It was just another school day when I opened my phone to see that Nirvana, one of my teacher colleagues over at the lower school, had sent me an unusual series of texts: several photos of a graceful white and grey bird with a yellow crest. Underneath these, she had texted, “Hey, do you want this?”
It turns out the bird, which was a cockatiel, had flown onto the playground slide out of nowhere in the middle of recess. Perhaps he had been abandoned by his previous owners; perhaps he had escaped. Whatever the case, his sudden appearance and unusual looks–he was clearly not a species of bird indigenous to South Florida–frightened the children and supervising teachers alike, scattering them in all directions so that all that was left was a ghost town of a playground with a little bird at the center of it. Nirvana, however, hadn’t been frightened, since she had worked with birds before at an avian-themed theme park and even owned one as a pet. She captured him and checked with me to see if I wanted him, since I had been talking about getting a bird. It was as though I had summoned him: I had said, “I want a bird,” and just like that, the universe had gathered little Klink up in its hand, boomed at me, “Here you go, see how you do with this one!” and threw me a fastball.
He was a gorgeous tiny thing, a ball of soft grey and white fluff with an orange circle on each of his cheeks, like a bad blush job, as well as vivid yellow in the feathers around his beak and the full crest atop his head. Minutes after arriving at my apartment for the first time, he clambered into the pink and white three-towered birdcage I had bought for him and set up in the living room of my apartment, making himself at home.
Sunday night ten days before Halloween, on the two-year anniversary of Klink coming into my home, my evening passed as usual. I was lying in bed with him letting him climb freely over the bed and my body when I turned on my side suddenly and startled him. He gave a yelp and flew to my window as urgently as though he had some predator in pursuit of him, knocking a framed photo of my father and me off of my nightstand in the process. However, my window was shut, so comic relief of my life that he was, he slammed head first into it instead and slid down to the windowsill, where he quickly composed himself and stared back at me, blinking, trying to play it off like nothing had happened. An episode like this might have scared me two years before when I had first gotten him, but I was used to them by now and knew he never flew into the window hard enough to hurt himself. I got up laughing, restored the framed photo to its proper place, and put him to bed, plopping his plump warm body onto one of the branchlike perches inside his cage and pulling a translucent sheet over him for warmth and to signal to him that it was time for sleep.
The rest of my Sunday evening proceeded as usual: I took my weekly Chinese class online, showered, changed into my pajamas, and finally rolled into bed. It was already late at that point, at least 10:30 pm, and I had to get up early for work the next day. Instead of going right to sleep, though, I lay under the sheets playing mahjongg on my phone as the minutes ticked by.
After I had been in bed about thirty minutes, I heard a sudden frenzy of wings from the living room, the jingling of bells, and a loud noise of repeated banging against metal–Klink flying into the bars of his cage as he flitted around frantically, hitting his dangling toys with the little bells on them in the process.
Night frights. Nothing out of the ordinary for a cockatiel. I had read all about them on Facebook back when I had first gotten him. Nobody was really sure what caused them. They could be a severe problem, costing their owners sleep night after night, but I was fortunate in that Klink had only ever had a few episodes in the two years I had had him, and they were short-lived. Usually, going over to his cage, lifting the sheet up, and cooing at him to reassure him of my presence was enough to calm him down. It was also supposed to help if you left a nightlight on. I did all of these things, went back to bed with hardly a thought, and continued playing my game.
After another span of time, shorter than the first, the frenzy of wings started up again. A jangle of bells and a series of thuds rang out rapidly from my living room. This time I jumped to my feet and ran to the cage, eager to stop Klink before he broke something in his body or started bleeding from all the banging into things. When I lifted the sheet, I saw that he was climbing all around the bars of the cage as though trying to escape. I cooed at him and he stilled, claws still wrapped around the bars of the cage, turning his head and staring back at me with what seemed to be a question in his eyes. I had heard of cockatiels who had such episodes multiple times throughout the night, but Klink never had before. I decided to take him out and let him lie with me in bed for a while to comfort him, since I wasn’t going to sleep yet anyway and I felt bad leaving him alone again.
