Bread for Birds
by Zachary Ostraff
Sandra Dal Poggetto, Breed No.14, 2017, soft pastel, Canada goose feathers on paper, 13.75 x 19 inches. Private collection.
Thinking back, I can see the sky filled with birds: birds swirling on the uplift, birds plummeting downwards like arrows, birds with wings outstretched to glide in place. Mostly seagulls, these birds cawed and called and raced towards chunks of bread held out by the man. He’d come once or twice a week. Drooped low, bent with age, the man would come no matter the season. In the cold he’d come bundled, in a jacket and a Cossack hat, braced against the wind. In the warmer months, he’d wear a plaid shirt tucked into his maroon pants that sagged so much that it was only the tuck of the shirt, not the belt, that kept the pants up. Walking across the street from his house to the field of long grass, he would open a bag of bread and call out like he was a bird. Keow keow. Soon one bird would come, then another, then another. Pretty soon, the once empty sky was filled with seagulls that would funnel to the man, grab the offered bread from his outstretched hand and launch back into the air. If you were close enough to see the man’s face, you would see stars flecked and shining within his blue-green eyes. His eyes didn’t always shine like this. Still, they did when he fed the birds, when he’d tell a joke to his grandchildren, or whenever he could surprise someone by sharing a bit of everyday magic. The cloud of gulls created a vortex of sound and feather that cycled down: each bird taking its turn—dropping low and raising up, dropping low and raising up. And each time a bird swooped down from the sky, to alight, but not really land—a hovering between down and up caused by a sudden flap of wings, so it could reach the bread in the hand, the man’s eyes grew a little brighter. Piece after piece of bread was freely proffered, and then there was none. No more bread. The old man would then walk back across the street, up his cement driveway cracked by the encroaching lawn, and into his garage. As the door closed behind him with a rattle and a bump, the birds would dissipate—returning the sky to blue, as if they’d never been there. Not at all.
Zachary Ostraff received his MFA in creative writing from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University (2016). His work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. He has also exhibited book art projects at a variety of venues. When he isn’t writing, he likes to spend time with his family. He is currently a Ph.D. student in creative writing at Texas Tech University.
