The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

Dan pictures her then as the image Berlin made of her: legs spread apart, a crease of rounded flesh where her thighs meet her groin, or her pubis, or her genitals, where her lips splay apart; her finger lazily taps the nib of clitoris there.

  He has, of course, seen her.

  Seen not-her.

  She is there, on the wall behind his desk.

  ‘I don’t know what to ask you,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I need you to tell me.’

  ‘Let me tell you a story, then. See what you make of it. Do you like stories, Daniel Warne?’ Her voice is like chocolate, he thinks; like better whisky than he’s ever tasted. He feels his skin might break open, cicada-like.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. But he is nervous.

  ‘Good. I’m going to start with once upon a time, because all good stories do. Once upon a time, there was a girl, because all good stories start with girls. Virgins, even better. A girl who can’t stop touching herself because she’s burning up and the only way to cool back down is to come again and again and again.’ Her voice is loose and breathy. Dan imagines her fingers on her vulva. Wet. Is she doing this on purpose?

  Hannah goes on. ‘It feels so good,’ she says. ‘But what she does is wrong, everyone says so. This girl can be anything she wants, she is queenly, imperial, has the brightest future if she takes it in her hands, if she frees her hands up for taking it. But she loves her body, her smooth beautiful body. Why should she have to give up anything? Why can’t she have it all? Why can’t she love her body and more?

  ‘But no one listens because she’s young, and probably blonde, too, because they almost always are in the stories. Hair the colour of flax. And when she persists, they give her a present to keep her occupied. A spindle. An impossible task. Her hands become calloused by the fibres and the threads, her shoulders hunch, and when a little man walks by and sees her there, he is inclined to help her, maybe even love her, because aren’t these stories always about love? Or deception? Or both?’

  She stops then. Trails off.

  After a moment, Dan says, ‘That’s you. That’s you in the story, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m glad I called,’ says Hannah Wallace. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ says Dan, and the line clicks into silence.

  After, his head spins, he’s jittery, can’t sleep. He slips into the bedroom and takes a valium from his bedside drawer, downs it with an old glass of water. Elise doesn’t move, is sleeping or pretending to. He watches her for a moment in the faint light from the street. Her hand on his pillow.

  Maybe in this moment he could crawl into that space and set her hand on his cheek and everything would go back to the way it was before. He could transport them away from this place, back to LA, his tiny apartment, or San Francisco, the bigger one they shared.

  Elise, near the end of her PhD, cross-legged on the unmade bed, shirt too big and hanging off one shoulder. Photocopies of research papers flurried all around her like feathers, ticker tape. Let her look up, and see him, and grin.

  ‘You will never guess what I just read,’ she’d say, waving a handful of papers at him. ‘This paper is killing me! Did you know that human males have wider and longer penises than any other ape?’

  ‘So you won’t leave me for a gorilla? That’s a relief.’

  ‘Well, not for his penis anyway. Gorillas have nice long, thick fingers …’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ he’d say, and laugh. ‘And I love you for it.’

  ‘Ah, but there’s more. Come here, let me show you.’ That look in her eye.

  She’d clear a space for him in the mess beside her. Slip her hand inside his pants. ‘This part here, this little rim at the top is called the coronal ridge.’ Trace it with her fingertip. ‘And do you know what they think it does?’

  ‘Show me.’

  That smile.

  ‘I’ll show you something,’ she’d say, ‘in a moment. Be patient. I’m teaching here.’ Clear her throat, swing her leg across to straddle him. ‘Now, as I was saying, the coronal ridge is very good at semen displacement. Which means that, if I’ve been a naughty girl, and had sex just now with several other men, your penis can remove ninety percent of the semen inside me—provided you thrust deeply enough.’

  Of course, everything she’d read was about sex.

  ‘Well. Isn’t that a sexy proposition.’

  ‘Oh yes. Sexy and functional. You see, it catches here, the semen, on this part here.’ She demonstrates, this time, with her tongue.

  Dan shakes off the memory, and watches her sleep. He cannot transport them away from this place. He’s afraid he never will, that she is bound to a box in the dirt and will not, cannot leave it.

