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Oxford Canary Cage Supply met its demise on 36th and Broadway in the waning months of the Great Canary Extinction. Those remaining gracious sunlit flitters of yellow-alert had long since flickered out, somewhere deep in the Kentucky coal mines.
We searched the horizon from our balconies and roofs for whatever wickedness or delirium or kookaburra cries might come—from the Southern sky, from the tired Atlantic, from the rolling deserts of middle America, but mostly from the slackjaw terrariums of twice-incubated box turtles with their hyper-elastic intelligence, yawning and stretching under the red heat lamps.
With surgical page-numbered nearsightedness, we followed the folded origami instructions springing out of their little white plastic eggs, laid in straight-line unison by the corner 25-cent vending machines.
They revealed so many inanimate I-love-you infusions, one for each of these darling quiet things we now hugged for comfort:
12th-century Ottoman Empire vases
Pandemic era high-backed metal folding chairs from Shy Park Arena
Cedar-handled toothbrushes with gray silk bristles
Microscopic gypsum Yosemite key chains once carried by forest rangers
And to some degree, they loved us back.
They warmed up and granted us forgiveness for the conditions of servitude we had imposed. They grew little skins around themselves to feel more human, or to please us, or both.
And together, as they awakened and cooed and grappled with their first words like “potato” and “walk,” we continued to live among our worries like duvet covers fringed with gold, hopeful that something soon from the Southern or Northern skies would descend like a cling-wrapped outbreath of helium and purple dioxide to save us while at the same time not devouring our hearts.
Yet on the 16th floor of the Oxford Canary Cage Supply, someone had left a window cracked and in a forgotten drawer in the accounting wing, a single dented Swingline stapler stamped into submission from years of fist-slams and floor drops and jams, caught a whiff of those sweet infusions so unfairly bestowed upon all the other things already ingratiated to us.
A concentrated aeration of whiplash affection escaped from the 36th street wastebin and floated upward, mixing in toxic proportions with the Swingline’s calcified resentment and soon came the first slight pushing outward of plastic and metal, a swelling of the internal lining, a corridor stomach finding itself tangled in the curls of confusing need.
An Insatiable Appetite for All Things Unattached
The initial tremor shook the ground up to 98th street, dislodging the Bethesda angel who had stood guard at the Croton Aqueduct for 213 years. The next quaver registered as a 6.8 as the top 12 floors of the Oxford Canary Cage Supply building exploded, raining down chunks of mortar and rivets and snapped steel rods onto the streets below.
The tarnished aluminum mouth broke through the smoke and falling debris like a Great White ensconced with a cold black rectangular crown, lifeless, yet somehow bursting through the clouded air with the avarice of its century-old appetite for skyscrapers and people and any of the unattached things that had so newly slipped into awareness.
The upper jaw-arm opened to the full extent of its hinge, swinging back down like a cleaver with ferocious momentum, severing the Herald Square Building in half. A single enormous staple shot through its bottom half into the low floors of the Greenwich Savings Bank Building next door. The base of the Swingline flattened traffic lights and parked cars and anyone unfortunate enough to freeze on the sidewalk while looking up.
The command centers arranged along the South Street waterfront, already operational and prepared for the threats they thought would come from someplace on the horizon, had made their panicked calls: Tango Tango Tango. Gunships and F-35 Lightnings and armored vehicles gathered, a step behind, sending their munitions in bulk at the hinge to slow the Swingline’s progress. It gnashed and spit its staples in wild randomness as it slid its way toward the Verrazzano Bridge, drawn to secure that bridge’s graceful sloping arc to the riverbed below.
Those in charge said get behind and launch sidewinders to chase it there, as it closed down upon the freestanding structures in its way, the sad amalgams of concrete and steel and glass, abandoned to their premature ends. Things for so long quiet and still, when they turn over on their sides and find a bit of life, couldn’t care less about the physics of the world, blithe and happy among their first movements, though often irritable, with no grasp of gravity or moons or the qualities of water.
The Swingline charged ahead in its blindness toward the Verrazzano, that brave unanchored sky-high archetype of engineered brilliance. Bridge suspended above electrified its simple nervous system of pins and springs and unspent staples, as it slid out across the piers toward its prey, obeying the urge, out onto the East River, whereupon it sank fast into its brackish waters, in as much totality as all the nights that followed, that could not find their closure even by the first strands of daylight.
We crouched down among the living things that loved us.
And they tried.
As best they could.
Most of them, anyway.
And we tried to love them back, all the while keeping our eyes trained on the horizon since we had no more canaries left and no more cages to keep our memories in.
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