DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR — LAURA TODD CARNS
/The first time it happened, Miranda was six years old. She found a sparrow with a broken wing in the garden. It was flapping its good wing furiously, while the other dragged in the dirt, anchoring the creature as it turned in frantic circles around the source of its pain. She kneeled beside the sparrow and reached out to stroke its head. She didn’t know to be frightened of an injured bird. She didn’t yet know the danger that could be wielded by someone in terrible pain. As her fingertip smoothed the feathers on the bird’s head, Miranda felt such a warmth in her finger that she thought perhaps the sparrow had a fever.
But the heat was coming from her.
The sparrow stilled its frenzy and stretched its neck up towards Miranda, like a flower straining towards sunlight. Miranda gathered the bird into the bowl of her hands, instinctively curling herself around it, her skinny dirty-kneed body seeming to expand into a curve of protection. The heat became nearly unbearable. And then Miranda felt the rasping rustle of wings and her body uncoiled suddenly, sprawling in the mud as the sparrow took flight, perfect and whole and startling against the opaque pewter sky.
Delusions of grandeur. Those were the words the doctor used, and Miranda learned not to speak of her gift again. She used it quietly, holding this marvel inside her like a swallowed sun. Under her blazing fingers, a tumor on a stray dog’s leg melted away, the bones inside a squirrel’s twisted spine straightened like a jump rope pulled taut.
As Miranda grew older, the glow began to weaken, and sometimes creatures would limp away from her apparently unchanged. She began to wonder if she had imagined those moments of heat and repair, the current of vigor moving through her. It seemed impossible, the more she grew and learned, that one small person could be any kind of bulwark against the careless cruelty of the world.
Years from those moments of kneeling in the mud, another doctor’s words wheel through Miranda’s mind. Cancer. Inoperable. She is no longer a small child unafraid. She no longer believes in miracles. But she thinks, perhaps, that she can believe, for one moment, in her own grubby-kneed girlness. She curls around herself and reaches up to stroke her own forehead. She is as worthy as a broken bird.
Laura Todd Carns is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She has published fiction in Pigeon Pages and Flyway, nonfiction in Hobart and Electric Literature, and poetry in Mothers Always Write and Claw & Blossom. She lives near Annapolis, Maryland where her children and pets conspire to distract her from writing.
