their heads and began to caw to each other. Charles motioned the bird with his index finger in the universal ‘come here and say that’ gesture. The bird obeyed. It was going to get a closer look and hopped over the threshold into the apartment. Charles lunged at it and grabbed it, shaking it in fury as he throttled the bird by the neck.
This, it crossed his mind, was how the Ancient Mariner screwed up. What was he doing? Had he lost in senses? He stared at the bird. It was too late. The body was limp in Charles’ hands.
The other gulls set on him, pecking him, and covering him in their pin feathers until he was certain he was choking on one.
He held the limp bird and stood up, amazed.
A gracefulness flowed into every sinew of his muscles. He closed his eyes and saw a dumpster behind a supermarket, and an empty parking lot where he felt he had to fight for a piece of pizza crust someone had tossed from a car window the night before. And it tasted so good, and he would fight so he didn’t have to share it with the others. It was his. His pizza crust.
He realized he could balance on one foot while holding the dead gull’s body aloft with one hand. The other gulls looked on. They were impressed. He lifted his leg in the Bird of Paradise pose and felt his inner light shining inside him the way a lighthouse passes its arm through an dense grey fogbank and the fish follow it thinking it must be the sun and the gulls chase the fish for a feeding frenzy and the world is in balance, mind, body, and soul.
Bruce Meyer is author of 64 books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and non-fiction. He has won the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction and been a finalist in the Bath Short Story Award, the Fish Fiction Prize, and other competitions. His next book, Down in the Ground, will be published in October. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.