As these years passed the people below talked about the birds and their singing. They talked about why they were there, they talked about the songs they sang. At some point, nobody knows when, the people below decided that the birds were there because the empire was strong. When the empire fell was when the birds would leave, and not a moment sooner. At the time it was a happy thought, a reassuring thought: the birds had been there since the people below could remember, since their parents could remember, since their grandparents. The birds would always be there, and so would the empire.

The people below were safe, and the birds sang to them.

In the years that passed the empire went to war, as empires are wont to do. Its kings donned violet capes and weighty helmets, riding horses into battle after battle. Some battles were won, some battles were lost. The empire won the war. And the war after that. And the war after that.

In the towers of the palace, the white birds flocked and sang, and the empire was safe.

Among the people below no one really knew what had happened. They were, for the most part, happy. Their kings fought wars, took wives, had children. The empire was enormous, stretching thousands of miles in every direction… so huge that it had to be sectioned off and given to local governments to rule over. There was no date recorded in a history book. There was no definitive moment. No great defeat. No mass invasion. One day the birds were just gone.

The people below had never known a time without birds overhead. They blinked in the sun like new fawns, searching for the raucous feathered ceiling under which generations had lived out their lives. For weeks the center of the empire fell into unease, which spread gradually to outlying regions.

Until one day the birds were back. But they didn’t flock, and didn’t sing. They fumbled through the air silently, as if searching for something, and they disappeared one by one until by nightfall none were left. The next day the same thing happened, the birds confused, silent, searching, disappearing by nightfall.

Inside the palace, a young boy rose every morning under cover of darkness, under cover of secrecy. He took up his net and he took up his sack, and went out into the world. When the white birds abandoned the towers of the palace, the empire would fall. His job was to keep the towers filled with birds, and every day they disappeared by nightfall.

______
In England there’s a legend that the British empire won’t fall until there are no ravens remaining in the Tower of London. Ravens remain, but their wings are clipped.

III
The ocean doesn’t.

IV
If I wanted a wife I would marry someone who needs me to be in charge.
But I don’t want someone who needs me to be in charge -
I need someone to stand on their own feet without budging, and
get going when the going gets tough, and
be strong for me.

V
I would rather live in a forest than a rose garden; a rose garden can’t look after itself
and can be ruined in a day.
A forest can be flooded out and still stay growing,
a forest can be burned to the ground and grow up again,
when the earth moves and the world moves a forest wonders, what can I do?
and does.

VI
A garden doesn’t.

VII
If I wanted to marry someone who could bend with me,
stand with me,
change with me,
stay with me,
live with me,
I would marry you.

VIII
So I will.

In the sun before the day my woman does not make oatmeal for one but two.

When it is raining my woman remembers umbrellas when my mind is too full of slush, and she holds them for me when I drop what I need.

When I hurry my woman thinks of those things I cannot think of.

When I stumble my woman fixes my words.

When I hate my woman puts her love into my hands and reminds me how to be what I am not.

When we fight my woman tells me I am wrong when I am wrong and tells me I am right when I am right, and never loses herself in the inbetween.

When we make dinner we pretend to fight, and my woman always wins.

In the nighttime when my mind races my woman pulls the tension out of me with a hand.

I sleep, and my woman sleeps with me.

In the morning she will ask not for five more minutes but for me.

I love the smell of dish soap in the morning.

hair everywhere oh god

Background info: Hava is my girlfriend.

Stoves are a different matter. My inability to cook on stoves is not exactly unknown to my friends and family. I can boil spaghetti and heat up marinara sauce from a jar; I can make macaroni and cheese from a box; I can make three minute ramen; I can make an omelette that would make you think you’d died and gone to heaven. This is the extent of my stovetop abilities. Or was, really. Now I can make pancakes too. It seemed the obvious next step. I have all the ingredients lying around from my various oven-related escapades and I can make a killer omelette. Why should I leave my conquest of breakfast foods so woefully incomplete? So I didn’t.

This recipe is a very carefully formulated amalgamation of various pancake recipes gleaned from all over the internet, measurements fiddled with and ingredients substituted over the span of several months-worth of pancake experimentation, all directed toward the all-important goal: creating a pancake that was as good or better than the pancakes of my youth. (Which were actually made from the Snoqualmie Falls pancake mix, which is still very good. But everything tastes better when you’re six, and I am no longer six.) I worked hard to make it as simple as possible to mix up as well as easy to halve if you’re not serving an army, since I often only make pancakes for two people and I’m really not interested in 40 minutes of prep for a meal that takes ten minutes to consume, which is why I will never be a professional chef.

The results of this recipe have been widely celebrated. If you don’t like it then either you are a pancake-hating monster or you did it wrong. I take zero blame for your failure.

Pancakes
2c flour
2tsp baking powder
1tsp baking soda
1/2tsp salt
4tbsp sugar
2 large eggs
2c milk

Combine all dry ingredients. Break the eggs into a small bowl and beat lightly, then put into the flour mixture. Get your whisk! Start adding milk in about 1/2c increments, combining stirring as you go, until it’s the consistency you like. (I like super thick pancake batter, so I usually use less than 1/2c.) Ladle onto a large oiled or buttered frying pan set to medium/medium-high heat — I usually make three pancakes at a time.

Some things I do that work well for me: in order to get the perfect amount of oil in the pan, somebody on the internet recommended you load up a silicone pastry brush with room-temperature butter and slather that sucker all over the preheated pan before the first batch of pancakes. That way you won’t have too much oil (this results in a pale and doughy first batch (believe me)) but you also won’t run out before you’re done making pancakes. Also bonus is that it leaves extremely mysterious patterns on the butter for the next person to find and get really worried about.