  Back in his office, the too-spare room, Dan digs around in the bottom desk drawer for a cassette. Chapter 4 it is labelled in black marker. Who uses tapes, in this day and age? He slides it into the little tape deck—the one he bought on eBay—and lies back on the bed to listen to his uncle ramble into the darkness:

  My cousin was a professor, a great scientist—chemist, made paint for houses, buildings, that kind of—so I had good genes, very good genes from the start, was very smart. You know if you grow up in Missouri in the seventies and then, okay, I was smart and they would say, if I grew up in New York, they’d say I was one of the smartest people anywhere in the world, okay, but in Missouri in the seventies, eighties, you try to be anything. Went to Chicago, full scholarship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a good student, great, one of the best, went there, did this, painted, you know I still have to tell this again and again, people don’t believe it, don’t get I started from nothing, really. My cousin, a professor, he explained the power to me many, many years ago, the power of people like me. So it really bothers me to have to tell my credentials because you look at what’s going on, and he was right, who would’ve thought, but in the seventies to have nothing, turn up in Chicago, New York, with nothing, I would’ve said guys, look, I’m just here to do the work, it’s not about the power, I’m just the artist, right? The. Artist. Just God.’

  And Berlin Warne laughs, a deep, crackling sound like chip packets.

  chapter 2

  After the baby stopped moving (living) and she birthed him and held him and buried him, and she comes home from the funeral to the drab house they’d prepared (but not for this), she thinks she might never leave her bed again, might turn off her bodylights and will herself to rot into the sheets, stain them with her shape, her fluids, her lack. If only, she thinks, if only she were strong enough for that kind of willing.

  The blood keeps coming, so much of it blotted up and thrown away, and the excess sickens her because this blood was his, was meant for him, and now he’s gone, and everything leaks out of her, drop by clot. She lets it. Deserves it. Maybe, she imagines, she will bleed it all out, desiccate and disappear from inside herself, empty.

  Her nightstand is empty.

  The windowsill, empty.

  The bed is a queen, quilt grey, everything shades of grey and white, and though the blanket is soft and heavy and presses her into place, it’s not big enough for the bed itself, or for her in it. This, she cannot reconcile: that queen does not fit queen. That only a king is big enough to cover the bed and then some, curl into, no matter the angle of the body. She wants to be satisfied with what she has, wants this life to be enough, but it’s not, can never be, now that he’s gone from it.

  She doesn’t want to eat.

  Or speak.

  The rain rushes trickle hollow drop down the corner gutter pipe, and she loses time, loses herself in a pool of threadbare sheets, entombed in dim light, warmed (yes) by the quilt but surrounded by water that runs over, drowning everything.

  Sometimes, she imagines the ceiling is a heron, and it readies to strike.

  But the ceiling is not a heron,

  It’s Eggshell. She chose the colour.

  He’s a good man, funny and kind, but he doesn’t understand. Day after day, he comes into the dim bedroom and slides apart
the curtains and the glass half-door to let the outside in, and the raindrop tip gollops off the leaf-thick tree beyond. Elise breathes the damp air into her bones, too musty and green, terrible and chlorophyllous. She would like to sleep for a hundred years, close her eyes to the creep of the vines, the passing of time, wake up amnesic, and he will not let her.

  He brings her tea on a white and birch tray, green tea for the antioxidants, or chamomile, and miso soup with floating green flakes in it. He pulls her to sitting against the headboard, holds the cup to her lips like a ceramic breast until she takes it into her mouth and swallows. Her belly slops, loose, when she lies on her side.

  When he comes into the room, she closes her eyes to him, wishes him away, and sometimes, as though he has heard her thoughts, he goes. But she is careful not to wish him dead. She made that mistake once.

  She was so young, then, and didn’t think—wished her father dead and her mother died too, and though she’s now a biologist, rational and deductive, she connects the wish to the coming true. Even if she hadn’t really meant it.

