Kirsten Mustain, Author

His knuckles against my eye socket made me see stars.  I fell into little points of light in a dark field, foolishly thinking that those cartoons where eyes turn to X’s and stars spin overhead were based in reality after all.
When my eyes flew open again his hands were pressing my throat.  I fought to breathe, slipped away like water down a drain.  
There is a blank spot here.  
He told the police I hit him with a floor lamp.  It is true that in the wreckage of morning light, the lamp was bent in the middle, the light bulb shattered.  When I fell backwards that night it was close to my hands.
But my next memory is of crouching like an alley cat beneath the brittle limbs of the mock orange bush.  Shriveled leaves still clung to the branches and they rustled in the sharp wind.  I curled against the frozen earth.  
He stumbled in the darkened yard, crawled on hands and knees, howled my name.  
I waited.
He muttered, “bitch, fucking whore,” went back inside.
I climbed the fence, ran through the three A.M. neighborhood.  My bathrobe flapped against my bare legs.  My feet, sockless inside a pair of high-heeled snakeskin boots, must have been cold, but I didn’t feel them.  
People must have seen me that night, standing at the pay phone outside Seven-Eleven, wearing pink terry cloth and one black eye, finger-shaped bruises circling my neck.  Did they stare, or turn away?  All I can remember is the blur of headlights passing as I fumbled to dial 911 on a chromed pay phone, cold receiver pressed to my ear.
Later, barefoot and coatless in the snow, his t-shirt spotted with brown stains, he told me he was looking for me so he could apologize. He was shivering between two police officers.  His hands were cuffed behind his back.  He said he was sober, but something just behind his eyes was spinning like a pinwheel.  

***

I never envisioned myself in a trailer in Oklahoma.  My front porch is rotting through.  A wrong step and the wood will splinter beneath your feet.  A warren of rabbits, a community of rats, and a family of possums live beneath the "skirt".  
The skirt makes the trailer look sturdier.  Pull the skirt back and you can see how  precariously it sits upon stacked cinder blocks.  A strong wind might tip it over.
Storms march through at least once a week.  Lightning slices the ground and thunder resounds in rattling windows.  Tornadoes tear trees up, expose their twisted roots to the sky.  But this trailer still stands, a particle board haven at the edge of the prairie.
I have legally changed my last name.  My phone is listed under C.T. Mustain – my dead grandfather.      
X would never think to look for me here.  That girl who I thought was me with the pink spiked hair, the leather jacket, the bottle of whiskey in her fist, was too cool to live in this place where the nearest espresso bar or alternative club is ninety miles away.   She was too fashionable to wear coveralls and mud boots.  She would have been horrified if the only music on the radio was country and western.
I know what her friends would say because they said it, “No bong hits this morning?  What happened to our little party girl?”
They weren’t my friends, anyway.  Days go by and the only person I speak to is myself.  I don’t know what I mean anymore.   I don’t know if it matters.  I exercise, read every spiritual book I can find, try to meditate.  
I awake at dawn to find my trailer surrounded by golden white mist.  Between the barbed fence lines, strung over blades of grass and tree branches, a thousand spider webs sparkle with jewels of dew.  A simple gift – enough to sustain me for this day.  


***

Maybe it was the red leather pants.
“He’s way too beautiful,” Mary said.  “He must be gay.”
Maybe it was the blond spikes of his hair, his full red lips around a cigarette.  Maybe it was that pair of zebra topped creepers he wore or the Kurt Russell dimple on his chin.
I didn’t notice the reptile in his wide blue eyes.  
He was in front, facing the gathering crowd, his elbows resting on the stage.  The house lights were on.  Roadies were turning the dials of large black amps and hooking up microphones behind him.  
A cloud of marijuana and tobacco smoke hung over the leather and safety pin swarm – the mohawks, the leopard print head tattoos, the mullets, the dilapidated leather jackets spray painted with band names – the Damned, Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks – polyester suit coats, skinny fluorescent ties.
“These people are such poseurs,” Mary said.
Someone handed me a burning joint.  I inhaled.
Maybe it was just the big yellow light shining down from the ceiling, but his hair seemed to glow.  “He’s an Adonis,” I said.
Then the houselights fell and the Ramones lit up red and blue and there was nothing but bass, guitar and drums, and Joey’s nasal New York voice “Beatonthebratbeatonthebrat-beatonthebratwithabaseballbatohyeaohyeahohoh . . .”  