I don’t look at him. I’m too busy trying to keep my hair out of my eyes and the seagulls out of my fish and chips. “Huh,” I say, and wave away another seagull. “Sure does rain a lot.”

“I have to agree with you there,” George says. “You going to finish your root beer?”

George is this funny older guy who lives in my building. When my mom comes to visit she talks to me in hushed tones about how she thinks he isn’t all there, you know, in the head, but because she is my mother and because I am her son I just roll my eyes and wave a hand and brush her off.

She’s right, though. Good old George isn’t really all there, but that’s okay because that means he’s about half again as gracious as anyone else I’ve met in the building. Before I met him I thought chivalry was dead, but he bows to women, opens doors, puts his coat over puddles, gives up his seat on the bus to old people and women and… well, anyone really. He always wears this atrocious green sweater with leather elbow patches and brown corduroy pants with loafers. His hair is thinning and his sight is failing and he’s probably just a year or two out of his midlife crisis — assuming George has ever had anything even vaguely resembling a crisis.

We’re standing on a pier at the Seattle waterfront, the one with the Ivar’s, and I’ve got fish and chips and a bottle of root beer. George didn’t get anything because of his diet, but he and I have a deal where I order whatever I want and then he can have some, because stolen calories don’t count. So if he wants some root beer, then why not? He can go ahead.

“Nah, go ahead,” I say, and he goes ahead.

“My wife’s like that,” George says, staring out over the water and sipping at the bottle.

I look up. “Your wife?”

“Like Seattle,” George says. “A beautiful woman who’s sick all the time.”

I look back down at the water, at the barnacle-encrusted pilings, and think about how I’ve never seen his wife. Sick or not, I’ve never seen her, and I wonder if this is just one of his games.

“I met her,” he says, squinting up at the sky and holding up the bottle like an artist’s pencil, “thirty years ago. Love at first sight. You never forget your first true love.”

“I don’t imagine you do,” I say, leaning out over the rail, my arms folded.

“You don’t,” he says again, and this time he chugs the rootbeer until it’s gone. “Let’s go home before it starts to rain again.”

It’s sunny out but I know George too well to distrust his eye for weather, so we gather up our garbage and walk away from the seagulls and the water and the pier, and towards the apartment building where I’ve never seen his wife.

.

“What do you mean, his wife?”

“I mean his wife, mom,” I say, and roll my eyes, and sigh. “I just wanted to know if you ever met her.”

“Who on earth would ever want to live with that man, day in and day out? He’s a danger, Daniel. A danger.” I can almost hear her pink flowered housedress through the phone, the cat curling around her ankles, the clock on the wall.

“He’s not a danger, mom,” I say, smiling despite myself as I look at my own clock and realize that it’s four pm and she probably still hasn’t changed out of her slippers. “He’s just a funny old guy in my building. And you haven’t met his wife?”

“Can’t imagine he could ever tempt a woman down the aisle,” she mutters, and I hear the sound of her sipping coffee in that judgmental way she has.

I look at the window. As predicted, rain is pelting my window with a fervor not seen since… well, since the last time it rained. I marvel again at George’s supernatural thumb on this city’s pulse.”I was just curious. I’ve never seen her.”

“He’s not all there, you know. In the head.”

“I know, mom. I know.”

George isn’t really mental — he’s just got his weird quirks. He fancies himself a writer but I’ve never seen him with a book. He fancies himself a wit, in league with men like Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill, but he’s never cracked a joke that made me laugh. He’s a funny old man in a funny little apartment.

I’ve never seen his wife.

.

“She was beautiful,” he says, gesturing with his coffee cup. We’re cloistered in the dark little living room, wrapped in two of his elephantine armchairs, drinking coffee and riding out the storm. It’s not often we sit together in these armchairs, but today is just a coffee and company day, so we talk about anything that isn’t the weather. “She was beautiful, all those years ago when I laid eyes on her first. All… all shiny like.”

I give him what my father would call a Hairy Eyeball and blow gently on my boiling coffee. “Shiny?”

He sits back, half satisfaction and half defeat. “Shiny,” George says, and shrugs. “Still just as beautiful now. Different,” he adds. “A lot different. Louder, more temperamental. Sometimes she probably doesn’t love me like I love her. But beautiful.”

“I’m sure she still loves you,” I say, lying through my teeth and hoping that he won’t suddenly jump up and yell ‘gotcha!’ as I fall for his little trick. I can’t tell yet if he’s tricking me, not yet, and I’m not sure if I want to.

“Wouldn’t still be here if she didn’t,” George says, and smiles quietly, watching his coffee seiche back and forth in the mug. “She doesn’t show it like they show it in the movies, but she does. You can tell, just looking at her.”

We sit in silence for an hour, maybe more, and I sit there thinking that I’m missing something. I’m missing something, but I don’t know what.

In the years following that coffee-filled stormy weekend, George mentions his mystery wife maybe all of four times, each mention more vague than the last, each time with more sadness and love. I’ve stopped thinking this is just a game. George is married, married to a beautiful woman who’s sick all the time. Sick with what? She might be in the hospital. Cancer, maybe. Sometimes at night I’ll think about George and his wife in a hospital room, her thin hands barely contrasting against the crisp white sheets, until I can’t think about it anymore and watch a movie instead.

Three years later George is hit by a bus on 5th. His hair was thin and his sight was failing — maybe failing too much to look before crossing, who knows.

I ask my parents to drive in for the funeral and when they get here my mom asks after George’s wife.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I never did end up meeting her.”

I don’t say any more about it, even though I spoke quietly with the priest before my parents arrived, and know exactly who George’s wife is.

Living in Seattle, George said, is like being married to a beautiful woman who’s sick all the time.

George was never married, but he knew everything about loving a beautiful woman who could never love him back.