Notes: Most people do not know how to tell the difference between the male and female robin. The female has a black head. Think of something so black your foot might be sucked into its void, like oil or oily sand or sludge or certain lost opportunities; think of waking (again) at night in an inky and sweaty murk, murmurs of emptiness, an echo of confused nothingness, and reflecting on your checking account balance and your loneliness and a door slamming, a freshly torn fingernail, a drywall scar, or the time you ran over the neighbor’s cat while backing out the driveway (distinct image: the neighbor sobbing while lifting the cat’s body with a green plastic snow shovel)…floating confusedly now with your hand outstretched to turn on the light, blind in darkness, sightless to the moments fading, a faint odor of lavender, then smoke, a wall ahead, an unseen and certain wall—bare feet, cold floor, hush. The male head is light gray, or graying.
Eggs: 4–7; pale blue, unmarked.
Nest: Long coarse grass, twigs, paper (toilet, to-do lists, physician and utility bills, wine boxes, etc.), and feathers, and is smeared with mud and often cushioned with pocket moleskin notebooks, torn Kleenex, or other soft materials.
Robins Often Fly: Into windows. Into themselves, I mean.
Call: Cuk or tuk. Yeep or peep. Pup-pup. Repeated chirrrrrr that can sound like a whisper, chuckle, or yawn.
Size and Weight: Imagine you are an adjunct faculty at a community college off a highway overpass in Kansas (or hell). You are aging and adrift. You are nobody. A haze, a sneeze. A fog of drizzle and damp paperwork and mist. The words won’t arrive on your novel (a noir time-travel romance) and you’ve stopped brushing your teeth and you feel hollow as YouTube. You wear New Balances. You jog tri-weekly, but badly, and often trailed by country dogs and the occasional sneering kid on a bike. Your running form? Like a leaning shuffle. Like a falling over. Like a flung hubcap, dented wobble, highway shoulder grass. Crickets. You have two-and-a-quarter friends. Zero lovers. You share an office that was once a snack machine room with an asthmatic historian (PhD concentration in Folklore Studies) and a rattling water fountain. One day (a gauzy Wednesday), the Assistant to the Director of the English Department wants to discuss your student teaching evaluations:
“…and several comments about your looks.”
“My looks?”
“No, the way you look. Always serious. Or maybe speak, I don’t know. Kids these days, they want charisma. You know? They want you to be a professor, right? Performative! Be friendly! At least two students said you don’t smile much.”
“I do smile. I mean not always. I teach very early and—”
“One kid wrote down you have an accent. I don’t hear any accent. Didn’t you use to live in Tennessee?”
“What does that mean?”
“Exactly! Right…You know you look tired.”
“I am tired.”
The Assistant to the Director of English Department clasps his hands together, almost as if praying. “Right…Look, I’m also tired of all of this, just like you. But these days we’re customer service. Student success, right? They could go to school anywhere. They could go to Topeka. I don’t know. Even Nebraska maybe…Or maybe they just go online! What are we going to do then, huh? I mean I’m not teaching online.”
With a grimace, the Assistant to the Director of English Department hands over your schedule, a pink slip of paper as light as a sigh. Composition 102, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, from 8–8:50 a.m., from 9–9:50 a.m., from 10–10:50 a.m., from 11–11:50 a.m. And then your brain shimmers, coughs. And crouches. Cackles and cracks open like a geode. Your hands tremble. And a heat blushes through the barbed wiring of your sternum. And you pick up, weigh in your hand, and fling a stapler at the forehead of the Assistant to the Director of the English Department, a stapler heavy and dull, institutional red and broken-winged and tumbling on the dust motes of quivering air. See it there? End over end. An instant before everything…The American Robin is the size and weight of the stapler.
~
Sean Lovelace lives in Indiana, where he chairs the English Department at Ball State University. He wrote Fog Gorgeous Stag (Publishing Genius Press), How Some People Like Their Eggs, and other flash fiction collections. He has won numerous national literary awards, including the Rose Metal Press Short Short Prize and the Crazyhorse Prize for Fiction. He helped James Franco actually finally finish a book. He runs. And often writes about nachos at https://nachosonly.wordpress.com/