By Jill Schepmann

Featured Art: “Spring Returns and So Do I” by Leo Arkus

I walk out of class, my mis-spoken and fragmented explanations of the day racing. A greatest hits of my unworthiness as a teacher. I think of earlier in the day, walking around the lake with a friend. The building I’ve just left is called Lone Mountain, which stands on a hill, in a city of hills, dramatic, grand. And I trick myself again into believing that I belong here. Sometimes, Lone Mountain makes me witness the fog coming off the Pacific to swallow San Francisco’s avenues. Sometimes, the glass buildings downtown. Once, on a rainy, windy day, I looked out my classroom window to see two giant cypress trees grown as one split and fall away from each other, their branches pointed skyward until they came to rest in sudden-found angles, fossilized insects on their backs. 

As I descend the mountain, I think of going home to my new girlfriend in Oakland. Oakland is also new to me. Susannah is making pasta for us. This caretaking, too, is new. I walk a little quicker thinking of the way she comes to unlock the door when I’m too long finding my keys. Her warm lips. Cupping her elbow in my palm. Her cheek resting against mine. I quicken. I quicken. 

When I get down to the street, I see several students gathered in a circle around my car. One student sees me looking at her and steps back from it, guilty-like. Then, I see the motion on the ground near my rear driver’s side tire. A turkey? No. A confusion of feathers. No. A hawk. A hawk on the ground? No. Two hawks on the ground, their talons tightly enfisted. I circle the car, questioning the gathering crowd.  

One student tells me she saw the two creatures collide in the sky and fall in a tight spiral to the ground just here. By the tire of my car. I look at all the other cars lining the street, the parking lot ahead of me. It had to be my car. It’s been a long day. I need to get home. I’m tired at the needs of others. Circling the lake with my friend. A death I signed. 

Another student speculates that they’re mating. (And yes, isn’t nature harsh? Don’t they say it might be a violence like this? One atop the other. Those joined talons. Something of a thrust.) 

Another student says that the one on top is trying to kill the other. (And yes, that seems likely as well. How it pecks at the eyes of the slightly smaller bird. And now, how it takes the beak of the other in its mouth, as if trying to smother it. Yes. It would certainly kill the other, the one on top, if it didn’t have to pause and look at all of us gawking. Gawking at hawks. Its eyes push us away. If its talons weren’t occupied elsewhere, it might push us in other ways.) 

“It’s going to kill it!” A young man says loudly. “Can I throw my water bottle at it?”  

There’s something in his eyes, a sharpness in his voice, that hints at wounds. 

Again, I look around. Isn’t there another teacher here somewhere? Aren’t I just an adjunct? An unessential part? Why my tire, brown hawks?  

I look at the large metal bottle in the student’s hand. In a soft voice, I say, “I don’t think we should throw anything. Let’s see…” 

People take out phones. People stop in cars. People pick up their dogs and walk around the wildness. Across the street, a young woman leans out the window of her second-story apartment to catch a better glimpse. 

It becomes clear that Animal Control has been called, though they do not pick up. Someone suggests the police. I manage to find the non-emergency number for the nearest precinct. The dispatch officer laughs when I tell her. “Someone already called. They’re on their way.” 

I put my phone in my pocket. We wait longer. Some other faculty members appear, shout a few words, disappear. Some hover out of earshot. It falls to me. The hawks fall to me. The one on top has become especially vicious in its pecking. The one on the bottom has thrown back its head, fully submitted its yellow-white breast. Too much time is passing. The student with the water bottle steps closer, closer. Still, their talons hold. I decide that their talons became stuck together when they met in the sky. It feels easier to believe that they happened into this situation, than that they somehow chose it.  

Maybe it’s our presence, that makes the hawk on top leave? It keeps looking at us, distracted from its found purpose. Leave, its eyes say. Leave. And when we don’t, time is our friend. We don’t. The hawk on top takes flight. I’m talking to others and miss it. I look up to see it join a third hawk in flight. We think for a moment they will also fight. But instead, they swoop together and land on the roof of another apartment building across the street, aligned sentries keeping watch above us. Again, my mind turns to story: a territory dispute prompted by the construction on the new dorm down the hill. 

I look back at the remaining hawk, or what remains of him. He stands upright, his wings flung out at different angles, a frozen shrug. As if to say, You win some? You lose some?  

