Khaled Mattawa
April 2007

Selima!

My cousins had a parrot. He called only the name of one girl. Whenever the parrot called her name, he would close his eyes and roll his neck as if to swallow or to clear his blue throat. I would run to the kitchen to bring him peanuts which he ate slowly and deliberately, the ones he picked from my palm clicking against the insides of his black mouth. I would then plead with him, calling out my cousin’s name. But the parrot would look past me as though the call took him too by surprise, a burden he had to suffer, a noise that had come from a house now hopelessly shut.

The parrot was never named and that may explain why no one mentions him now. The girl whose name he called married years ago and fought her husband through two pregnancies, but did not divorce. Sometimes when she cooks his meals, she begins to feel a dull hate tighten a fist inside her. When this happens, my cousin sets out on her own. She walks carefully to avoid stepping on hedgehog carcasses or wild artichoke spikes. She looks at the ground for snake and scorpion tracks, listening for the wild wolf-dogs that lurk on the outskirts of the city. She walks for hours to sit under a poinciana, to dip her feet in the stream that sometimes runs past the house deep in the lost parrot’s heart.

From Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable Press, 2003).