He seemed only too eager to hop onto my fingers when I proffered them, and off we went to my bedroom together. He stood on my chest and looked around my room like he hadn’t seen it a thousand times before while I tried and failed to win my game. The apartment was quiet. I heard the distant sounds of some voices out in the hallway, but then that, too, faded away.
That’s when I heard it. A gentle jangling of bells. The sound of something softly brushing up against wood and metal. Faint, almost imperceptible, but definitely there. Something was moving in the birdcage out in the living room. I glanced at my bird, who was standing on my chest staring back at me. Something was in the birdcage, and it wasn’t Klink.
My stomach dropped down to my toes, and I lay in my bed petrified. I was in a building full of people, but at that moment, everything outside my apartment door seemed far away. My world consisted only of myself, lying in the dark room, my bird on top of me, and the Unknown Presence in the birdcage in the living room. My mind raced with thoughts of what might be out there, as the soft sounds continued, barely audible. My first thought was rats. Somebody on one of the Facebook groups I followed had posted an RIP status for a happy and bright cockatiel of hers named Sonny who had apparently been eaten by a rat overnight. Scrolling back down through her feed and seeing pictures of joyful, carefree Sonny from mere days before his grisly end, I had shuddered thinking of his as-yet-unknown-to-him fate.
But I had a hard time imagining it could be a rat. In the five and a half years I had lived in this apartment building, neither I nor anyone I knew here had ever encountered a rodent problem. It felt unlikely. Insects, perhaps, which were common in South Florida’s warm climate. But, of course, insects were too small to be making a noise loud enough that I would hear it in the other room.
Another thought lurked in the back of my mind. This evening ten days before Halloween, the two-year anniversary of when Klink came into my life, also happened to be the three-year anniversary of my father’s death. I had seen Klink’s arrival in my life as a gift from my father, an invitation to heal and to focus on life once more, rather than death, as I had in the year following his passing. Truth be told, there was more of my own poetic sensibility in this thought than there was of my father, who had been a cynic. But the thought had made me feel better at the time. Now, given the significance of the date and the bird and the birdcage, I wondered if he was paying me a visit. All my rational faculties screamed at me that this would never happen. Even if it were perfectly normal for ghosts to present themselves to humans via animal mediators, my father would have chosen a warthog or a meerkat before he would have chosen a songbird, since he wasn’t an animal person, but he found Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King hilarious. Still, the sounds in the living room persisted.
No matter what happened, I needed to return Klink to his cage. And if my father was out there waiting for me, no matter what shape he was in, I wanted to see him. I braced myself for my first ghost sighting. I wondered whether I would survive it. Taking a deep breath in, I got to my feet. Klink climbed up my arm and settled on my shoulder, calm as gently falling snow. In the darkness of my bedroom–I would not dare to switch the light on, for fear of drawing attention to myself–I padded barefoot over the wall-to-wall carpeting, step by step, toward the door. The sounds from the living room stopped on and off, but just when I would begin to think I must have been imagining them, I would hear them again–the gentle ringing of the bells from Klink’s toys, the thumping against the other hard surfaces in his cage. Something was undoubtedly moving in there. I was convinced at this point that it must be my father, and that that’s why Klink was so afraid. Animals can see things we don’t. They have a sixth sense. This is why cats sometimes stare at random corners of the room with eyes wide open as though they see a ghost, and also why dogs seemingly bark out of hand for no reason.