Something in me crumbles. Who am I? What am I doing? Who put me in charge? I walk around to the back of my car to see his face. Why he? I’m no ornithologist.  

Let’s they. They are bloodied, and their wings break something in me the way they are askew. There’s something shuttered behind their eyes though they somehow remain open—the other was so ferocious. Their eyes are what bring me back to action. I’ve seen those eyes before. The terror. The disorientation. Death approaching. I think of Gracie, my dachshund of almost 16 years. The last nine months of her life after the stroke, she would get lost in the apartment she’d lived in for most of her life. Stuck behind couches, the bathtub, the corner of the closet. She lost the ability to back up. We left her alone as little as possible, but sometimes, I did have to leave her. Sometimes, coming home, out on the street, I would hear her crying in fear within. I would find her trembling, glassy-eyed, barking at the still and dark corner of the bedroom. The only end was my hands, cradling her ribs, pulling her up and into my arms, cooing okays to her. She jumped on contact. Couldn’t see me coming. A moment later though, she remembered this, the shape of my arms. The shape of her. She softened in my arms. I remember her. 

I see the hawk. I’m on the phone again with a wildlife rescue organization. Yggdrasil. Later, its website tells me this is the name in mythology for “World Tree.” On the first call, no one answers. On my second try, a woman picks up. When I tell her the situation, it seems I’ve made her day. “Two hawks fighting! An injury!” She gives me another number for dispatch at Animal Control. I relay it to the first student. She nods and makes the call. I didn’t know this student before, but I recognize already a new seriousness in her motions since she saw the two birds fall to the ground. The hawks are changing us.  

I speak to the woman on the phone more. Her husky voice tells me who she is: twenty-ish years older than me. Mottled salt-and-pepper hair. A rent-control apartment in Bernal Heights. The Outer Mission or Haight maybe. There’s a recognition in our ease; I sense that she also trusts, maybe even deeply loves other women as I do.  

“So you’re wondering now,” she says to me, “what you can do to keep the hawk comfortable as you wait?” 

“Yes,” I say.  

She tells me that we have a few critical moments now, while the bird is stunned, unmoving. And it’s true. The bird has not moved at all. Maybe it’s blinked a few times. But otherwise. Just standing there. The boy with the bottle has backed up now. Husky tells me, we need to ensure that the bird doesn’t run into traffic. “What can you do to make a barrier to keep it from running into the street?” she asks. 

I think of the tarp I keep for camping in the back of my car.  

“You’ll need to get a large cardboard box. Is there a corner store where you can run in to get that?”  

“No. No corner store,” I say, “but…” I shout up to the girl in the window across the street. 

She gives me a thumbs up and disappears from sight. The decisiveness of her movements reminds me of my first roommate in college. Denise. Denise who took care of me those nights I drank too much and passed out, threw up. The ways I tried to still myself. What am I doing suddenly telling Denise what to do? Who’s in charge here?! 

“You’ll need a blanket, or something to wrap around the bird’s wings. You’ll have to pick up the bird and put it in the box and then secure the box.” 

I look down at the blazer I picked out for the office visit before the walk I took around the lake with one of my friends who went with Katie and I to City Hall all those years ago. Today, I wore the kind of shoes I wished I would have worn then. Leather. Classy. But the shoes I wore today were wrong for today. A blistered heel. 

But I also packed my hoodie this morning. Why? Something in me that never trusts a blazer will be enough when the sun goes down. “Okay,” I say into the phone. 

The girl has brought a box. It’s disassembled. Too small. The Denise in her sees this as she gets closer. 

“Do you have anything bigger?” I ask. She tilts her head. She runs back inside. A moment later, she returns, carrying a box that seems to have been built to hold hawks that fall from the sky. Somewhere in all of this, I hang up the phone and begin the plan. I have given the tarp to the boy with the bottle and his friend who stomped at the top bird. “Stand back here between the two cars. Hold the tarp firm with your hands and feet. Don’t let him run into the street.” They nod, happy to have a job.  

I turn and walk toward the bird. Behind me, the woman with the box. I start toward the hawk, and they give me those eyes again that are and are not Gracie’s. I think they will run. Or, since a hawk, soar into the sky through me, fight me if I go in this way. I back out. I direct the woman with the box to move toward the bird with the box on the ground. “Just to distract it,” I say. She takes a deep breath. But she trusts me, believes in our plan. She steps toward them.  

