Heron is a bird. Two wings, two legs, a bedraggled feather skirt and a long curve to his supple neck. Heron’s voice lives in the very bottom of his throat, a grumpy troll that communicates with sounds like the clash of stones when the tide sucks on them.  He is the slave of seasons and all his days are pretty much the same. His only memories are the instincts that tell him what to do and when to do it.  All the young herons he has fathered and fed have flown away.

She is a human female, warm blood, dense bones and all. Her eggs live deep inside her.  If one happens to meet up with a sperm it stays in her body and grows for nine months, give or take, and then comes naked and squalling into the world. This has happened twice.  She raises her children alone. When this story happens, she is empty except for the longing that fills empty spaces, quiet except for the buzz that lives in synapses unfired for too long.

Her name is Kate.

2.

Heron ate a skate.

Hunger and boredom, they made him do it.

The skate was a flat, fat triangle, so big that just one of them would keep him full the time it took to stalk and grab many days' worth of the usual fishes, fat in the middle and pointy at the ends and stupid, most of them, stupid enough to take his legs for reeds, his feet for leaves or shells and swim around them, a slippery tickle, until he decides to strike. Though he's lived on their plenty, counted on them being dumb, knows the taste of their slime as they slither down his long throat still twitching, Heron has no hunger for them anymore. Not for them. Not for many things he knows in every feather, every cell. Has always known.

The giant triangle fish did not expect the thrust of Heron’s bill, never saw it coming or if it did, could not escape the strike. It hung from Heron’s bill, flexed and twisted, flapped its fleshy wings and lashed its tail and Heron did not see coming how much it would hurt when the skate’s tail whipped against his belly and his legs.  Before he could eat the skate, Heron saw he would have to figure out how.

Lucky for him, his wings knew.

They wrapped around the skate and folded it into a package, narrow and thick. Pressed the package tight against his belly for the seconds it took to pull free and stuff the wriggling mass into his open bill. It was hard to swallow, a harder swallow than he ever swallowed before and the package caught halfway down and his throat stretched until it hurt and for some unmeasureable stretch of time, Heron thought the fat mass of skate might choke him so that he would never breathe or eat again.

But his legs knew what to do.

They knew they had to dance, dance harder than they ever had to win a mate and Heron danced and danced and the dance saved him, even though he was not certain it would until it did. Heron danced and danced and slowly the huge mass of firm flesh and soft bone made its way past the narrowing of his throat and found its slow way down into his stomach.

His stomach was shocked when the package got there, bigger than anything that ever came before it, a huge weight that made his stomach hurt from stretching, so big it squeezed his lungs while it sat there, huge and immovable and while he floated in that feeling that was almost death, Heron told the feathered gods of his family that if he survived this experiment, he would stick to the usual fishes for the rest of his life. In the many hours it took his enzymes to digest the skate, though, Heron slowly came to appreciate the novelty of the experience.  While he didn’t measure his time on earth in numbers, he knew he had been Heron for many changes of seasons, many mating dances, many nests. He had eaten numberless years' worth of the usual fish.

No mating had ever survived its season.

For most of the time between breedings, Heron returns to his solitary ways. He hunts alone, eats and dozes alone, the tides and the air enough company to content him. Only when early spring ruffles his wings does Heron think about courtship, about congress, about those weeks of heightened purpose, when he hunts to feed the hatched babies that doze inside the nest. Six months away from spring, the remembering itself seems like a dream. The longing inside him feels like lice in his wings.

3.

Kate watches Piers’ morning exercise--bar bells, jump rope and crunches--for the pure joy of seeing his big sleek body move. After a while, his skin turns shiny with sweat. She likes his body better than his art, which is a re-jiggered Renaissance style applied to modern themes and a bit of a one-trick pony, more idea than soul. She blows on her coffee and admires his abs through the pale steam rising from her cup. To be fair, Piers’ brush technique and his mastery of perspective is impressive.  It’s what he does with it she doesn't care for.