***

The beat is a curious thing.  A drum beat – any drum beat – affects the human heart.  Whatever that beat is doing – however fast it’s going – the heart will match it.  So consider this – when you are at a rock and roll show and the drummer is pounding away on those skins, however fast he drums, that’s how fast your heart is beating.
And oh we felt powerful, sometimes.  There is forward motion in that loud drive.  It will lift you off your feet.   A loud beat can blot everything but itself from the brain.  I was the red and blue light and that big wall of sound rolled me over.  It was the only meditation I knew then.  But a fast heart is a restless heart.
***
 “I can’t believe you actually met these guys!  It’s so cool.”  My 20-year-old friend is sitting cross-legged on the living room floor holding a Ramones album on her lap and smoking a cigarette.  “I mean, punk really meant something then.  It was a real movement.  Everybody cared about each other.  It would be so cool to be part of something like that.”
I choke, stand up, open the window.  She is so young.
“Meant something” and “cared about each other?"  The driving anxiety beat, the hatred those ratty bad boys and girls spewed?
In Denver we could only be so cool.  We weren’t on the east or west coast.  We lived in an oversized cow town.  So we were handicapped, as we saw it.  The scene was limited.  Maybe they cared about each other in L.A. and New York.  Maybe they cared about each other in Denver, too, but I didn't run with that crowd.
Cool was what counted most.  It had to do with shoes and how many drugs you did and how wild and loud and out-of-control you were.  Extreme was cool.  Cool people had a haircut wilder than yours and an air of authority.  They lived on the streets.  They were from London or Chicago.  They had arrived on a freight train.  You only drove your dad's car.  Or the car your step-father bought for you.  
In the eighties having your hair spiked and dyed in Denver meant people were likely to spit on you from passing cars.  Punk was played on local stations after midnight.  Gigs happened in warehouses down by the railroad tracks in the dark.  There was sawdust on the floor.  I was drunk the whole time and high on white crosses and coke and pot and mushrooms, but only once and never again unless I'm in the mountains.  
We had a message.  But goddamn you can’t understand the lyrics anyway.  
To me the punk movement seems now like a smoke screen for the tragically insecure.  
At the Rainbow Music Hall, cloudy that day in the parking lot.  Southern Comfort and cocaine and the pavement almost black with dampness.  I was wearing pointy-toed ankle boots, black spandex, my leather jacket with “The Damned” painted on the back.  And Bobby had a razor blade in his pocket.  And we were laughing.  The saddest things are funny when you're high and waiting for the show.  But the razor blade was dull and he was sawing my hair, pulling off more than he was cutting.  Clumps of brown and bleach falling in the parking lot and people smoking and watching.  “Hey, Bobby, you missed a spot.”  I'm gritting my teeth, but damn, it hurts.
Pain was what life was about.  You had pain and you had to kill the pain.


***
I was high with the taste of cocaine in the back of my throat, sitting in a rolling leather chair in the engineer’s booth.  The bass and the drum tracks had been laid.  
X was playing his white Stratocaster.  His fingers slid down her smooth long neck.  His eyes found mine through the plate glass.  He made an Elvis lip, belted a lyric into the microphone.  “I am pins, you’re a ball to me.  You can bowl me over any time.  I like falling for you.”
The engineer grinned, passed me a joint, “Your husband sure has a voice on him.”
I smiled, exhaled a long stream of smoke, “Yeah.”  

***
therapy . . .

“I thought he was going to be a star,”  I say.  “It was the music.”
Kathy's brown eyes look blank.  She bites the eraser on the end of her pencil.  She nods.
“He was a total dickface, but when he picked up his guitar he was like an idiot savant.”
Kathy blinks, “Idiot savant?”
“He was really talented even though he was an ass.  He wrote songs to me.”
Kathy nods again.  She hasn’t written anything on her yellow legal pad.  “He made you feel good, at first.”
“Well, yeah, it was the story, wasn’t it?  All my friends were jealous.  All the people on the scene knew who he was.  The band was packing shows in Denver and Boulder.  We all thought it was only a matter of time before he’d be riding in the back of a limousine – he had the looks and the voice.  He could write killer tunes.”
“What do you mean by ‘the story’?”

a fairy tale moment . . .  

