Birdy

I dream of a girl. She sings to baby elephants on a pink-sanded beach. The elephants hoist their trunks to her in thanks before they saunter into the wavy water. They don’t return to shore. The girl’s alone. I wake. I’m alone, too.

The girl is in my dreams the second night. She smiles at me as she spells her name with fallen queen leaves. Birdy. I try to tell her my name, but she skips off into the green wilds.

“I’m Carly,” I say when I open my eyes.

Birdy leads me into the green wilds. We sit on a cool patch of soil. She hums with the multi-colored butterflies while she collects hairy coconuts. She cracks one with a rock and hands me a half. The milk is creamy as it finds home in my belly; it fills me like dense baker’s bread. Her coffee-colored curly hair is long like the queen leaves. I let her braid mine with whispering white flowers.

The white flowers still nest in my hair when I get out of bed. They whisper they love me. I love them, too.

The breeze is gold. It unbounds my brown skin. Birdy tugs me in the friendly water with her. The bottom fish tickle my ankles, and I laugh into the sun. This is peace. This is everything.

I want to ask her where she’s from. Why I dream her. She doesn’t answer. I tell her my life isn’t happy like it is here. My mother is dead from a bitter cancer while my father abandoned me at birth. I live with my aunt now, who smokes more than a smokehouse and drinks more than a swearing and sloshing sailor. I tell Birdy I’m sad most times, that I feel like I have no one. Not even the endless God I hear about in church. My personality is too shy to befriend classmates at university, so I don’t have many companions. Perhaps only one.

The world itself is sad, too. I describe to her our horrid president, the countless black bodies gunned in cold streets by bigoted and backwards cops in blue, football players punished for kneeing against barefaced injustice. I explain mass shootings, those that devastate sacred churches, mosques, and the members connected to them. Those that shatter schools full of shining children and heartened teachers. Then I’m weeping and wailing in her honey hair.

She lifts my chin to kiss my cheeks and forehead. Her hand veils my heart. I ask her if she’s leaving me. She shakes her head no, though I watch her step into the wavy water, where the bottom fish reside. She doesn’t return to shore.

I’m awake. The wavy water swirls in my veins. The coconut milk livens me. The queen leaves and the whispering flowers shelter me. The green wild and its butterflies hum between my ears. I smile.