My husband has turned into a flamingo. It has been twelve days. I can’t let the neighbors know so I only let him out at night. During the day, I hide him away inside and lock all the doors. Pink feathers freckle every room.
I come home from work and let him out. He finds the pool, rests one leg in its shallow water. His neck feathers are a deep pink. His once-blue eyes are yellow. It is an absurd vision—my husband there in the chlorinated water with one bamboo leg in the two-foot end and the other retracted up into himself. I sit in the pool chair with one leg folded under me. It makes me feel closer to him, this little mirroring. I’ve wrapped my pink robe around me, too, and we lie there together, strangely in sync.
I’m sure the chlorine isn’t good for his leg or feathers. I consider having it drained and refilled with fresh water and maybe some algae, but then I change my mind. Of course, that would be a serious endeavor, I tell myself, and maybe he will turn back.
§
My mother waited for my father to turn back from a parrot, even though no bird had ever turned back. Still, she bought a cage when she began to see the signs—he craved crackers and repeated everything she said—and put him in it the moment she woke up to his small body perched on her jewelry stand. I was in college then. She never called, not once, to tell me her suspicions.
She kept him in a cage for almost six months. Even as he flapped his wings and squawked, clawed at the bars, and worked the metal with his beak, she would not set him free. A neighbor, kept awake one too many nights, was the one who finally did it. She got my mother to open the door with the promise of a freshly baked pie and then ran upstairs and lifted the lock. My father swooped down the stairs and out of the house before my mother made it to the kitchen. Only then did she call me. Only after he was gone did she tell me anything at all.
My mother was not alone in this. Many spouses or parents or children try to keep their loved ones after they’ve turned. I once read an article about a man who had kept his wife-turned-toucan locked up for over a decade. She was only freed when their children came to check on them and found their toucan mother sitting on their father’s large ostrich head.
It is a lucky thing to turn into a bird. You get wings. But you leave people behind, so the people you leave try to make you stay.
Some people are very critical of those like my mother, the ones who hold too tightly to our feathered loved ones. They say let go, let go! Let them use their wings! We never know when it will happen or to whom, but it has always felt like a source of failure to my mother, to have someone and then lose them. I used to disagree with her. I used to say that my father left because he needed to. He no longer belonged in our world. But here I am, unable to give my neighbors this bit of gossip, unable to stop wondering if it’s something I have done.
§
As the sun sets, I feed us both. “Frank,” I say to him because that is still his name. “Frank, dinner is ready.” I am not sure if he understands me or can just smell the bucket of crustaceans, but he comes when I call. From extensive googling, I’ve determined that flamingos like algae, insect larvae, mollusks, and shrimp. I’m not quite sure what to do about the first two, so Frank has been filling up on the latter two from a seafood market at the edge of town. We eat our food outside even though it is getting colder, and the late September air makes me pull my robe tighter around me. In a few weeks I’ll have to drain the pool completely.
I take a bite of my frozen lasagna. My new afternoon market runs leave me little time to cook. “My lasagna used to be your favorite, you know. You used to ask for it once a week.” Frank doesn’t look up from his bucket.
I tell Frank it’s our yo-yo year. Up down up down up. “We’ll end up on top,” I say. Our silver-versary is this year. Twenty-five years together. When Frank was still human, I suggested we throw a party. Get a silver cake, invite all our old friends we never see anymore and drink champagne. He thought it was too flashy, but I told him we were worth celebrating. I wonder if he already felt the change in him then. His bones lighter, his neck more erect. Now look who’s flashy, I think as I watch his feathers catch the sun’s fading light.
§
Frank’s transformation was slow, just like my father’s. At first neither of us acknowledged it. It started with a powerful craving for shrimp cocktail. He couldn’t get enough. We were eating seafood once a week, then twice, then almost every night. He no longer craved lasagna. Then he started standing on one leg while talking to me about his day at work or watching baseball or even reading. What changed everything, though, was the feathers. Pink feathers began to sprout out of Frank’s head like gray hairs. We would pluck one and then there would be two more. Still neither of us said anything.
Then they began to grow out of his elbows and chest.