Suddenly they only see her. I walk back and come in from the back tarp entrance. They don’t turn to look at me at all. I hold the wrists of my hoodie out by my arms. I bend down slowly. I wrap my hoodied arms around the hawk. I am holding a hawk. I feel the potential of flight in their now-limp wings. One of their talons kicks out just shy of the bare skin of my forearm, so white. I exhale and try not to imagine the scar that might be. I hold the hawk in my arms. 

And gently, so gently, so gently I’m barely moving, I lift the hawk into the box. They go in on their back and side. I fear they’re uncomfortable, but I pull the hoodie over the top of the box all the same. I hear Husky’s words from earlier on the phone: “You must contain it. Protect it. Until they get there.” The hoodie bunches where they clutch it in their talon. A firm handshake.  

We all let out a breath together. I look at the woman with the box. I give her five. “We did it!”  

“That was amazing,” she says.  

Something in time ripples. Who am I. Who’s in charge here.  

The hawk is still in the box under my hoodie. The ball of hoodie in its talons. 

And now we wait. And it’s decided that since the woman lives here and I live in another town now, and I’m a little tired, such a long day—I should go. She is Denise again. I am me. And my eyes are tired. So tired. It’s decided. The woman—Erin, she tells me now—and her roommate, will sit watch. I see their capableness. I have known it. Half my life ago now. And more. I trust it. We’ve done this thing together. I’m the elder, and I will give them this. There was a time I would have wanted to have it. To wait and sit with the hawk. Into the night. On. And I did. I am.  

I am still sitting with that hawk.  

I am still on the floor with Gracie in my arms and that last vet ringing the doorbell she can’t hear anymore.  

I am still in that bed one more time before I get up the next morning and carry boxes out of that apartment in the Mission I called home for 13 years.  

I am still in a strange office by Lake Merritt in Oakland earlier in the day. “Here?” I ask. The woman nods. I raise my pen. I sign. Katie and I are divorced. 

I did stay with the hawk. I have.  

But today, I get in my car. I leave. I drive home. Over dinner, I tell Susannah the story. 

* 

It’s more bird than the eye expects. It bobs on the late afternoon wind that picks up. 

The breeze goosebumps the dry sweat on my arms. All morning I’ve played. At Dolores Park. No. Not all. A late night that carried into an early morning, thinking of my students and what we will do these next four months. The spring semester looms. And it calls me out, saying that all day I’ve been playing tennis at the Dolores Courts. And, the night before even in that student planning, yes, play. 

Can you hear your own narration? I will ask them. It’s always there. We all have it.  

But can you hear it? 

So much asks us to hear other things. So much speaks over it. 

I walk past Lone Mountain on the way to the gym for my shower. I don’t live here anymore, so, when I play tennis on school days, I’m a person who carries many bags. San Francisco is not a place to speak lightly of homelessness. But showering here or at the park—this awareness that I no longer have a home here—the packing and unpacking it requires.  

Above me, the hawk circles. 

Maybe not the hawk. Or not the one I rooted for. Not the one I held.  

Or maybe. Or maybe the other. Or another. 

It’s so high, so effortless. This day, at play.  

At play. All morning. Light. All morning. 

Almost afternoon. Almost 1:00. And then, 2:00. At 2:00, or probably later—yes, my watch tells me I will be late—I’m going to see the woman I had once for 14 years thought would be beside me all the rest. 

It’s been a year almost to the day since I last saw Katie. We decided to take time. Take time. What a phrase. I have a problem with time. I will probably be late. 

And then, in an email two months ago, she asked if we could meet. We’re so respectful of each other, she wrote. 

Others have been skeptical of this plan. 

Even I. 

For the way, seeing her during our very long separation, the last nine months of us calling ourselves us, would bang me. Gong-like. The reverberations for weeks. Ripples I will call them later. But no. A gong. 

Even though I’m in love with another. Deeply. So deep. At the same time. So full. Such loss. Ripples back and forth across my body. The body knows. Fidgety feet. Cold sores. Peeling hands. It knows about gongs. 

It gongs with new love. One night, we’ve been up late with our bodies, again. So deep. Sometimes, this time, we’re so close, I’m in so deep, again, I’m so afraid, if some time, if she weren’t. If she weren’t there. If.  

That night, pressed close. Tears I don’t have to explain.  

“You don’t have to be afraid of losing things now,” Susannah tells me. 