I got to my bedroom door, then continued down the short corridor to my living room. When I got to the end of it, I took one last deep breath. If it was my father, whom I had never thought I would see again, I wondered how he would choose to present himself to me, our first encounter after his passing three years ago. I imagined him shaking his head in disappointment that I had chosen to follow a career path in the Humanities, knowing full well it wasn’t lucrative. He would remind me in his stern voice, though I hardly remembered it now, that the Humanities didn’t matter much for anything. But then again, maybe he would hand me a math problem, reminiscent of countless afternoons that we had stood together in front of the whiteboard in the upstairs hallway of the home he had moved into with his partner after the divorce, him patiently explaining to me how to do my math homework, me listening in frustration.
I hadn’t heard the noises in a while. I took a deep breath, and turned the corner to face my dark living room.
The birdcage was still covered with the sheet that I had used to put Klink to bed, so of course I couldn’t see inside it. Even though I was no longer hearing the sounds, I approached as slowly as I could and put one hand on the sheet. I inhaled again slowly, then in one fell swoop ripped it away from the cage to reveal what lay underneath.
It stood empty, the toys inside still as statues. Everything looked totally ordinary. But because of what I had heard, I didn’t trust the emptiness, nor the stillness. I didn’t want to leave Klink alone with something that could harm him. I stuck my head inside and scrutinized the perches, the toys, and every corner of the birdcage. Absolutely nothing. I saw no signs of a living or undead entity of any sort–no rats, no insects, and certainly no ghosts.
Finally satisfied that there was no other presence inside the cage, I took Klink off my shoulder and placed him on a perch inside. Though he didn’t protest vocally, I noticed peculiar behavior from him almost immediately. Although I shut the cage door after I put him inside, he kept climbing over it as though he expected it to open, like he wanted to come back out. When I made no move to open the door, he scurried over to the most nearby perch, just to have somewhere to station himself, but stayed on the outermost part of it closest to the door where I was standing watching him, refusing to step any further back into the cage. He moved rapidly back and forth between the door and the outermost edge of the perch, looking for a way out, looking to stay close to me, without uttering a sound. That he wasn’t producing any noise was also significant, since I had long ago ascertained that the more nervous he was, the less he chirped. A noisy bird is a happy and comfortable one. A silent bird is terrified. I peered into the darkness, this time with more curiosity than fear, since as the moments ticked by I was increasingly convinced that, if there was a presence in the cage, it wasn’t going to make itself perceptible to me.
Eventually, I put the sheet over him and turned to go back to bed. Just then, I heard a rustle of bells from all of the dangling toys in Klink’s cage, more than he could have brushed up against at once, and a cold blast of air rushed past my cheek. As it did so, a slew of memories came to mind, vivid as though I were there once more: my father dressed up in suit and tie sitting with his partner in attendance at every single one of my sisters’ and my graduations from high school and college; the birthday celebrations we spent sitting around his table, him sometimes wearing one of those dopey conical paper birthday hats to make us laugh; his argument with me, when I was venting to him once about how awful it was that Einstein had cheated on his wife, that I shouldn’t judge Einstein because I had no idea what his marriage had been like. This was the only time I remember my dad arguing in favor of compassion.
Emerging from my reverie, I looked around the dark, quiet living room, wondering if the blast of cold air could have been due to a brief air conditioning malfunction, or if rather something bigger was afoot. I looked back at the covered birdcage, then lifted the sheet partially and to peek inside the cage one last time for the night. Klink had moved deep inside, and his head was nestled securely into his wings. He was finally asleep. Sighing, I went back to bed myself.
The following morning, Klink seemed totally fine, hopping about in the sunshine. He apparently had already forgotten the events of the preceding night. I told myself, “It was nothing.” Still, I couldn’t shake the thought that I didn’t know where Klink had come from, nor the unsettling feeling that maybe sometimes in that birdcage, he wasn’t alone.
*****
Gina Elia is a freelance writer who also teaches Mandarin Chinese in South Florida. Her work has been published or is forthcoming on the TED-Ed platform and in numerous publications including but not limited to Business Insider, The Manifest-Station, Eclectica, Psyche, and Sangam Literary Magazine. She was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a PhD in Chinese Literature from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, and studying languages.