Once upon a time there was a punk rock princess.  She didn't have a kingdom like a regular princess, instead she was being held hostage by an evil step-father.  She desperately needed a prince to save her.
She knew what this prince looked like.  He looked like Billy Idol or Brian Setzer.  He had the coolest shoes and the raddest hairdo.  He smoked and drank and always had some cocaine in his pocket because that was fun.  All the coolest people did cocaine.  Maybe he was a little rough and rude on the surface, but deep down he was sensitive and smart.  Only the princess would know that.  He was going to be a famous rock star and the princess was going to ride with him to the top and everyone would see how cool they were. They would have a mansion where they threw big parties for the sole purpose of showing off their ultimately hip images to the crowd of less cool people who would worship them.
This is a story written by a 13-year-old.  She told herself this story so many times that it became the key part of her existence.  It was her ultimate dream.  When people said to her, "Follow your dream," or "Dreams aren't real," this was the dream she imagined they were talking about, because everyone knew that princesses couldn't be writers.  She did follow her dream – not the unrealistic one of writing, but the realistic one of finding a prince to save her.
Perhaps a fairy godmother could have patted her on the shoulder and said, "Sweety, rock stars are about the furthest thing from Prince Charming there is on earth.  A boy who looks like Billy Idol and smokes and drinks and carries cocaine in his pocket and wants to stand on stage and sing to crowds of screaming girls who are throwing their panties at him is not for you.  Image isn't everything, but a boy who's macho and rude on the outside probably isn't sensitive and sweet on the inside.  Besides, when you grow up, the last thing you'll want to be is 'cool'.  'Sane' would be much better.
Furthermore, all the money in the world isn't going to make you happy and fame isn't all it's cracked up to be.  And you really would rather gain your own success without having to define yourself by a man."
But the fairy godmother in this story was just a tiny whisper at the back of the princess's head.  She couldn't be heard over the shouts of tangled thoughts and the shame of low self-esteem.  And the princess would have rebelled against any good advice from a grown-up because that was the only thing she knew to do when adults started talking to her.  They sure didn't know how to live.  How could they tell her anything true?
The only thing the princess knew that made her feel better was the music she played on her stereo when she was locked in her bedroom by herself.  The rock and roll guitars and those sexy male voices that seemed to understand her.  They sang about her alienation.  They sang about her anger.  They sang about love.  It sounded like they were singing just for her.  And those voices that seemed to be her only lifeline in a world of fear and despair were the only voices she listened to.
So her life's quest became finding that rock and roll Prince Charming.  She didn't care about school or the future or careers.  She had one object only and all her energy went into finding it.  At every concert, at every party, even in the halls of high school, she sought Prince Charming.  
And then one day she saw him.  Prince Charming in the flesh.  What she saw was the image she was looking for, and since she thought image was everything, she thought this boy was everything.
It just so happened that this boy was looking for his perfect image too.  A pretty girl with low self-esteem.

and back to therapy . . .

