When my kids ask me about the strange woman who lives across the street, feeding the brown-speckled birds every night, I always keep my lips shut. I don’t tell them about the woman’s daughter or her curse that turned her into a bird. Instead, I instruct them to mind their own business and remember that I love them very much. They’re six and eight, so their thick eyebrows always furrow at my enigmatic words, but one day, they’ll figure it out. For now, I can hold on to the promise of their innocence and obedience – how long I’ll have them, one can never tell.

 

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        When the skies beam baby blue and speckled birds gather to soar in the humid air, I imagine connecting eyes with one of them, small and beady. Maya Alcantara is now a bird, but for a long time – nineteen years – she was human. She finished grade school on top of our class.

I can’t tell you how many times my mother dropped her name during my graduation dinner. I’d managed to bag one medal for honesty, which was secretly a pity award for the kids with overbearing parents, but my sole medal didn’t compare to Maya’s twelve.

        “It’s because she works very hard,” my mother had said, her forehead creasing.

        “I work hard, too,” I’d pouted, holding up the bronze medal as proof.

        My father must have heard the crack in my voice, because he swooped in with a comforting remark.“Everyone worked hard to finish grade school, no matter the number of medals.”

        “Yes,” my mother said carefully, like she was wrangling the word out. “One thing’s for sure: Maya’s going to have a bright future.”

        After Maya turned into a bird, I invited my mother over for dinner. I repeated the words back at her, asking if she envisioned Maya’s bright future to be the sky. My mother was rendered silent, probably for the first time in my life.

​

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        Maya burned out in high school, crashing like a bird electrocuted on a wire. She landed flat on the pavement, while the rest of us meandered around, content without expectations placed on our necks like nooses. We barely noticed her descent once seventh grade came rolling,

adjusting to caffeine-powered body clocks and unforgiving deadlines, until she started to strike

out.

        Come eighth grade, Maya stopped going to classes. After a while, her name was etched permanently on our blackboard, under the ‘absentees’ label. We didn’t think much of it, because she had become ordinary, a glimmering speck against the constellation of fiery stars that were math geniuses and student council officers. That is, until her mother came to school one year later, thinking Maya was there to be picked up. She raised hell in the principal’s office, the town’s two-person police office, and especially to her separated husband who had migrated to Canada. We heard her never-ending shrieks as she yelled through her cellphone in the streets,

daring Mr. Alcantara to drop the call one more time.

        After five days of frantic searching without any leads, we began to hypothesize that she had gone to Canada. We imagined her caked in makeup and carrying a branded handbag to disguise her age, tucking her clinking grade school medals into the bottom of her suitcase.

        Maya was found in a small apartment she’d been renting out for a month in a back-alley street outside the neighboring town, paying for rent with her father’s guilt-gift credit card.

        From ninth to twelfth grades, Maya was dropped to and picked up from school by her mother. We think it became worse of her mother breathing down her neck. Maya, still intelligent, found ways of escape in school: locking herself up inside janitor’s lockers, inciting fire alarms, and hijacking the school’s radio system.

        Her superlative in our high school yearbook had been ‘Most Free-Spirited’, a desperate attempt by the teachers to euphemize the word ‘troublemaker’. If only we had known how right we were, how morbidly spot-on the label was – I have no doubt we would have changed it.

 

--

 

        Most of us didn’t make it out of the city. In fact, given Maya’s track sheet, we assumed that she wouldn’t leave, as well. It turns out we underestimated the power of Canadian dollars; Maya received the crisp one-way ticket we’d imagined her holding five years ago.

        The world went on. We drifted apart, clustered into different colleges now, circling each other warily during basketball meets and swimming heats. I managed to survive my first year in college with minor bumps, keeping my grades afloat. The memory of Maya was tucked to the back of my mind, only occasionally reminded of her when I got back home after a late commute, seeing her mother sitting stiffly on the porch of their now one-person home.