  It was a roo, they told her later, a large male grey, and it had bounced off the front of the ’82 Commodore and through the windscreen and was out the back window even before the car hit the tree. Elise, nine at the time, tucked into the back seat and not-watching, remembered so little. Only the thump of impact and the smoosh of her body against the seat ahead and onto the floor and the sensation that a large, furry bird was moving through the centre of the car, tail flowing out behind it. Time pushed the bird past so slowly, but she could not reach it with her small hand, could not pat its smooth feathers before it was gone.

  He was going too fast, they told her later, and she knew he always went too fast, her father, too loud, and even in death he dragged her mother behind him.

  Sometimes Dan sleeps next to her, and his damp gap mouth hangs open, whisky-thick, and she gets up out of bed and walks through the dark house, listening. The rain does not stop, but in the space between droplets she hears the shriek of her mother, of her baby boy—all the cries he never made—and she knows them each for what they are. Knows them in her body, these far-off sounds. They are some kind of home. They set her nerves to fire.

  And when she returns to the bed, she imagines that Dan is her mother or her grown-up boy, and she nestles her head into his arm between the hard of his shoulder and the ridge of his chest, which is not soft as her mother’s was. Her mother’s beautiful, satisfying body, with its curvesmooth breasts and pillowy belly that Elise could jiggle under her hand.

  His body is lean. As her boy’s might have been.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She feels the waves of her voice vibrate into Dan’s ribs, hears herself as the baby would have. She really is sorry for where they are now, what has happened to them, for wanting her mother, her child. It’s not enough to say it like this, she knows, Dan unhearing. But maybe his body will hear, will remember.

  Her mother would have understood. Understand.

  The smell of her warm and den-like, the smell of a mother but also a family, just the two of them.

  They could be everything, she thinks,

  (or thought)

  and she doesn’t understand how a person could need more than this one other person in the world, this inside gone outside person she knew better than anyone else.

  Her mother.

  William.

  But she says nothing. For weeks, she says nothing, so loudly. Closes her eyes against the grey sheets in the white room in the too-green world and tries to burst open, tries to atomise herself into the dank air. Already she’s nothing but fragments.

  *

  Then, one day in May, in a rain break, everything changes.

  Elise is alone in the room, in the bed, sitting up, arms wrapped, forehead on knees seeking darkness. Her pallid blonde hair hangs over her shoulders, messy dreads tickling the pink marks on her hips and, naked, she hears it: the heavy, hard thunk from behind the linen curtain; an abrupt, violent sort of sound. Her body braces for impact, and shattering glass, and a long startled scream. A heavy boot.

  She listens. No sense of time, or day. In her chest, her heart thumps. Under the floorboards, the washer spins with a restless whirr.

  She crawls across the bed, across Dan’s side (empty), her legs weak and sore from lack of use, and slides onto her knees on the carpet. Pulls the quilt over her shoulders and, turtled in this way, she opens the curtain a fraction, peeks into the brightness.

  There, a bird.

  It does not move.

  The creature lies on its right side, left eye staring blankly upwards to the patio awning, short bill, drab brown plumage. Elise catches in her own ribcage. A sparrow. She senses that this moment has already happened, again and again through time, that maybe this bird (same bird) has marked each stage of her life. And each time, she held it too carelessly.

  She slides the door open and picks it up, holds it in her hand, leans it back inside the room with her, and slides the door shut against the day. The squeak of hangers on the curtain rail, she has disturbed a flock of shirts, and they swing and sway above her.

  The sparrow reminds her of the tundra. A cacophony in the air, the lake, the grass, the cree-e and wa-a-ack and peepeep—and water everywhere, snow melting across the compact tundra soil, tipping into ponds the size of playing fields and into thigh-deep holes beneath the dwarf shrubs. She hasn’t thought of Alaska in so long, but here it is, in her hand and her mind, carried into the room with this dead little bird.

  She was twenty-six then. A lifetime ago. A master’s in ecology, the breeding of little birds, and a summer in lamb’s wool and khaki. Hulking binoculars around her neck, hands in fingerless gloves. Incessant mosquitoes. Sandpipers.

