Lemonade (This Bird)
by Meghan Lennox
Molly, Maybe We’ve Always Been Alone, watercolor and gouache on paper, 30 x 70 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
LEMONADE (THIS BIRD)
MEGHAN LENNOX| FEB 2023 | Issue 21
On July 20, 1997, after 22 years, 8 months and 14 days of human form, my sister turned into a bird. That very first day, a finch—she perched, beak open, eyes to the sky, on the hood of my parents’ car, waiting for them in the hospital parking garage; unflinching as my father opened the passenger side door; stock-still as the leather seat accepted the weight of my mother’s collapsed will.
People were at first uncomfortable with the lengthy narrative of ghost inhabited bird sightings, but the day a painted bunting settled on my mother’s shoulder for at least three minutes during her vacation to Key West, even the bartender took out his camera as patrons raised salt-rimmed glasses to my sister’s rainbow plumage.
A trained Catholic (by way of all-girls schools and nuns with rulers), there was an oscillation in my mother’s belief system between God’s supreme heaven and the soul’s ability to take flight in a whole new feathered form. Early morning tea was spent on the deck, nodding back at ‘hey sweeties’ from the confiding chickadee ruffling along the railing, but by mid-afternoon, she was genuflecting at the entrance of church pews before kneading woven fingers into her bruised lap, shoulders trembling against the punishing oak.
Five months after my sister’s initial ascent, a tumor consumed the liver of my mother’s mother—turning her first yellow, then ash—twelve days shy of Christmas. My mother stood before the open casket waiting in vain for my grandmother, baby-faced and bald, to also sprout wings. Cushioned in cream satin, her cheeks had never been so fair and rosy, but the spotted brown skin of her folded hands left little hope for flight. The night before, my mother dreamt of purple petals flowering on a bushel of green stems, unaware of the bulking tubers maturing in the dirt below.
At Christmas Eve mass, my mother sobbed. Her face contorted and scrunched, an overly wrung lemon. Silent Night’s slow, solemn, falsetto echoed back at us from the rafters, and she squeezed us closer, pressing our damp eyes into each other’s shoulders. An atheist from this point forward, my father used the sleeve of his Argyle sweater to dab pulp from my mother’s cheeks.
“Next year, we’ll bring more tissues.”
“Next year,” answered my mother, “we’ll stay home.”
Today, in Southern California, exactly 25 years after her initial flight, my sister is a yellow-tailed warbler, tapping her beak on my bedroom window—suspended, wings flapping. She comes often enough that at the onset of little clicks against the glass, my children run to the window, gently waving, “Hi Alyson! Hi Aly-bird!” To my boys, my sister will only ever be this bird and a photograph framed on my mother’s mantle.
Meghan Lennox began writing on any surface that would support a #2 pencil at a young age. While teaching high school English, she began studying creative writing at the New School before abruptly abandoning NY for a career in film in LA. There, Meghan cast several features for Sony, multiple Network pilots and produced the indie feature 'Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town.' After a decade of hiding away her own writing, she wrote and directed her first short film 'Show Pony,' starring Britt Lower and Clara McGregor, which premiered at the 2022 Sarasota Film Festival. Meghan has spent the last year writing— screenplays, flash fiction, creative nonfiction and is grateful to have picked up that pencil again. She lives in Los Angeles with her two indubitably hilarious boys, Jack and Hudson.
Molly Segal is a Los Angeles based painter. Born and raised in Oakland, Segal is interested in sites where disaster and decadence converge. Her large scale watercolors explore fragile connections and finite resources, in particular the price of survival in inhospitable climates. Her paintings have been exhibited at Charlie James Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Zevitas Marcus Gallery. She was an inaugural artist-in-residence at the Quinn Emanuel Artist Residency in Los Angeles in 2021. Her work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Whitehot Magazine, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2013.