        Maya returned just before Christmas, her jet-black hair turned blonde and her eyes lined with kohl. My father and I had come home one day from gift wrap shopping, and she simply stared at us, across the street, with vacant eyes. I didn’t miss the tattoo that snaked out from below her neck, curling towards her jaw like a slash morphing into a gaping wound.

        That night, the Alcantara house burned. When Maya and her mother emerged, one bright-eyed and smug, the other blurry-eyed from sleep and choking out the smoke from their lungs, they were never the same.

 

--

 

        Given Maya’s house had been reduced to dust that coated our roofs, cars, and front doors like stains, the family of our old classmate, Jen, offered Maya and her mother a place in their duplex. They claimed the space graciously. Jen invited me and a couple other people to come over one afternoon, shamelessly calling it a reunion.

        We all knew we were there to eavesdrop.

        When I reminisce the cold surfaces of drinking glasses that we pressed against our ears as we strained to hear through the thick wall, I honestly don’t remember much. The same goes for Jen, Amelie, Grace, and the rest of us there that day. We tried to piece it together, but each time we gave proffered up our memories, the puzzle of Maya became blurrier. Some were indignant she had morphed into a bird, while others preferred to think rationally despite the certainty of Mrs. Alcantara’s words. After a while, we settled on common ground, to please the skeptics among us: Maya had disappeared.

        There was no body. There was no evidence.

        In my mind, I still hear the raging timbre of Mrs. Alcantara’s angry shouts. “Then go! Fly away, fly away from your problems again!” she’d bellowed, before an agonizing gap of silence. Then followed the chirping, because when Mrs. Alcantara exited her shared bedroom, Maya was gone. A brown-striped bird pecked at the sealed glass window, begging to be released.

 

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        When my kids are fast asleep, wiped out from a long day of sports training, I eagerly tuck them into bed, and lock the front door behind me. What I usually do takes nothing more than ten minutes, but it always feels much too similar to sneaking out and disappearing with the wind.

        Mrs. Alcantara still camps out in her modest, one-bedroom bungalow that rose from the old house’s ashes. We were expecting something bigger, but after her ex-husband’s lawsuit for Maya’s death and Mrs. Alcantara’s insistent silence, she decided to tone down on the grandeur. Now, she’s reduced to the neighborhood grandmother. Children on bikes give her weak,

distracted hellos, and parents walking their dogs shudder discreetly away from her door. 

        Maya’s mother sees me coming, and so do the birds. They begin to squawk, but as I near, holding out my empty hands, their agitation descends into light chitter. I lean forward, resting my hips against the cracked porch railing, placing a row of leftover rice grains onto the wood. The birds on the porch flutter towards the grains, the beating of their wings making up for the silence Mrs. Alcantara and I lapse into, more often than not.

        “My kids asked about you,” I tell her.

        Mrs. Alcantara’s eyes have gone milky and pale, one of her eyes claimed by diabetes a few years ago. She struggles to steady them onto me. “They did, huh,” she mumbles. Her voice has gone raspy from disuse. After all, there’s no one for her to nag or chase around, unlike my mother, constantly calling to make sure her darling grandchildren are doing well.

        “I’ll tell them about you soon,” I say. All of us made up our minds to do so, at least those who continued to believe that Maya had turned into a bird. For now, we keep our annoyed curses and screams locked in our throats, even though our own parents constantly nag us to be harder on our kids, to use words that spite them to stop rueful behavior. They raise their eyebrows when we tread over our statements carefully, telling us to be firmer with our children.

        Look where that got Mrs. Alcantara.

        “Are you still looking for her?”

        Whenever I ask this, I always receive the same response. Today is no exception.

        “Yes.” This admittance is not enough to prove that Maya’s mother turned her into a bird, but it’s ample to remind me it is a possibility.

        I know that the lifespans of these sparrows and finches are three years; Maya’s disappearance has almost reached its fifteenth anniversary. I know that her mother sets up shop outside her house every seven o’clock at night, without fail: through sun, typhoon, earthquake, holiday. I know that Maya’s gravestone is nothing but a small nest in her backyard, where the other brown birds nest and play and raise their young. I know all this, but I choose to keep my silence.