  The male sandpipers had come first, rust-browed and leggy, before the big lake had even cleared of ice. They migrated north from wintering beaches in the Bay Area, or Baja, or Texas, to stake their claims over pieces of earth that looked much the same to Elise, even when she crouched. She saw loons and cranes and eider ducks, terns and snipes and small moulting foxes, but she would never see the place as they did.

  Within a week, the females arrived. They wintered further south, in Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, and with bodies as light as fifteen paperclips, they flew all that way. She caught them all in fine mist nets, clipped blue and white and green plastic rings around their legs; noted pair bonds and territories, clutch sizes; marked nests in the sedge with flagged stakes; and waited for eggs.

  Waited for the chicks to come.

  The Alaskan summer was cool, and there was no running water in the shed where the scientists lived. There were only the birds and the birding men and her. Sometimes, she bathed in the sauna with one of them, a ruddy turnstone guy, hot steam sweat on her then-smooth skin, slick with loneliness, long-light nights. He wasn’t her type but he had a thick, seeking penis and a keenness for poems, and reading aloud.

  She was so needy, then.

  And after a while, they came. The eggs appeared, small and brownspecked and arranged in each nest like clover leaves, point to point, wide edges out, tucked against bareskin brood patches for warmth. Each egg a fifth, or a quarter, the mass of the female herself, pushed out singly, one day apart.

  Elise ached for everything to happen—the hatching of chicks, her own success. She couldn’t then fathom how little control she had over any of it, her ambition so ungainly. Each bird, nest, egg, was only a speck on the limitless tundra, unseeable even from the floatplane that brought their supplies.

  She was so stupid, then, to believe in beautiful things.

  Sometimes, she heard them talking, the ruddy turnstone man and the other, and the tips of their words bit her like the mosquitoes did, their tiny bloodbodies smearing down her pant leg and in her boot tops. Laughter swallowed when she entered the room.

  Sometimes, she squatted in her crotch-high boots and closed her eyes and listened to the birds, the buzz, the words,

  and in that space, t
he silence came, a shock, all at once, every voice silent but one. The jaegers. Elegant, ghost-throated jaegers, gull-sized and streamer-tailed, painfully graceful in the air, like a waltz. Their squeaky, child-like calls belying the danger.

  They learned her markings and found the nests, stole the eggs, and swallowed them whole. Frantic, Elise made cages out of old mesh wire to protect the nests, her hands bleeding as she pulled apart spools of it, clipped and tied it, caught her skin on pin-sharp ends. The mesh was wide enough for sandpiper bodies, too narrow for jaegers. She protected all the nests left in her site—thirty-seven in total—and hoped it would be enough.

  ‘Relax,’ he’d say, the ruddy turnstone guy, and mark a trail down her breast belly pubis vulva with his tongue, and she shivered with it, uncertain if she could.

  The sandpiper hatchlings were dappledowned and cottonball soft, and they burst out like popcorn all across her study site, dashed onetwothreefour out of their nests, out of their motherfather’s warmth, out of the cages she made for them. And the jaegers sat on the wire tops and waited.

  Now, dead bird in her hand, Elise is not where she wants to be. Leaning in towards forty, building towards something (not the right thing), right here on the floor, quilt hanging off her belly-flop body, dead bird in her hand. Dead sparrow. Dead baby. Nothing like it’s supposed to be. She’s done the hard work, a master’s, a PhD, the research positions and, now, still on a fucking contract. Five years at a time.

  She wants so much to stay here in Queensland, where she came from, where she’ll die, where a part of her already did. She wants someone to tell her she’s outstanding, and visionary, and essential, and make a space for her. The space she has worked so hard for. And deserves.

  William was not a mistake.

  The thought stabs into whatever she might have begun to think, and disappears.

  Elise imagines Iowa, her aunt’s dinner table, canned peas and mashed potatoes and some kind of meat, overdone. Melamine plates with brown and yellow flowers. Hand in hand, a cousin to each side, heads bowed, the place all God and noise and lace like a dusting of snow. And yet, somehow comfortable. Nourishing.