Christmas Dinner
by Santiago Alexis Mostyn
Instead of a wall, our living room was sided by long panels of glass that reached from the floor to the top beam of the house. In the mornings, before the sun arced high enough into the sky to induce a glare on its surface, the glass, still in shadow, was almost invisible.
This morning, a parrot flying up the valley did not see it at all through the crawling bougainvillea vines and overgrown hibiscus trees. It swooped high above a crimson blossom and crashed suddenly into the unseen surface. It fluttered down through the air and landed with a soft scattering of blood and green feathers on the concrete driveway below. One frantic wing flapped briefly against the ground, dragging the body in a small circle and making the light breast feathers around it tuft up into the air. After a few moments, it stopped.
My hands pressed against the inside of the glass panel, my forehead rested lightly on it. Where the parrot had hit our house there was a faint grease mark. It was momentous to me: not as a stain but as a memory of that final, stinging negation. Down on the driveway, two flies were settling onto the parrot's beak. Another had landed on a nearby droplet of blood. I heard my mother shout at me to sit down. She would not eat Christmas dinner alone. I turned back to the table, where a pot of colorless bean soup and two loaves of bread sat next to a burnt apple pie.
As we ate together, midday came, and the sun finally rose past the top edge of the roof. It charged down on the little death scene, and obscured us from the outside with beams of reflected light.