Safety Glass - takahē

There’s power in naming things: swallow/warou, yellowhead/mohua, saddleback/tīeke, tūī is tūī. I name the 23 glass birds flying along the length of our hallway. The long overhead skylight is a reflecting pool, the birds’ glass bodies deepening and lightening as they ring in the weather changes.

Each bird a ‘this is your life’ moment, right there in the hall. The stitchbird bought when I graduated, a rose-pink korimako for my first job. Later, when we married, a pīwakawaka followed by a cobalt-blue kingfisher to match our front door. Later still, when I lost the baby, a green miromiro so pale as to be almost translucent, so small and perfect in my hands I thought my chambered heart would break. And the swallow you bought me the first time you broke my arm.

Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, I think I can hear their feathers shifting and settling. I repeat their names to myself in the dark like a litany until I fall asleep: fantail/pīwakawaka, tomtit/miromiro, stitchbird/hihi, silvereye/tauhou, kingfisher/kōtare, swallow/warou, yellowhead/mohua, saddleback/tīeke, tūī is tūī.

I’m at the kitchen sink when you stumble in drunk. That look in your eye I know means trouble for me. I dart down the hall, but I’m not fast enough. You grab me by my hair, push me backwards, your body pins me to the wall, breath hot on my face. I twist away, and away.

I close my eyes

fantail/pīwakawaka, tomtit/miromiro, stitchbird/hihi

I imagine I hear a flutter

silvereye/tauhou, kingfisher/kōtare

My litany moves out of my head, becomes a sound, becomes an invocation

swallow/warou, yellowhead/mohua

I raise my voice

saddleback/tīeke

A cry rings out, sudden and clear

cheet te-te-te-te

Tīeke, sounding the alarm.

I open my eyes.

There is movement in the hallway, a collective beating of wings as, one by one, birds peel away from the wall until the air is thick with outstretched feathers.

The birds fly at us, beaks pointed arrows. A tūī sinks its beak into your back, sinks its claws. You cry out in pain and surprise. I recognise that sound.

You lead with your fists, take wild swings, collide with soft, barbed bodies. Your elbow catches my jaw. A kōtare flies at you, beats a tattoo of wings across your head. Pecks, retreats, then pecks again, harder this time, draws blood.

You are a mess of bright feathers, claws and beaks and blood. I am there, amid the chattering calls and shrieks, the beating sound of wings and war cries of birds on the attack, defending one of their own.

The birds draw me close; a koromiko whispers honeyed words. Soft wings brush my face, my body, feathers sweep and cosset, calls lull and sooth, then rise in cadence.

A kōwhai-yellow mohua is the first to break away, curving purposefully upwards. More birds follow, up and up, higher, higher still. The mohua shatters the skylight, showering glass and feathers, birds continue to fly upwards, wings dipping and rising in rhythmic flight.

The birds spiral upwards and I rise with them, a graceful warou spinning and climbing, growing stronger with each beat of my wings, up through the skylight, arcing into the night.

PK Granger writes fiction from her sunroom overlooking a tangled garden in Ōtautahi. A graduate of the Hagley Writers’ Institute, she likes to explore the everyday, and then mess it about.