I really did like birds when I was that age. That’s why I liked the harpy at the zoo.

Even going down the street, little mary janes click-clacking on dirty concrete, I would stop to look at the pigeons and how they would puff up and coo, one big tracking behind one small, fussing it like a lover’s quarrel. No matter how they fought though, I would feed them all the same, always grain, never bread. Clunky in the head as I was, I knew still how loaves upset fowls’ tummies, but I was sure I was helping as I cornered rock doves to lull their chattering. They’d tussle in the air together sometimes after my help, but when have men and women never fought?

The harpy I knew absolutely knew too. Rarely did I ever see women around her enclosure, and now in my mind’s eye, I would not count her either. The wooden crate she was carried in had to have been large enough for three men, or it was barely big enough for a little girl, but I never saw the pretext or the aftermath. I only saw her in that cage.

She had a nice enclosure though. Hay, filth, and animal feed stung your nose anywhere else in the zoo, and while the towering giraffes and the elephant and her calf worked to distract you, both giants, both slow, like massive, rusted machines that ‘ought to go ka-thunk, ka-thunk when they move, you get bored eventually. Hers smelled like the Earth, but not like dirt and waste. It smelled like petrol at a gas station and the breeze when it caught empty suburbia, and it smelled like rubber and latex and any other aviary, such a way that sank to the back of your throat like sweet aftertaste. The rope around her cage would scratch your hands as you drug along, but that was as far as you were allowed to go. You could only look at her. The harpy was pretty when she allowed you to do so.

No fowl existed that could compare to her, but I felt falcons came close enough. Brown like the Earth, tips of clipped wings black she’d been dipped in tar, white smatterings of feathers undertail hiding her vent, and a very pretty face with fair skin and long hair, dark as dirt. Eyes so dark you could see the reflection of zoo-goers and keepers in them, men of all sizes, and her nose hooked like a beak, lips always pulled to the farthest corners of her face, all this I remember. Heavy, pale teats wings often covered that made me flush every time I looked, but her face made me flush more and after some time, I sought out the funny feeling in my stomach looking at her made me feel, in my little mary janes. I remember men jeering, groping at the distance from the bars of her cage and cawing at her, turn around, turn around, watching her huddle into the corner farther and farther. I wasn’t sure how to feel that I wanted that too.

I kept seeking her out since I first saw her. The harpy was a woman, for only women carry breasts and harpies are only ever women, but she wasn’t a woman the way my mother’s friends were. Their faces were long, wrinkled marks across them, corners of their eyes that creased without movement and round chests and hips and rings on their fingers. Always with talk of husbands and young, how they must feed one and change the other, clucking like mother hens. Harpies don’t have husbands, not even fingers, but she had an orange tag around her leg, so I guess harpies could still get married. She didn’t seem much different from the married women and married mommies I knew anyway. For a time, she drew a crowd, so often of men who’d point and louse, but all things get dull as time goes on. Not for me though.

I got to see the harpy alone once. It was also the last time I saw her.

She’d gotten boring like dirt. This didn’t matter to me. She was pretty, and few knew this, but I knew she was smart too. It was a secret between us and the zookeepers. They had to keep her cage bare because she was too smart, they’d say. She knew many things, like how to tie knots, pick locks, how to dance, how to fly, flirt, gorge, and abort. That was why she was dangerous, they’d say, so only when she was caged did they dare get close to the bars and fist their fingers through the enclosure. Who wouldn’t want to touch a harpy? I did once.

When all the men, the keepers, voyeurs’ eyes alike were gone, I’d stepped over the rope railing and smoothed out my flowery sundress, edge covering bright, loose pants. I had to stand on my toes to peer in, but I saw the mass of her body in the corner. She heard me, and I’m sure now, she heard me before I ever got there. Click-clack went her talons like my little shoes on a metal floor, click-clack as she slumped over to me at the edge of her enclosure. It was the closest I would ever be to her, and then she looked aeons older than any human who’d touch the Earth. Now though, she just looks like I did at that youthful age.

Weights under black eyes. Fair skin clung to bones. A permanent pout in her lips that I remember wanting to lift myself up to. Sagging chest but protruding stomach, smooth like aunties’ when she bore weight of kin. Though between powerful, feathered thighs that could lift me like a babe, I knew her sex was there and I remember how red that thought made us, especially after I had reached out, mimicking groping hands like the men I remembered. She’d stepped back, and when my eyes slunk to her face, nose pulled like a snarl, I saw it in eyes I never truly looked at before, eyes I don’t think anyone ever did.   

Breasts heaved with her breath and I never saw a bird sputter, but that’s what she did, and she rammed herself against the cage into my hand between bars. The force of her made me trip, and I still have her scars on the back of my arms and my legs, but all I remember was her spitting face. She screamed at me, near frothing, bashing, raging like only a harpy could, nude and flailing before she tuckered herself out. Her rage simmered, and though a wing cradled her battered gut, and never leaving her gaze off me, she still went back to the corner where she returned to being dirt. She looked at me the same she did the men, and the men who watched, and the men who preened, and the men who put an egg inside her. There were no zookeepers. There were no men, and there was never women. It was just me and her, and then it was just me. I got up, dusted myself off, and then I don’t remember anything else. I remember that it was the last time I ever saw her, before the news came out, calling woe of her passing. She passed from egg binding, from failed breeding programs, from shock and exhaustion of trying to birth something she was never meant to carry. They put an egg inside her and it never came out, and I remember that. And I still remember her face.

And she hated me. And I hope she still hates me.