“We need to talk about this,” Frank said one night as I pulled a soft bubblegum pink feather out from behind his ear.
“Whatever could you mean?” I said, then turned away. He touched my shoulder, but I did not move.
“Emma,” he said so, so gently. “I didn’t intend for this. I didn’t.” We rarely cuddled in bed—Frank gets too hot—but that night he held me tightly, and I kept my tears behind closed eyelids.
A week later, I woke to an empty bed. An empty house. Outside, one leg in the pool, stood a flamingo.
§
The phone rings in the kitchen and we both let it go to voicemail. Kelly was the first to call. She wanted to know if Frank would be coming into the office. “No, no,” I said. “Not today! He’s very sick! Very contagious!” Then it was Frank’s sister. I had to tell her that he was busy. “He’s working so, so hard. Never home! Always out!” His golf friends, too, call and call and call. But I cannot pick up. I cannot tell them.
I hear my and Frank’s voices in singsong unison. Hellooo, we chirp. Frank and Emma here! We tell the person on the other end to leave a message after the beep and then we make a sound like a pitch pipe. The voicemail box has long since filled.
The phone rings a second time, then a third time and I know it’s my mother.
“Hi, Mother,” I say.
“Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks!”
“Mother, I’m busy.”
“Come over for dinner. I just made carbonara.”
“Frank and I just finished eating.”
“Then dessert.”
“Mother.”
“Fine, coffee.”
“Another night. I’ve had a long day. I love you.” I hang up as she sucks in air, undoubtedly preparing for a long speech about family obligations.
Frank perches on the couch and makes wheezy, high-pitched honks at the Discovery Channel. Watching nature documentaries is our new nighttime routine. This is not entirely unlike the way we spent our nights before; we’ve just traded ESPN for squawking birds and David Attenborough.
The going to bed alone is new. The screeches throughout the night, too.
We’ve learned so much together. We’ve learned that Frank’s knobby knee is actually his ankle. We’ve learned that he is an American Flamingo, one of eight different kinds. We’ve learned that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. We’ve learned that flamingos mate for life. When we learned this, I smiled at Frank and almost touched his neck. He turned his head from me to pick at a feather.
“Of all the birds, this is a nice one for you to be,” I said. And I meant it. Of all the animals, Frank is so beautiful, so stately. He could have turned into a vulture or a crow. He could have turned into a hawk and eaten the next-door neighbor’s terrier.
Tonight, as I lie in bed, I wonder how long we can go on like this: me and my flamingo husband. I see him in the living room, one-legged and asleep, with his head coiled back against his body. I wonder how many mollusks, how many lasagnas we can handle. How many meals? How many feathers?
At night I dream of moving with him to Florida. We could buy a nice house where it’s warm year-round and we could have a marsh out back and he could do his own hunting. Or we could go farther south. We could go to the Caribbean. Even if he never turns back, we could be there together. He could have his new world and I could still have him.
In the morning, Kelly from his job calls again. It is Monday. She has called every Monday morning for the last two weeks. I tell her he is still sick. “I hope he feels better,” she says, but she doesn’t sound concerned like she used to. “Could you put him on the phone?”
“He’s sleeping.”
I hear her sigh. “I’ll cancel his appointments for the day,” she says. “But he needs to call me.”
“Best to do it for the week,” I say. “He’s not looking any better.”
§
My mother calls while I am house hunting in Key West—homes on the water, homes made of glass. I ignore her as I scroll. I’m supposed to be consolidating the company’s expenses into the master spreadsheet, but what the hell; my husband is a flamingo. My mother likes to call until I answer. She calls again and again and again as if there is always some great emergency. I put my phone on silent. I imagine Frank out on the lawn of one especially grandiose house, his feet sinking into the wet marsh around it. My mother sends a text: Dinner tonight. Quiche. Non-negotiable. Every house is out of my price range, but I scroll until I’ve reached the bottom of the very last page.
I don’t go to my mother’s. Instead, I go to the fish market and buy mollusks and fresh shrimp to keep Frank pink. The men who work there know me well by now and smile broadly when they see me.
“It’s the mollusk lady!” sings one.