Angela joins her on the stoop, a waft of peppermint rising from her tea. Watching Piers exercise is both a shared joke and their obsession. Neither of them has yet seduced him. Each has confessed to the other the thought has crossed her mind. They haven’t seduced each other yet, either.  Angela calls her work neo-impressionism, even though it has nothing to do with qualities of light but explores the effects of commerce on image. Her images are all but flattened into posters, but the posters are so slick and beautiful she qualifies for this master class in realistic painting.

Kate's trying to make hyper-realism and surrealism get married and have babies, not because it’s cutting edge so much as because it combines the two things she does best—faithful rendering, weird visions. Every member of their group is post-post-modern, trying to invent something new against ridiculous odds. 

Piers is breathing heavy now, sweat raining from his forehead to splash against the concrete, making nickel-size splotches against the gray. In nearby treetops, a tiny warbler burbles with morning verve. Once Kate hears this one bird singing, she hears them all, a cloth woven from many bright threads of birdsong, draped like a scarf across the shoulders of the day.

Kate stops here long enough to note the family relationship between verbal metaphors and visual images. To feel the day’s hopes and disappointments floating in the morning air. The teacher, a semi-famous artist, might say something nice about her work today.  Maybe she can fix the place she fucked up yesterday’s sketch without having to start all over again. Maybe later she'll go for a long walk on the beach.  Maybe she'll will hear the phone ring if her children call.

The little warbler is insistent, as if somebody's paying him to sing.

4.

Part of the day he wades in the shallows. Part of the day he drowses in a tree. When Heron naps, he hides, as close to the trunk as he can fit with his wings clasped tight to his sides.  Heron feels safest sleeping when he feels invisible, when he becomes the biggest, stillest cone on the thickest branch, when his tree is outside the flow of animal traffic, beyond reach of the two-legged creatures who like to stare. Because he stares when he fishes, Heron mistrusts their attention. When they stare, Heron imagines they are imagining how he will taste.

Heron likes best to feed when the sun slides down the sky and plops into the water. He likes the sound the sea makes then. Tonight the sea sound seems to rhyme with the song his nerves make remembering the skate, with the ache of his stretched innards and his surprise at becoming Heron who ate a skate and lived.

5.

Kate is on the beach near dusk. Because she comes from the west coast, sunset here starts from the wrong side.  The sound of small waves lapping sand is familiar, though, and makes her feel safe enough to light the half joint in her pocket and take a few rough tokes before her throat rebels. A few heartbeats later, the strange settles in, releasing the tension in her shoulders, rejiggering her pulse and the colors of the coming night. What was one sound layers into many parts. What was three women fuses into one.

The mother revels in the rich of it, senses full and all her body hairs alert. The painter frames it in order to invent then render a deliberately eccentric composition meant to challenge what the viewer, that mysterious other, thinks is real. Kate the human sees the scum of refuse at the tideline and feels rage. A rocket launched from Cape Kennedy just past dawn this morning, and she imagines the evening luminescence fouled by burnt rocket fuel, by the unholy racket of her species trying to fly away.

But mid-evening along this shore touches her like a lover might if a lover could touch her everywhere at once. She sees, she hears, she smells, she draws the evening into her lungs, caresses and expels it. A little wind off the water kisses her neck.

6.

The sun sinks for a long time before it disappears.

Heron stands still to watch it go. The usual fishes poke at his legs, begging to be eaten. Because Heron isn’t hungry, he lets them play. Out of that tickle, a wanting comes.  Normally what Heron wants at dusk is food. 

If touch is hunger, what is food?

7.

The sea is to her left, which means she’s walking south.

8.

The eye on Heron’s night-side scans the shore. This means he's facing south.

9.

When Kate sees the heron wading, she realizes it’s the first shore bird she’s seen all day.

Curse the men who need to rape space to prove to how big their dicks are, who treat the planet like it's a bar past closing time.

10.

The creature is alive.  It has long straight legs that taper like his do.  It walks in the shallow water, too noisy for a bird. Heron knows it sees him because its gaze feels like a touch.

11.