“You know – the fairy tale.  I was nineteen.  I had to get away.  My step-father was making my life hell.  X seemed like the answer – the knight.  I know it was stupid – Prince Charming was never real and X was just a wanna-be.”
“Try to get away from saying deprecating things about yourself.  You aren’t stupid.  People make mistakes.”
"My life has been one big mistake after another."
Katy smiles.  "You're only 28.  You've still got most of your life ahead of you."
I roll my eyes.  "Don't remind me."
"You mentioned your step-father."
My gaze falls to my checker-board Chucks.  "Yeah."
"You haven't really ever talked to me about your childhood."
I shrug.  "Not much to tell.  Glad it's over."
"What about your step-father?"
"He was a dickface, that's all."
"Did he hit you?"
"No."  My chest constricts.  I can barely breathe.  
"Why was he a dickface?"
There is a litany down there where my heart is pounding.  Rage bubbling up.  A cauldron of sick black liquid.  It says, "I hate you I hate you I hate you."  A Stiff Little Fingers song.  A chant to a driving backbeat in the backseat of an orange Volkswagen Superbeetle.  Let me introduce you to my step-father.  His name is Randy.  You can see his pony-tail between the top of the seat and the headrest.  Note his long nose in the rearview  mirror, beady brown eyes behind glasses.  Do not speak.  Maybe he won't notice you.
I loved words.  Robert Frost, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, they gave me words.  But words spoken in my shaking voice – those were the most treacherous things of all.  No matter what I said or what I meant.  Every word could be twisted to mean exactly what Randy wanted it to.  Sometimes he didn't even hear the words I said – different words entirely.  Silence was best.  
Kathy waits.
"I was shy," I say.  "Excruciatingly painfully shy.  In kindergarten I didn't talk in school for the whole year.  The kids thought I was a deaf mute."
But that was before.  Randy wasn't even living with us then.  
Kathy is patient.  She draws a distracted squiggle on her yellow legal pad.  
"You never knew what he would say or do.  And even when everything was fine, it wasn't fine.  I mean, say you come home from school every day and make yourself an avocado sandwich.  You've been doing it for the entire school year and then one day Randy comes home and catches you eating your sandwich in front of the television.  You think you're in trouble because he told you last week not to eat in the living room, but it turns out he is furious that you've made an avocado sandwich.  He tells you you're too fat already and he's not buying you any more clothes because you'll just get fatter and not be able to wear them.  He tells you you're a parasite – how dare you eat the avocadoes he paid for – but he didn't even pay for them because your mom is putting him through law school and she's the one who buys all the groceries."
"Sounds pretty confusing."
"My sister and I had to lurk in the background.  If he noticed us we were in trouble."
Stop being such a baby.  He never laid a hand on you.  Words don't count.  They're just lies people tell to make you feel a certain way.
We are sitting around the "butcher block" table in the kitchen, yellow and orange vinyl placemats with spotted mushrooms on the borders.  Four of us – Mom, sister, me, Randy, eating tuna casserole with spinach noodles and melted cheddar.  
Mom begins in her "chirpy cheerful" voice, "Kirsten's English teacher sent a note home today."
Randy's eyes flicker briefly.  His voice is flat, disinterested, "Oh."
"They got the tests back today.  Kirsten's in the highest percentile in writing for the whole country.  Her teacher read her essay aloud in class."
Randy pushes his glasses up with his middle finger as if he's flipping us off.  His eyes have that derisive glint again.  He speaks of me as if I'm not there.  "Too bad she can't get better grades in math.  Writing never got anybody anywhere."
Mom sniffs.  "Still, it's quite an achievement."
"An 'A' in geometry, that would be an achievement and she'll never do it because she's so lazy.  Anybody can write."
I take a deep breath.  "I'm don't even have geometry this semester!"
"And you never will be because you aren't smart enough!  What are you going to do with your life?  You sure as hell can't stay here and leach off of us all your life!  You'll never get anywhere wasting your time writing when you should be doing math!"
Kathy frowns.  "What about your mother?"
"What about her?"
"What did she say?"
"I don't know.  I don't remember."
"Did she defend you?"
Did she?  "I don't know.  Sometimes, maybe."  She couldn't control him.  He wasn't sane.  Like that Poe song, "You Can't Talk to a Psycho Like a Normal Human Being."  But she married him.  She's married to him still.  "My mother loved me!"
"Of course she did."

***
You may think you can heal by fixing things on the outside.  You buy the new work-out video; read another book.  
If only . . .  then . . . that hole would be filled.  
Lots of people keep on forever like that.  Sometimes I wish I was them.  They have the comfort of being normal.  They can still settle for what they see on television.  Every new bottle of shampoo holds infinite possibilities.