Months later, after the hawk, hours later, after the shower, after a burger and a beer, in the car—“Maybe we can just sit in the car and talk?” Katie asked.  

I’m never the first to leave. Anything. But others have been skeptical. My stomach gurgles. The body knows. The body is skeptical? I clutch my bags on my lap. Awaiting the drop off. I’ve loaned her the car that we once shared so that she can move out of the apartment that we once shared.  

Only now, she’s not moving out. In a gale of emotions on returning, she’s decided to keep it. This decision has sent another ripple of emotions through me, through Susannah, the way I can’t stop myself from reassembling my life around Katie, ripples. But I don’t share this now. Just the car. 

She needs the car so that she can let things go. Now is the time for that, I think.  

“Now is the time for new things,” she says. 

In the car, I clutch my backpack. 

Above me, the hawk, suspended on the wind. Or buoyed. Or standing, even. On air. 

All day. 

Time. Taking time. Getting control. Power over. Time. Take it.  

As if we ever could. 

And now, I speak. 

Now, which now?  

The now in the car I say, “It’s like time travel. Sometimes, someone will ask a question just so, and I’m right back there in New York. There on the A Train. There in your sister’s house at Christmas. And I’m like, no, I’m not even there anymore. No, I don’t even want to be there. Now. For then. Not now. But I am. Then. Now.” 

And then she tells me, “I have such guilt about that,” she says. “New York.” 

And another me would have left it there, but I don’t want her to have guilt. That bird has flown. We don’t have to carry it anymore. “You didn’t know,” I said.  

A moment later, we will assure one another of our honesty. The rarity. The gift. 

Others have been skeptical. 

But I don’t want that. 

I never wanted that. 

Once, two summers ago now, in our dark bedroom, I turned toward the window, the new blinds we had put up that nearly destroyed us. “This will be the thing…” we said. The joke that we couldn’t finish. I was crying. And now, I’m not even sure it was this time now, this thought I had that I said then, that I still feel. 

Then, that time, I was so tired of things ending. There was Katie’s brother. There was our cat. There was our dog. There was Katie, leaving San Francisco, leaving me, a time for new things, her, New York. Poetry. Her, meeting a person. Her, asking us to open. To end being closed. I was so tired of things ending, of being the one to say, The End. Now. Over. Then. No more. 

All day. Time. Taking time. I’m taking so much time to say this one thing, the only thing I knew, when I said, “we could do that, but I don’t know what it will mean. We could do that, I don’t know what that will mean. And we can do this, but I really, really don’t know what this will mean.” 

But I did know, even though I couldn’t have said it then. I have never had trouble finding people to love or to be loved by. 

The one thing. Then. Now. The one thing I’ve kept holding onto, in all the times of letting go, one thought that I heard all the time, every time, then, now, tomorrow. 

“We don’t have to destroy ourselves.”  

We can end. Yes.  

We have. 

We will. End as long as we need to. 

“But we could end still in sight of one another.”  

“And with love?” 

It’s a conversation like we used to have. So much circling, so fast, I can’t remember who said which part. Sometimes that’s how it is when you’re living with love. 

And I can’t see the hawk anymore. Now. Up there. This time. Not the last day I saw Katie, but the last day I saw her that I choose to remember.  

That time. 

Or. That time. 

Erin’s roommate, on returning my hoodie, we were on her stoop. I was still sad then, how it got away. How it seemed I’d failed. 

She stands, a step above me.  

She says, “I don’t know, I mean…” She looks off in the direction I don’t know, and I do, that the hawk flew. “It didn’t feel right to keep it in the box. When it woke up.” 

She’s right. She’s trying to comfort me. A person twice her age. 

This happens to me sometimes. I’m forever beginning. It’s always new. People always offer kindness. 

I look down. She’s so much taller than me. On the stoop. 

I look up at her eyes, they’re brown. Already, they see so far.  

Earlier she said, “This wasn’t my first experience with a hawk.”  

She’s so much taller than me, more than me. 

Or maybe, that’s just time. Dropping me through again. To when I was as old as she is now. Half my life ago.  

So I just say, “I know. Yeah.” 

And then I squint, looking up toward Turk Street. 

Late afternoon light. 

And I see it then, now. 

“It just kind of wobbled a little,” she said. “And then it took flight.” 

---

Jill Schepmann’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and Parcel, among others. They hold an MFA from Vanderbilt University. They live in Oakland and teach at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco.