That Time You Punched a Magpie by Jane O’Sullivan
Associate editor Dacia Price on today’s bonus short-short: In this delightfully absurd portrait of early motherhood, Jane O’Sullivan asks readers to consider the consequences of fear; the choices we make, and the legacy they leave for our children. Playful and surreal, readers are left to decide whether these choices can ever be undone.
That Time You Punched a Magpie
Sun. Hot concrete. A split shadow, snagging on stubbed grass. All you did was throw a hand up.
You knew, of course. You’d been warned. That fucker hated prams. The postie had told you, that time you’d found him crumbling an apricot muesli bar along the top of the letterboxes. “Don’t mind me,” he’d said. “Just making friends. Got to round here.”
He’d told you he knew every maggie on his route, that they could live in the same tree for twenty years. Then he’d aimed a thumb at the park across the street. “Watch that one, yeah? He’s why I can’t take the cart.”
You thought you knew. After all, you’d grown up in this town. “I’ll be right,” you’d said, and smiled.
It wasn’t exclusive, you learned. It hated anything with wheels. Bikes. Skateboards. Kids on scooters, wailing as they fled. But prams, it hated them the most. The ones that were too slow to leave.
That day, your front wheel squeaked, like it always did. The sun rippled. You had your head down against the glare, that’s the only reason you saw it coming. That broken shadow, streaked and streaking.
Instinct. That’s all it was. But this time, your knuckles hit feather.
“FUCKEN BWARK,” yelled the magpie, as it tumbled loose from the sky. “FUCKEN WHAT!”
You remember thinking—loosely—that it felt like plastic. Hard, and sort of dry. You remember that startled shimmer of surprise. Of joy, even. It felt good.
It bounced a little as it landed, then it hopped—one, two—to the stubbled yellow grass by the side of the path.
You were too scared to stop. It would go you for sure, now. Any second. Your head. Your ears. Your son asleep in the pram. But instead it just stared, wary, as you went past.
You wouldn’t look at it, flicked instead to your son’s fat ankles, that crease in the flesh, and the path in front of you. You were almost there. The fence. The bus stop. You could see it.
“What the fuck bitch?”
You said nothing, just kept on rolling, that squeaky wheel spearing you through the midday heat. The cracks in the path slid, ga-dunk ga-dunk, under your wheels. But you glanced back. That was your mistake.
“Twenty years,” it hissed, so slow you still don’t know you heard right. Then, much clearer: “Never forget a fucken face.”
And you knew it then, that you were cursed. It would never let you forget. And those babies it was protecting, in the long fingers of the eucalypt up above? They’d be raised to hate you too—you, the magpie puncher. It would spread across the suburb, the city. Nowhere would be safe.
You moved house. Changed your name. Dyed your hair. You sold the pram and told your son he had to walk now. He was a big boy, wasn’t he?
He hated the new neighbourhood, its brick walls, its lanes. He scrunched his nose. “But I’m TIRED,” he yelled one day, and kicked his tiny sneaker down the hall. Then he made his toddler body go all floppy and slumped against the door.
You turned and went to fetch his shoe, then you stopped. You took a muesli bar out of your bag. The wrapper crackled in your hand. He sat up then. “For me?”
“Yes,” you promised. You would not let him make your mistakes. You couldn’t. “For you,” you said. “And the birds.”
Jane O’Sullivan lives in Sydney, Australia. Her work has won the Rachel
Funari Prize, joanne burns Microlit Award, and Digital Writers’ Festival
Swinburne Microfiction Challenge, and also appeared in Island, Mascara, and the Spineless Wonders anthology Pulped Fiction.
