The Lovebird by Natalie Brown Page A

after he’d written his address on the napkin, I had a dream about Jack Dolce. In the dream, he stoodbeside the cooler at Gelato Amore. I approached him and said, “One small spumoni, please.” He dropped his ice cream scooper and lifted up his T-shirt, and I saw that he had the proud, bulging, red-feathered breast of a bird. When he reached toward me, I saw that the back of his hand was covered in a thick, furry pelt, while his palm was soft, pink, and puffy. He was careful with his claws when he clasped my fingers. As he bowed his head and pressed his lips to my knuckles I saw, tucked beneath the dark waves of his mussed hair, two curved horns, like those of a goat. And when he slipped off his shoes, I noticed that his feet were webbed. Something in the way he smiled, lifting his long tiger’s whiskers skyward when he did, told me that he was the happiest man I had ever seen. I awoke from the dream slick from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. My sweat-soaked nightgown formed a fine film on my skin, and, thus cocooned, I remembered that once, only once, I had looked up when I felt Jack Dolce looking at me, and allowed him to peer into my eyes. I rolled over and clung to Simon in fear, Simon, my Simon, my miller, Simon Melnikov of the silver hair and the nineteenth-century Russian army.
    “A dream,” I mumbled into his neck, searching for a hint of hyacinths. “Oh, a dream.” I tugged at the plump lobe of his ear.
    Simon stirred irritably and with a sudden sniff. Half asleep, he slurred, “Are you still worrying about that lovebird?” and then immediately started to snore, and I was left with nothing to do but press myself as close as I could against his hard back.

7 MOURNING DOVE
(Zenaida macroura)
    AFTER MY DOLCE DREAM I KNEW I was changing, but I soon discovered that Simon was, too. His change seemed to have happened suddenly. Later I realized it had probably been happening for a while and had gone unnoticed, the way orange blossoms can be smelled but not smelled, or a red resin bracelet can be seen but not seen.
    I also discovered that, even though I might have been changing myself, Simon’s shift cut my heart to such a degree that I would have, for my part, never begun to change at all and would have made sure Simon did the same, so we could have stayed near to each other always, with our noses pressed in the nights, with my thumb pushed into the cushions of his palm. I would have ignored utterly and forever any sense of something missing and remained an earnest explorer of his impenetrable eyes, a steady She-Bird. That was how I felt when Simon transformed, that I would reverse it, if only I could.
    One Saturday morning in January I rose just before noon, my usual weekend wake-up time. During an unsuccessful search for Simon in the chilly chambers of the white-walled house, I found only Annette, still in her fleece footie pajamas. Simon had cut offthe white vinyl tips of the footies to make room for her rapidly growing feet. Her bitsy toes hung out and now, encased as she was in the soft lavender fleece, she struck a slightly simian figure. She was in her bedroom, speaking intensely to one of her stuffed animals, an opossum: “I
told
you, Mrs. Gerkin, the
only
food that lasts forever is honey.”
    I stepped into the backyard wearing a pair of Simon’s boxer shorts and one of his undershirts, crunching a spoonful of cereal in my mouth. Simon was in his wife’s garden, stripped to his underwear, pushing a shovel into the dirt and squinting against the sweat that stung his eyes. His black-and-white-checkered trousers and button-down were in a pile next to a patch of pansies.
    I saw that he had done much pruning, snipping, shaping, and weeding. The garden looked nearly groomed. And he had picked dozens of flowers. They snoozed beside him in a bucket.
    “Wow,” I said in a voice garbled by cereal and sleep.
    “You’re up bright and early as usual,” he said. I smiled, but he did not. “And I see