14th March, 2014

Consider Camilla; coal-colored Camilla; perfect, pendent Camilla. Camilla watches while I count cupflower seeds. Exquisite Camilla; unkempt Camilla; Camilla who droops from the cage ceiling with the weight of rainwater, like a drop set to fall from a Catalpa leaf's lip. Camilla is a Malaysian Flying Fox. I am a human. Neither of us belong in that room, with the great cage hung with fruit-skewers, and the red lights, and the vampire bats quietly sipping cows-blood from vials behind a vast crimson curtain. I suppose Camilla is there because she is unwanted, because a zoo closed or a pet-store went out of business...something like that. I wonder if she's ever been beyond Michigan. I wonder if she spent her childhood on wing over the Malay Peninsula, eating fruit from the Rambutan tree. One way or another, Camilla is no longer fit for the forests. Man has taken Camilla from her home in the most absolute way; man has changed her so utterly that she could not eat at her own table even were that table before her and laden with langsats; she could not sleep in her very own bed. Camilla is a permanent exile. Yet she is not alone. I am there. For two hours every Friday, with my envelopes and my seeds and my stickers. And I, like Camilla, am in exile; I too know no way to get home. Camilla looks at me through onyx eyes, and I return the gaze through grey/blue ones, and we are exiles together. She unfurls a tongue curled as a shepherd's crook and tenderly laps at her wing-tip. I unpeel the adhesive on an Echinacea label and affix it to a corresponding seed-bag. Chris, who was, in bygone days, an alligator animal-handler at a Floridian zoo, talks enthusiastically about Liverpool FC circa 1993, and the names he reels off (Ian Rush, Robbie Fowler, Jamie Redknapp) bring back memories of childhood. My mind capers through long-forgotten details: the bed I shared with my brother; the doll my mother made for him of his favorite footballer; the magazine-cuttings blue-tacked to the wall, men with faces contorted as gargoyles, limbs liquid geometry; Alan explaining to me the merits of players, like lullabies, as I'd fall off to sleep. Camilla shudders and alters her hold on the ceiling. The screech owl turns his head ambivalently toward her, and ambivalently back again. The printer runs out of ink and I am let go early. Camilla preens. I leave her to her Tomis and head back to my Elba.

One day we will get home, you and I.

One day we shall all make it home.