T.R. Steele

Home

It’s true. Their numbers are increasing, breeding activity becoming more and more common, thanks in part to human intervention. You had never seen them before, not even in childhood, when you were more alive to noticing such things. But when you start seeing them, above skyscrapers and darting over parking lots, you cannot stop seeing them. You learn that over the centuries, the dead trees they used to nest in had been taken from them; but later, they found refuge in a forest of chimneys, their long, dark hollows stirring some memory in the swifts’ bones. But then the chimneys dwindled, felled like trees, brick and mortar replaced by stone and glass. You begin to understand it was people who had ruined their first homes, and their second. 

It is people who owe them their third refuge.

*

I lived in a small room in a main floor apartment with two roommates and had for around six months. They were nice, and we smiled as we passed one another in the narrow hallway, but we weren’t friends. It was a stepping stone sort of apartment, and I kept finding reminders of this, remnants of tenants past: a bobby pin caught between floorboards. Half of a pill that wasn’t one of mine in the corner of the closet. A long, dark hair caught in the layer of glass between window and screen. I felt like an intruder, as if I had walked into someone else’s house and settled down there.

But it was a nice house, old and sturdy. I was lucky, my friends had said, to have large windows and an outdoor space that we shared with the units above and below. I liked to sit out there when the entire house was quiet, usually in the early morning, when the chimney swifts in the smog-filled sky tittered hundreds of feet above me.

They were so small as to seem like insects up there, darting and twisting and turning on a whim. I saw their sharp wings flap incessantly as if slicing through the sky. And I never, ever, saw them land.

*

They can’t alight. Their legs won’t allow them. They can only grip what is vertical: trees, the sides of buildings, the fabric of a sweater. Like bats they climb and they hang. Their wings cross over one another, bisecting their bodies, scissoring. Their eyes are bright and their mouths are wide, their beaks barely visible. You might see them and suddenly understand why some people are afraid of birds. But if their story were different, you might never have seen them at all.

Their eyes are bright and their mouths are wide, their beaks barely visible. You might see them and suddenly understand why some people are afraid of birds.

*

That summer I lost my job, which was not as dire as I thought it would be. I knew it was coming. I had been fading from it for some time. But I still felt the reality of it sink as heavy as stone in my gut.

I had enough money for a few more vials of T, several months worth of groceries, rent. I was okay. I’d get another job. I would. But for the time being I had the swifts, and my thoughts, and the roommates who weren’t friends working overtime or travelling or generally absent. 

I made the best of it: walking shirtless in the apartment. Listening to music on the shared speakers. Sitting outside whenever I wanted, watching the sky, the swifts.

The house, I learned then, had a chimney, partially hidden by a new, more modern roof. Now I was freed from the morning routine, free from work, I began to watch the swifts more intently as early as dawn. I’d watch them from a white plastic chair bent with age among the drooping hydrangeas, the slightly overgrown grass. I wanted to see one emerge, or dive into the mouth of the chimney. I wanted proof I was making a difference, even though I had not built the house or offered the swifts a home; I was only witness.

*

At night, the swifts dive down into the chimney and crawl up and over one another in the dark. You’ve never seen this, but you can imagine it, picturing them like ants in a tunnel. Their fledglings bracketed, clinging to nests shaped like shelf fungus, lining the walls. The swifts scrabble, scrape, sending little tremors through the house. They whisper words to one another pitched so high you cannot hear them. But you feel it as you crawl into bed, sweat-streaked and exhausted from doing nothing all day. The soft silence of their language, filling the walls with meaning.

*

On the solstice they seemed to have grown in number: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. I couldn’t keep count. I sat in the chair in the backyard. It was so hot, the kind of heat that made the air feel as if it had a weight. I let the condensation from my glass of ice water drip onto my bare chest, my scars seeing the sun for only their fifth or sixth time. I was empty of thought, of feeling. As the city hummed around me and the swifts chattered above, all of it a constant motion, I lifted my feet off the ground and imagined I would never touch it again.

*

You wonder what it would feel like, to be among so many bodies, downy and soft in some places, and sharp as thorns in others. To have them buffet against you as they shift and cling, taking hold for the night. To make a home for yourself in a hostile place, echoes of ash and smoke and soot. To never be alone, no, only growing in number each year.

*

It wasn’t that my life was empty. It just needed to be filled.

I felt an ache that I’d soothed with school, then work, then more work, and now that was gone, it had no balm. But I had roommates; I had some friends; I had a future. I knew that. I breathed that in, as often as I could, between mouthfuls of thick air. 

It wasn’t that my life was empty. It just needed to be filled.

Another quiet evening in an empty house. The sky was pink, the sun setting into redness. I sat in the chair, looking up. I watched the swifts gather in numbers greater than before. The world was tilting; they were angling toward migration. The summer had swept by. The night closed in.

I watched as they swirled around the chimney, circling it, diving in, chattering constantly, crawling over themselves as the dark chased them. It was beautiful, the way in which they never collided, their swarm made up of the shards of sky I could see between their insectile bodies. Some clung to the outside of the chimney. Defying gravity. Always facing upward, beetle-bright eyes full of the setting sun.

I wanted to follow them. To know what it was like, to be a part of a larger whole, to be made only for the endless sky.

*

In the morning, as dawn broke fogged and yellow, swifts pour from the mouth of the chimney like smoke.

If you are watching, looking out at the pale grey sky hemmed with pink, you might see it: a man, stiffened by a summer night’s chill, standing from his white plastic chair, walking toward the cloud of birds until he is held under the shadow of their swirling mass. You might see him stand there, waiting, as the birds take in the sight of this figure they have wondered about many times before. You might watch as the man raises his arms, as if asking for them to lift him up. You might watch as the birds dove down, answering the unasked question.

You might see them cling to him, dragging down his clothes, claws digging into skin and hair. Hear the tittering, loud, bright, beautiful. Witness the first of them, crawling up his neck, to the side of his face, clinging to the frame of his glasses, eyes bright and curious. 

You might watch as the man opens his mouth. 

You might stare, unblinking, breath held back. 

You might see the swift, the first of many to be drawn to the warm, the dark, the promise of a new home, climbing carefully inside.