Any Respectable Distance
Shin started raising a flock of Jian birds in the backyard three months ago after he got laid off. He changes their water and feed every morning before I wake, and by the time I’ve dragged myself out of bed, he’s sitting by the window with a plate of sunflower seeds, splitting them open and discarding the shells in a neat pile on a napkin and popping the seed meat into his mouth while watching the Jian attempt to fly. Shin thinks the Jian are romantic since they can only fly as a fated pair, but I’ve always thought the Jian looked stupid. I’d rather have no wings than one silly, clunky wing that drags around as you walk and lifts you a millimeter off the ground before you tumble back down. That’s what the Jian do all day: jump from the tree trying to fly before falling like slightly buoyant asteroids. None of them have found their fated pairs, and these Jian have grown up together so I doubt they’ll ever find their pair from this flock.
“Are they supposed to pair by now?” I ask as I enter the kitchen and reach for a mug in the cupboard.
“It takes time to find a good partner,” Shin replies. Not that it took very long for us to find each other and seal the deal with a ring and vows. I liked cheering on his efforts in climbing the corporate ranks because that meant I could retire early, and he could buy me fancy air fryers and organic strawberries. “I’ll do better than that—I’ll hire a gardener to maintain a fruit orchard in the backyard,” he promised. Six months before the layoff, he bought packets of seeds and sowed them in empty kimchi jars on our windowsill. He misted them daily before leaving for work and tracked their growth with paper rulers printed at his office. Our yard is full of Jian now, though. Shin claims the poop will fertilize the earth.
“Even a good partner will need some coordination if they are to fly any respectable distance together.” I place my mug full of water into the microwave and walk over to where Shin sits. He used to make fun of me whenever I used the microwave instead of the kettle, but I hate the sound of the kettle screeching. He stopped mentioning it after he realized that the gas used to heat the kettle hiked up our energy bill more than the microwave did. Instead, when he’s not paying attention to the Jian, he tells me cold water will boost my metabolism. I know he just wants to save money.
Even as I approach, Shin continues to face the Jian.
“That’s not how they work. This isn’t like paired sports where you’ve got to practice with your partner. This is instinct. True love. Fate. Once a Jian finds its pair, flying becomes instinct.”
“Sure,” I say, wondering what fuels his certainty. “Any prospective pairs then?”
Shin shakes his head. The microwave beeps, and I wrap my sleeve around my hand and pull out my mug. I add a few of the remaining tea leaves Mom sent when she last visited, outraged by our paltry stock and droopy bags of Lipton. The tea seems to help with my digestive system, or it could be because I’ve stopped eating chicken—Mom thinks chicken causes all ailments, although Shin calls it pseudoscience. Shin and I got into a huge argument after he insisted on buying only $0.99/lb chicken thighs and no other meat, leaving tofu as the sole source of protein for Mom to subsist on during her last visit. Now we use my credit card for groceries so I buy bags of frozen shrimp and pork trotters weekly—at least until Shin finds a new job. “Soon,” he claims, although I’m not sure when he finds time to interview when he eyes the backyard all day.
One of the Jian catapults off the tree and onto the ground. It stands and then stumbles on its legs, bent at odd angles like crushed pipe cleaners. I set my mug on the table and slide the back door open. Shin refuses to interfere with their flight attempts, and I feel sick if I watch them limp around, so I step into an old pair of slippers I now use exclusively outdoors and slowly tread toward the bird, trying not to scare it off. The Jian will abandon an entire tree and nesting area if they detect a disturbance even if there’s no other tree large enough or strong enough to act as a home base. These creatures are mercurial and sensitive, and Shin has become overly indulgent, constantly re-landscaping the backyard to be more bird-friendly as soon as the Jian abandon it. He piles mulch and garden stones in different corners of the yard based on feng shui; he uninstalls and reinstalls new birdhouses he has designed to hook on the fence. I’d asked him to fix our broken DIY clothespin picture frame while he had all his newly purchased woodworking tools out, but he said the frame was too delicate to handle and it was time to use a proper picture frame rather than my flimsy arts and crafts.
Despite the disturbances from Shin’s backyard makeovers, the Jian return to the tree soon enough. Normally it’s me or the hawks who scare the Jian from their habitat, although I only visit to fix their wings. The Jian don’t know the difference, and I sound heavier, more imposing, pulverizing blades of grass and acorns as I approach the limping bird.
It attempts to run away, dragging its wing behind. Up close, I notice bleeding from the open fracture near its ulna. I am a shadow’s distance away from the bird when it gives up and shifts more of its weight onto its stronger leg which looks like it too will collapse. I scoop the bird from the ground and hold it to my chest as I return to the house.
Shin stands by the back door, one white-knuckled hand around the handle, his feet bare against the hardwood floor, his slippers abandoned by the kitchen table. He opens the door for me and purses his lips.
“What now?” I ask since he refuses to say anything even after I lock the door and place the bird in our laundry basket as I dig for a first aid kit.
“You need to stop interfering. This is a breach in its habitat. It might not know how to return to its natural lifestyle.”
“It’s this or it dies,” I reply as I pull out a box of bandages and sit cross-legged on the ground next to the laundry basket. The Jian shifts its head, staring at me and then Shin, shaking its wing minutely. I stroke its wing and feel its shivers even though the house should be much warmer than outdoors.
“It won’t die once it finds its fated pair,” Shin says.
“And how’s that search going?”
“Not well, if you keep interfering.”
I apply pressure to a gauze pad on its leg, slowing the bleeding from a wound I discover has reopened, most likely a scratch from when the Jian fell from the tree again. Once the bleeding subsides, I apply a dab of antibiotic ointment and then wrap it with gauze, covering the area around the break. Midway through wrapping the gauze, I decide to devise a splint from a cotton swab. The Jian has settled down, its wing motionless and its head leaned against my arm. It struggles to keep its eyes open.
“They’d have better luck finding their fated pairs as buried corpses or as coyote feed,” I say. “Is it so important that they die trying to learn to fly?”
Shin believes that you can’t get anywhere in life without suffering and working yourself to the bone. “Some people just give up after losing their job,” he said. “But I’m still up and running and so are the Jian.” I would’ve preferred if he kept his job and health insurance, but he insists he’ll find a better-paying company. In the meantime, I’ve added him to my health insurance plan, but the numbers get tight if we operate according to his children-after-twenty-five-but-not-before-thirty plan.
He ignores me and slips out the door as I sit with the injured Jian. He gathers stray branches from the ground, the sharp, tiny sticks poking into his arms and chest as he bends to pluck yet another. The Jian outside stay clustered around the tree, climbing to the first rung and hurling off, flapping their single wings madly while crashing down at a slant from their unsupported side. They don’t fear Shin as they do me. Shin moves like a ghost, imperceptible and faded like his body has been diluted by the wind. Even as he nears the tree trunk, the Jian continue jumping and falling, perhaps even more aggressively than before, as though they need to prove their efforts. Shin doesn’t stay around to watch. He turns to the side of the house where we keep our trash bins against the fence. Removing sharp branches won’t do anything to prevent the Jian’s injuries, but I refrain from saying this out loud. Shin probably knows too: The Jian are tenacious, but not stupid. I doubt even they believe they’re capable of flight, not with the way they eye the tiny finches and blue jays and hawks that flap and soar from above, symmetrical wings working together seamlessly and ceaselessly.
The Jian beside me nudges its beak on my hand, and I pet its head and body. It extends its neck closer to me, and I let my fingers graze through its feathers, feeling each barb and afterfeather, too soft for flight. Even its wing seems built for failure—the wingtip far too stiff to spread wide enough and aid in soaring, the overlying feathers without a strong enough grip to prevent slippage, the overall shape too flat for air pressure to build underneath the wing. I don’t think any level of compatibility would be enough to hold a pair’s wingless sides tight and let their wings propel them into the air for long. I stroke its back and wing, avoiding its injury. I lift the Jian out of the basket and into my lap where it relaxes. The Jian seem to prefer being held—something I realized after several attempts to heal them.
Over the next few weeks, the Jian recovers and begins to follow me around the house. I stay away from Shin’s office cluttered with small Lego models and gadgets so the Jian navigates smoothly over the carpet which I vacuum every other day. I keep an eye out on the ground in case I step on its dragging wing, or if it lags or stumbles. Its leg hasn’t recovered completely, but it can walk much more consistently than before. I can tell Shin is upset that I’ve kept the one Jian in the house because he ignores it and barely speaks to me, but he doesn’t force me to throw it back into the yard. I spend my evenings treating the Jian’s legs and scrutinizing its wing and the little stub on the other side of its body where a wing should’ve existed for a flight-capable bird. The Jian doesn’t seem to mind that it can no longer drop from the tree like Newton’s apple, but I grow concerned that taking it from its habitat for too long might truly ruin its chances of finding its one, true, likely mythical partner. I’m not sure I can call it hope, though.
Shin and I first met as partners for a school project. We designed and 3D-printed a hand brace to assist people with cerebral palsy. I could never properly shape and extrude the latches where the finger pieces hooked onto the knuckle piece—the dimensions always slightly off from Shin’s original vision, so Shin did it himself. He never participated in any user studies before coming up with the design, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that this device would only impede anyone trying to use their hands. I had gathered that data which Shin told me to slap into the background section of our paper, read by me and a grammar checker. Somehow we scored well. I suspect no one wanted to cross-check the proof of concept’s practicality, and it looked complex enough to be correct. We were snarkers-in-crime: gunning for the grade and laughing at our peers who decided to stick it out in academia, trying to reconstruct unpublished code and reproduce experimental results in papers we largely thought were made up.
I purchase several sheets of foam board and cut wing halves from them. Initially, I try to attach one wing half to the Jian’s stub, but it simply drags like the real one. Then I glue two wing halves to a center section, also cut from foam, and finally stick a spar onto the center in front of the last airfoil bend. I attach two winglets perpendicular to the foam and hold them steady as the hot glue cools. After several days while the Jian recovers completely, its fractures closed and healed, its legs angled in the right places, I harness the wingspan to the Jian’s back, covering its natural wing as gently as possible.
“There you go,” I say. “Now you don’t need a partner.” The Jian follows me outside to the backyard, and I lift it to the first rung of the tree. The other Jian have already fled to the corner of the yard, furthest from us and closest to the back house entrance.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I say. The Jian shakes its feathers, and I see a corner of its natural wing slip from beneath the wing set. It jumps.
Instead of falling, it glides in the air, its body lifted by the breeze, its foam wings holding strong. I eagerly turn to the kitchen, pointing to the airborne Jian so Shin can see. But his chair is empty. He’s probably using the restroom. I wait for the Jian to glide to the ground, pick it up, and place it back onto the tree. The wings are too heavy for it to climb the trunk itself, but you can’t win them all. “Wait until Shin comes back,” I tell the Jian. He has so much to see.
Lucy Zhang (@Dango_Ramen) writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, The Spectacle, Redivider, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Hollowed (Thirty West Publishing) and Absorption (Harbor Review). Find her at lucyzhang.tech.