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My Uncle Jimmy is standing in his dank apartment, the one littered with dirty needles and old syringes except he calls them rigs and not syringes, and methadone hasn’t done a goddamn thing for him and he has no money for dope so today is the day he’s going to die.
He’s supposed to go to the interview at the spark plug factory in an hour, in the suit his father—my grandfather—bought for him, but he won’t pass the piss test, and he’s just done with all of it. Uncle Jimmy is sweating and shaking, he tells himself he’s just dope sick and Jesus this heat, because it’s September in Toledo and it’s miserable, and he’s eyeing the electrical cord on the broken refrigerator and the belt on the floor that should be holding his pants up but isn’t and he’s deciding which one is going to be the strongest, the best for stringing himself up from the pipes in the basement of this shithole building.
And this is when the bird shows up.
Let me be clear: this is not some trilling, jewel-toned songbird, nor is it a sharp-eyed blackbird, nor is it a cuddly storybook duckling. No. It is an ugly-ass moa bird, so gigantic it barely fits inside the room, and it doesn’t even have feathers, it’s covered in bristles, I kid you not. And get this, it doesn’t even have wings. That’s right, a bird with no wings. It squeezes its giant self through the window, because of course there’s no screen, and the flies are all over and in and out, so why not a fucking bird too, an enormous ugly thing that takes up the whole room? Uncle Jimmy has never seen a moa bird, but neither have you, because they’re from New Zealand and they went extinct like six hundred years ago. And my uncle feels an immediate kinship with this bird because the moa birds are all extinct for one reason: the first humans on the island hunted and ate them. Every last one of them.
So Uncle Jimmy and the moa bird, they’re staring at each other, and because of the state my uncle is in, he doesn’t think it’s even a little insane when the bird opens its beak and starts talking.
“You going to waste that new suit on this shit?” the bird says. He stares down my uncle, his eye round and glossy as a button.
And swear to God, Uncle Jimmy starts laughing. He laughs! Because he knew if the bird had said any other dumb-ass thing—you’re only forty-five, what about your little blond-haired boy, your sister’s also going to be dead from drugs in a few years, can’t you spare everyone?—Uncle Jimmy would have drop-kicked that bird out the window just for the pleasure of watching him go splat.
But this moa bird, he’s smart-mouthed. And he talks like he’s from Detroit. And because of all this, Uncle Jimmy’s too-many-teeth smile cracks wide open and that throaty, boyish laugh erupts and … well. It’s been a long time since he laughed, and damn, this is some crazy shit.
The bird keeps staring at him, smirking, and then tells Uncle Jimmy: get the hell out. When Uncle Jimmy just stands there, the bird shuffles its great taloned feet on the peeling linoleum and says I mean business, brother. And my uncle starts laughing again—how I love that laugh! My sharpest memory of him, so sharp it hurts like a needle scoring the skin—and his golden mop of hair is shaking with his laughter. Of course he’s not going to the interview, because the bird can talk but he’s not magic, he can’t change the results of the piss test, but Uncle Jimmy’s leaving. He’s walking out of that dump, leaving behind his rigs and his needles and the belt and the refrigerator cord and maybe he’ll go to a twelve-step meeting but probably he won’t, but hey, he’s leaving. Because he has got to tell someone, anyone, this story, even if they are never, ever going to believe it.
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