Return of the Stork

It’s the morning of my death. I hear a vehicle in my driveway, though I’m not expecting anyone. Beep. Beep. Beep. I go to the window and see the rear of a double-seated mobility scooter. One enormous wing is draped across the back of the passenger seat, white feathers fringed with black ones, a violet sheen overall. A beaked, bare head sits atop a long scaly neck.

I watch my hand close around the door handle, the skin tightening across the metacarpal bones, plunging towards my wrist.

Outside, cool air rushes through the crabapple tree and into my throat. A cloud of petals tumble sideways. Some overnight rain has made the fence appear freshly painted. The weeds radiant. A narrow puddle runs down the centre of the driveway, reflecting a strip of morning sky. The driver performs a graceful j-turn and stops abruptly, facing me now, remaining seated, a long heavy bill resting against its narrow breast.
The creature flings back its head and emits four startling sounds, CLACK CLA-CK CLACK CLACK, which, absurdly, I interpret as: Long time no see.
I feel moved to respond. ‘I’m sorry. Have we met?’ My words emerge and vanish, as if spoken in a small carpeted room. 
A single deafening CLACK from the bird, which I’m almost certain means: Yes. 

I walk to the passenger side of the vehicle and pause, inviting the driver to withdraw its wing from the back of my seat, which feels excessively intimate, even if we have met before. The invitation is declined. I step onto the footboard, turn and lower myself onto the seat, into the crook of the bird’s axilla. It smells cleaner than I imagined, like citrus and mountain air, a youthful scent, which is jarring. From the neck up, the creature could be six thousand years old. Its skin looks made from fragments of granite glued onto a sock, which was then charred, then inflated, then deflated, then gathered at the neck and pulled thinner over the fist-sized scalp, almost snapping with tension as it reached the tip of the beak. 
Across its lap is a fluffy yellow blanket, radiating warmth. 
The bird half extends its outer wing to adjust the side mirror and in doing so the blanket slips, revealing a thin, stick-like thigh beneath it. I look quickly away, feeling as though I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have.

‘Always helps to show a little leg,’ the bird says, clearly now, in a honeyed human voice. 
I say ‘Sorry?’
‘You’re as green as a Granny Smith!’ She says then wheezes with laughter. When she speaks again her voice is shockingly high: 'Like you walked in on your grandparents doing the 1969!’
I start laughing too, silently and uncontrollably, afraid I’ll never breathe again. Eventually I manage to ask: ’Am I dead?’
The bird sighs and fans her feathers in front of her face. ’Not exactly.’

The bird maneuverers the scooter around winding suburban streets. The weather can’t decide what it wants to be. Livid clouds fold voluptuously into white ones, framing patches of powder blue sky. Mists of rain glitter in occasional sunshine. There are no people anywhere. The cars are parked and empty. Dewy roses lean over front fences, so lush and vivid in colour they’re almost nauseating. Wet footpaths slither along walls of pulsing green vines. Cushions bulge on porch seats. 

The bird and I are getting to know each other. I learn that it’s a wood stork, and female. 
She explains: ‘A way to organise a group of beings that happen to look alike, I suppose.’
I ask her if she has a name of her own and she says no. Then I ask her if I can call her Nancy. It was my grandmother’s name. The nice one.  
She says: ‘Fine by me.’
I discover she’s had some recent health problems, which explains the scooter. She only flies when she has to. 

Nancy glides onto another leafy street. Up ahead, two people are extracting bags from the boot of a car. A dog growls balefully through a fence. Their voices carry on the quiet air.
One of them says: ‘Stay, Bones, stay.’
The other one is talking to the driver, who is still seated in the car. She is saying: ‘Oh well. We haven’t been able to go on a big trip or anything. But that’s a small price to pay in these times.’
‘Oops! I think you might have taken my basket,’ says the driver. 
‘Eddie! Bones, enough! Eddie you’ve taken her basket. The one from Janelle! Sorry, Linda.’ 
‘Don’t be silly! We all got the same ones.’
The man returns with a basket filled with shapes wrapped in colourful tissue paper. ‘Janelle’s baskets, eh?’ 
‘So thoughtful.’

I hold my breath as we approach them, expecting shrieks, but the closer we get the further the group becomes, until they're a pinpoint in the distance and we’re on the edge of the city, moving fast. Evidently the scooter has some go. Trees and buildings fall out of focus, blurring the edges of sickening detail. 

‘I don’t get it,’ I yell into the wind. ‘Was Bones a symbol of inescapable doom? Are we meant to be Lindas or Janelles? Was Janelle generous or a people pleaser? Oh God. Am I Eddie?’
Nancy’s beak remains closed and pointed. Beams of light dance in the blacks of her eyes. 

We reach a bridge and the landscape finds its axel. Far off buildings are stationed like tombstones in an old city graveyard. I feel my sternum pulling inwards the further we travel away from the people and dog I love. There’s too much sky from up here.

We pass a billboard assuring us one bank in particular is the one to trust. I panic over how little I’ve saved. A single journal from my childhood remains, half the pages torn out by a later version of myself who couldn’t bear the one before. I had a lock of my own baby hair for a while. My mother gave it to me after clearing out some old boxes in her garage. She didn’t want it, but felt weird about throwing it away, so for a couple of months it lived in a sandwich bag in my bedside drawer. It made me very uneasy. One day I threw it in the bin under the kitchen sink. As I closed the cupboard, a bird landed on the fence outside the window. It faced me at first, then hopped 180 degrees and fanned its tail, a brown and yellow motif. It moved with the lightness of a creature unsaddled by samples of its own DNA, stored for decades as if from the scene of an unsolved murder. I watched it fly guiltlessly away. 

I’m crying now, in a strange high-pitched wail, like a kettle boiling, or the sound that rushes out after something is expelled or born, leaving a hole where the wind pours through. Nancy takes a corner of the blanket in her beak and drops it on top of me. It’s heavier than it looks. I sink under the weight of it. My wail drops to a lower octave. My lungs fill slowly with warmth. 

On the other side of the bridge is a beach where the sun gazes down on the dark blue ocean. We sit on the blanket and I scrunch my toes in the sand, an earthly pleasure if ever there was one.
‘Will I miss this?’ I ask.
‘No, honey,’ says Nancy. ‘Any regrets?’
‘Thousands.’
We both laugh. 

I curl onto my side and Nancy shakes her wings as she stands. She’s tall from this angle. Pure magnificence. The sun glows behind her and I shield my eyes. Nancy gathers the four corners of the blanket so they meet above my body and I feel myself being lifted off the ground. There’s the rush of waves breaking on sand and seabirds squawking in the distance. Flashes of blue and yellow appear in the opening of my cocoon. I’m sleepy now, warm in the knowledge that there’s nothing I need to set an alarm for. The past and future dissolve brilliantly around.