Pishing

 

An old favorite whimsical story of mine, "Pishing," has been published in Issue 4 of Doubleback Review, and can be found right here.  It first appeared in 2013 in the Mills College Walrus—since gone defunct, along with Mills itself.

 

I was editor of The Walrus my senior year, and typeset/printed almost the whole thing in the letterpress studio where I spent countless late-night hours that spring, with the windows flung open to the sounds of frogs under the bridge nearby and the regularly sounding campanile designed by Julia Morgan.  A graduate student, a quiet artist, was working there too, on his own project—a calendar of skies, clouds, watercolor records of the passing days.  He listened to a staticky transistor radio with country Western music from somewhere in the Central Valley (maybe out towards Stockton and Tracy where friends and I found a rodeo one weekend), while printing tiny squares of skies into coarse textured artist's paper.

 

"Pishing involved making a variety of sounds mimicking the scolding calls of birds.   The idea was to get the birds’ attention and draw them out into the open, where you could watch them better."

 

"Every year of the three they’d been married and lived in the house off Old Page Mill Road, she’d been charmed by the plaintive minor triad of the Golden Crowned Sparrow, the bird which showed up only after summer ended, and, elusive as the last sunlight of the year, sang always hidden in the trees.  Claire was charmed by everything elusive and doomed.  So she really did try to pish the furtive lovely bird.  But instead of her sparrow, she got a mockingbird—a brilliant flash of white tail morphing into the joker, the clown, the unabashed fake.  It unnerved her, to have conjured the mocking spirit in place of the quiet one she’d asked for.  She took it as a sign, and refused to try again."

 

 

 

Image:  Esralogue at Pexels