The heron just offshore is watching her. If it was human, its stare would be rude.  Kate turns toward the horizon, the ocean and the bird.

12.

There’s seeing and watching. Heron knows both. He knows the creature in the shallows is watching him. When he stops walking, it stops. It turns toward him.

13.

Because the heron’s eyes are on the sides of its head, it doesn’t have to turn its head to see her but Kate knows it sees her.  She can feel the soft buzz of its consciousness directed at her.

14.

Even though nothing happens, everything does. Something moves inside his chest.  Heron takes a slow, proud step, one foot leading, the other catching up.

15.

The heron takes a step, then stops.  It feels like a pickup line.

Kate steps precisely, foot rising high then swinging out.

16.

Heron takes another step, stretching his neck forward, as if he was fishing. 

17.

 Kate turns toward the bird.

18.

He feels her look.

19.

Once with a boyfriend’s dog, she felt something like this. 

Without a common language, speaking.

20.

But can she fly?

21.

So much attention.  The bird eyes swallow her.

22.

Heron looses his wings and takes a long step forward, as if he means to take off.

23.

The bird starts to fly away but then doesn’t.  She takes a long step forward, then stops.

24..

Heron remembers.  When the nestlings are big enough, he shows them how to fly. Heron takes long steps, showing her how to move her wings.

25.

She feels the fierce attention of his sideways eye. The bird takes three long strides, wings lifting. She mirrors him, letting her stretched arms rise and fall.

26.

Heron lifts off, not high, not far.

27.

Kate copies every motion. She does not fly.

28.

Every nest has one slow hatchling.  Heron repeats the lesson.

29.

Okay, I’ll try again.

30.

It waves its long skinny wings. They are beautiful but useless.

31.

If something is impossible, is not being able to do it failure?

32.

Heron feels how much it wants to fly.

33.

I’m sorry. 

34.

This time he leans, flaps and lifts until he sails through air. Heron wants her to feel what flying feels like.

37.

The bird rises in a sweeping arc, travels the length of a city block, then comes back and lands in the water just across from where she stands.

38.

With all the will that is in him, Heron wills her to take flight.

Instead, she sits down on the sand and lets the water lap her legs.

39.

I love you. I love you but I cannot fly.

40.

If you were a heron, I would do the mating dance with you. 

Instead, he stretches his wings and rises, rises and flies away into the night.

41.

Kate works all night to capture it. By morning light it lives, a creature half bird, half woman, both halves carefully rendered, hyper-real.

42.

For a long time, her fellow students look instead of talking. Kate watches their faces.  The words come like thrown stones, splash and sink.  From the surface of the painting, with a look of longing it stares back at her, the two-faced creature she has become. 

            43.

Heron stands in the shallows, alone, watching the sun come back while the usual fishes bump against his legs.

It started in 1975—this habit of creating grassroots publications where none exist.

First, there was Dark Horse, out of Boston, a poetry and fiction tabloid a bunch of young, impatient writers edited and produced once a quarter while we waited to be discovered. Dark Horse went national, lasted ten years and gave first ink to a lot of emerging writers some of whose names you probably know. You might say we discovered ourselves and “real” publishers eventually followed suit.

In the early ‘90s, a smart, ambitous young woman turned up in the fiction class I was teaching at Haystack, an Oregon arts conference. She and her husband had just sold their tech startup and she was looking for the next adventure. I suggested she start a literary magazine. Susan Burmeister-Brown and her sister Linda published Glimmer Train quarterly for 29 years. That’s hundreds of stories from throngs of writers.

Now is now. I’ve had six novels published in five languages, with six more in manuscript gathering dust in the attic. Books chronically optioned for films that never got made. A couple of short story collections and a memoir on the Library of Congress card. I’m not done yet—and neither are my peers, even though publishers, as always, are still looking for the next big thing.

Tobey Hiller, prolific poet and ficion writer, contributed the title (G)OLD.

This Substack is for us, the long-haulers and for everybody who’s curious about what it’s like to stay the course. To fly and to crash. To grow up and grow old within a writing practice.

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