“It’s the mollusk men!” I sing back. Together, we smell of dead fish and sea salt—the scent of a seabird’s spouse. I thank them and tip extra, then slide the ice bucket between my front and back seats.
The marsh smell is so pungent that I roll down the windows on the drive home. Crisp wind whips my ears pink. The air is significantly chillier today, the wind cutting. The leaves are already reddening. In a few weeks, the sun will be setting before I can let Frank out.
§
My mother’s sedan is in the driveway when I pull in, parked parallel to Frank’s. Of course she’d come.
“Mother!” I call as I slam the door closed. “Mother!”
I drop the bucket of mollusks in front of the fridge and storm into the living room. There she is. Mother reclined in our ottoman, sipping coffee out of my favorite mug, with Frank’s yellow eyes on her cup.
“Mother.”
“Daughter.”
I stare at her, arms crossed. I refuse to say anything about my flamingo husband.
“So, Frank turned. That’s what this is all about.” She takes another sip of coffee.
I shrug. Then, as if to contradict this gesture, my body breaks into ripples of tears. My mother comes to me, holds me, pulls my head down to her neck. She leads me to the couch. We don’t say much after that. We watch Frank dip his beak into the coffee cup and screech. She lets Frank out to use the pool at my request and then she goes into the kitchen. I smell oregano and basil and tomato and wonder how she is doing that, how she has made anything out of my depleted pantry. When she is finished, she brings me a bowl of spaghetti and places it down on the coffee table with a hot pad underneath, just like she taught me.
She sits on the floor beside me and holds her own bowl up to her face.
“Frank needs to eat, too,” I say.
“You mean from that bucket stinking up the house?”
I nod.
“Eat your pasta.”
We eat in silence, occasionally watching Frank out the window. He is busy dipping his head in the water and pouring it back onto his feathers.
“What are you going to do?” my mother asks.
I shrug. “I’ve been house hunting in Florida.”
“So you’re going to move to the Keys, then? You’ll buy him a window seat on a plane?”
I glare at her. “I think I’ll buy him a cage and lock him up for a neighbor to find.” She looks away when I say this. For a long time, I look at her hair, her once bright red curls now taken with white. How I always wanted her hair, with its fiery shine, over my own dull, dark strands.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“So you think you can keep him?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes I do.”
She puts her hand on mine.
“You can’t.” She says this gently and I feel as if I am freshly eighteen, holding my mother’s hand after she has told me too late about my father’s escape.
“How do you know?” I say. But even as I say it, I know it’s true.
The sun is setting when we walk out to join Frank with his dinner bucket. We bundle together with a blanket wrapped around us and share a pool chair. I can’t remember the last time I cuddled with my mother, but I’m thankful for her warmth. I don’t know how Frank isn’t cold out here. He looks so small in our pool, just a little puffball. He used to be so sturdy, with thick calves and a stomach full of my cooking. Now, as the wind picks up, he looks like a reed, one that could easily be blown away.
“You expect me to handle this a lot better than you handled Father’s turn,” I say. I feel my mother readjust, touching her head to mine.
“If I had told you—”
“It would have made it real.”
She squeezes my hand. We watch the sun dip behind the trees and dusk settle in. There is always a calm in me at dusk, once the day is over and tucked away. It’s when I can slip off my shoes and review all that has happened, all I’ve accomplished, before I am too tired to stay awake. As if Frank agrees, he stands extra still, and all three of us savor the dark.
When my mother turns to me, her eyes are wet. “You’re already doing better than me. Letting him out here. Feeding him fresh food. No cages in sight.”
“He’s locked up all day, though.”
“But he could fly away now if he wanted.”
We turn to him. He looks content to stand and soak in the night. In our extensive TV watching, Frank and I have learned that flamingos prefer to fly at night when they move between habitats. I realize that when winter comes, Frank will have to be one of those birds. I imagine going in to rinse out the mollusk bucket after dinner and coming back to an empty pool, an empty yard. Maybe I will catch the silhouette of his wings above me.
I only hope that when this happens, he sheds a feather. Something concrete from this strange in-between that I can rub between my fingers, something that I can leave in his spot in the living room or right here by the pool—small and soft and pink.