***

Maybe it was three a.m.  Long after the show was over, at a party for the band.
The room was spinning, too bright with wine.  It was easier to keep my eyes closed, but every time I parted my lids, I could see him there, on a couch across the room, talking like he was already a rock star.  Three girls sat with him, fish-net legs across his lap, bare arms around his shoulders, giggles.  His kissed their mouths by turns.
A throaty voice next to my ear, “Did you drink this whole bottle?”
I squinted:  Angel’s high cheekbones, her red red lips, her round blue eyes, lids dark with liner, the shock of burgundy hair dipping over her perfectly plucked brows.  She was holding the green neck of the red wine bottle I’d been clutching.
“Is it all gone?” I asked.
She frowned, “Are you coherent?”
I tried to smile without sending the room reeling, “Yeah.”
“If that bastard was my husband, I’d kick his ass.”
“Yeah.”
“Fucking prick doesn’t know what he has.  You’re better than all of those stupid sluts.  If you were my girlfriend I’d have you home in bed right now.”
“These lights are so bright.”
“Come on,”  She shouldered my arm, dragged me out of the chair.  
The next room was soothingly dark.  I sprawled on the bed.  
She untied my combat boots.  They clunked to the floor.  Her light fingertips pressed my arches, massaged my toes.
I moaned.  
“You think that feels good?  I can do something better.”
“So do it.”
“You are so smashed.  You’re lucky I’m not the kind of person who would take advantage.  Some of those wolves out there would eat you alive.”  She flopped down next to me, flicked a cigarette alight, illuminated her face with a deep tug on the filter.  Smoke poured out her nose.  “What the hell do you see in that bastard?”
“I don’t know.  He’s handsome.  He’s going to be famous.”
“For being the biggest prick on the face of the earth?”
I laughed. “No,  music, silly.”
The door flung open.  Light stabbed my eyes.
Angel was already on her feet. “Call me.”
The bed creaked and lurched with the weight of his knees.  “What the hell are you doing in here?”
“I drank too much.”
“You know I want to do Angel!  Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Angel doesn’t like boys.”
“I could have watched at least!”  He flung my heavy leather motor cycle jacket on me.  A metal snap slapped my face.  “Come on, we’re going!”

***

The first time I tried to leave without planning.  I calmly explained that I couldn’t be with him anymore, put some clothes in a bag, got in the car.  He broke the driver's window with his fist and yanked the keys from the ignition as I was backing from the driveway.  For months every time I vacuumed my car I would hear the chink of tiny shards of glass sucking into the tube.  That night he cut up my driver's license and my ATM card with a pair of scissors; scattered the pieces over our green carpet.
“Next time I’ll kill you,” he said.


***
It stopped raining.  The streets were wet black, the sky sullen gray.  I was still in my car in the driveway, numb to time.  It could have been three minutes or half an hour since I got home from work.  My bruised eye was camouflaged with make-up and strategically combed bangs.
X was inside behind those mint green curtains.  The T.V. was flickering.  His fuzzy white belly would be poking out between his BVDs and his t-shirt.  I dropped my forehead to the steering wheel.  "Please God, please just let me die."     
Something fluttered.  I slit my eyelids.  A hundred tiny bird wings.  Twittering voices, a sparrow flock, brown and gray, dropping from the sky.
Even though they were individual birds, each moving in its own way –  ruffling their feathers, dipping their beaks in the puddles, arching their necks to swallow, dunking, shaking their wings – they all moved together, like one organism.  Through the thickness of my tears, I saw myself – not a lone confused human in an infinite void – but a tiny piece in a puzzle of galaxies, stars, planets, people, birds, animals, trees, rocks, and atoms.  
A single beam of sunlight split the clouds.  I felt in the deepest part of my being that God had spoken to me through those tiny birds.  Strength returned to my limbs.  My tears stopped flowing.  Somehow it would be all right.   

***
Once a month the town of Afton, Oklahoma has a “poultry swap.”  
Among booths that sell funnel cakes and frito pies, people set up cages and pens with chickens, ducks, piglets, goats, kittens, puppies, calves and donkeys; miniature horses and geese.
I am a foreigner here.  My checker board chucks look strange among the cowboy boots.  I hesitate to speak, afraid my language won’t be understood.
At my feet, fuzzy yellow chicks are crammed into a cage on the ground.  Fifty cents each.  Small and downy, they never stop cheeping.  Their vulnerability beguiles me.  I buy twenty, bring them home to a small chicken wire enclosure.
They strut and scratch with pluck, but their hold on life is tenuous.  One of them drowns in a heavy rain before it can get inside.  One gets loose and is caught by a cat.  Others die for no apparent reason – sprawled in the dirt – pecked by the living.
I have limited experience with dead things:  a squirrel in the road, his glassy eyes still wide; my grandfather, small and peaceful, nestled in puffed satin.  Now fourteen chickens are buried in my yard.  


***

Angel’s lips were painted burgundy – the same color as her hair.  She batted her lovely wide eyes at me from beneath her bangs; made an “o” with her mouth, sucked cola through a straw.  
I stirred my ice.  “So I think I’ll have enough money in another week.  You were right – he hasn't found out about the new bank account.  I’ve just got to figure out a way to get him out of the house for a few hours.  All he does is lie on the couch and smoke dope – except when he’s following me.”
“My brother, Lane, knows him.  Lane could ask him to go out to the bar or something.”
Outside the plate glass coffee shop window, X's red Chevy pick-up cruised slowly by.  He turned his eyes from the road, looked in at us.
Angel slammed her glass to the formica table top. “Your husband is a fucking psychopath!  Does he do this wherever you go?”
“I told you he did.”
“Jesus Christ, I thought you were exaggerating.”

***

My neighbor rescues 225 chicks from a factory farm.  She brings me twenty in a cardboard box already slimy with chicken droppings.
These modern chickens have been bred for one purpose only.  Their pale wobbly legs will barely carry them.  Their feathers are white so they may be plucked easily.  They will never be able to fly like my other chickens.  It will be a miracle if they can travel six feet to find their food and water.  

***

The phone rings and rings.  I do not answer.  My voice might give something away.  Somehow the person on the other end of the line might see me, still in bed at noon, huddled beneath the covers, weeping.  They would know I am a loser.  
I wish just to fill my lungs with marijuana smoke and find myself in that floating place, like a fish in a glass bowl.  Just one more joint.  It would silence the litany which hammers upon my sensitive nerves.  I live in a trailer.  I have no money of my own.  I have no job.  I have no husband.  I am worthless.  I can’t even buy drugs anymore.
My life is just a series of bodily cravings that I can't satisfy.
I sit in my meditation chair.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Sob.  Breathe some more.

***

Kathy nods.  “It’s part of your process.  You’re remaking yourself right now.  That comes with a certain amount of growing pains.  Don’t be so hard on yourself.  You’ve survived a lot of trauma.  Ease up – give yourself a break.”
“But I don’t understand why things are like this.”
She pauses, wiggles her pencil between her fingers. “Patterns – we get comfortable with what we’re used to.  It’s incredibly difficult to break the pattern, but you did it, and – well – it’s kind of like giving birth.  You’re on the right track, but it won’t be comfortable for a while.  That’s why more people don’t do it.”  


***

Most of the factory farm chickens die, some with wings and legs spread gruesomely, bloody peck marks on their heads.  Others seem to have merely gone to sleep.  Some are killed by predators a good pair of wings could have carried them away from.  
But one of them survives even after she has mysteriously lost a leg.  I name her Stumpy.  She has learned to push her head through the chicken wire and keep it outside the fence where it can't be pecked.  Sometimes she lays like this all day.  
It is painful to watch her move.  Her wings flail as she hops on one good leg.  The stump of the other leg moves back and forth helplessly.  It might be kinder to kill her.

***

I wrote X a note with an orange crayon I found under the couch.  It said, "I'm gone.  I have a restraining order."
We couldn’t carry the furniture, so we kept it simple.  Angel and Lara put some dishes in a box.  I pulled my clothes from the closet.  We slipped into the night with two cats yowling in a carrier, my computer, my best books.  
Lara and I sat on the floor in front of the white brick fire place in our newly rented house.  We lit two red candles.  In the center we placed a large glass ashtray.  Inside the ashtray, we stacked my wedding photos, newly ripped from between yellowed cellophane. X and I both had spiked punk hairdos, sunlight gold from a bottle.  He was using his charming smile.  My eyes were vacant with liquor.  Our color portrait selves shrank and dissolved into fine webs of silver.  The ashtray cracked loudly; split exactly in half.

***

Stumpy has disappeared.
All the other chickens flock around my feet as I toss feed on the ground.  Their surprised chicken eyes hold no clues.
Strolling along the fence row in the evening, I discover Stumpy's white feathers in a heap beneath a large-limbed white oak.  A hawk, then, perhaps.  Perhaps Stumpy got to fly after all.  Perhaps she had one wild ride high over the pasture and into oblivion.
Little birds will gather her feathers to make nests.
As I turn back toward the trailer, the sun pools red on the horizon.

    ***

The red-winged blackbirds have returned to the tall grass.  At night I hear the primal song of the frogs.  It will be an early spring.  
Outside my window, a fragrant honeysuckle climbs and entwines the dead trunk of a tree, weaving homes for the mocking birds, the sparrows, the cardinals, the goldfinches, and the black-capped chickadees.
The sparrows, with their sensible brown and black plumage,  look more "real" than the cardinals and goldfinches with their festive red and yellow feathers.  If you cannot believe your eyes, any bird book will tell you cardinals and goldfinches are just as real as sparrows.  I have not imagined the brilliance of their colors.  They've been there all along.