Plumage by Nancy Springer

winos, no smell of urine. But the cinder-block walls painted institutional beige, the mustard-brown vinyl flooring, the low acoustic-tile ceiling, the posterboard signs No Soliciting No Loitering No Recreational Wheeled Conveyances No Public Displays Of Affection—might as well say No Living. Racquel wore fuchsia to defy places like this. Specifically, in this instance, he was wearing a fuchsia tunic fringed with dip-dyed cassowary over a bias-draped plum skirt. And a touch of cassowary at the neck. The right accessories meant everything.
    No functioning security system in this place, either, he noticed as he knocked at Sassy’s door.
    â€œIt’s open.” Her voice sounded wan.
    He went in, walking through a front room piled with books to find her sitting at her kitchen table amid more books, mostly about birds. She did not get up to meet him. She barely looked at him.
    â€œHey, woman.” He slapped the glittery baseball hat onto her head. She did smile, and she took it off to see what it was, but she did not show enough interest to head for a mirror and admire how it looked. And she was cute as hell in that hat, dammit, with her heart-shaped face, her big eyes and her little pointed chin. Even her big honkin’ glasses were cute under that hat. But she did not put it back on, just laid it aside.
    â€œI haven’t seen you around.” Racquel sat down at another chair at the table, which was one of those tasteless aluminum-tubing-and-plastic laminate kitchenette affairs, with aluminum-and-plastic chairs to match. Heinous.
    â€œI lost my job,” Sassy said.
    â€œI know. Doesn’t mean you can’t come see me.”
    â€œI haven’t felt like going anywhere.”
    Racquel moved a pile of books to the floor and studied her. Sassy looked like she didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything. No makeup—of course, when had he ever seen Sassy in makeup? How long had she been letting herself go? Since he had known her, anyway. There she sat all slumped, with her hair not combed. Wearing sweatshirt, sweatpants, and they didn’t even match.
    â€œI’m almost sure it was ivory-billed woodpeckers I saw,” Sassy said.
    â€œHuh?”
    Sassy pressed her hands on the large book lying open before her as if pressing flowers. A bird book, of course, with big colorful pictures. “Ivory-billed woodpeckers,” said Sassy. “And Hawaiian honeycreepers. And a moa. I saw a moa. And those were passenger pigeons I saw flying over.” She spoke in a monotone, like a grieving person telling the story of how it happened, the cancer, the motorcycle accident, whatever it was. “And those weren’t hyacinth macaws. They were Spik’s macaws. There’s only one left alive in the wild. I saw two.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    Sassy closed her book softly, as if putting a baby down to sleep, and turned the cover toward him so that he could see the title: Rare, Endangered, and Forever Gone .
    â€œThe last ivorybill anybody’s seen was in Cuba in 1988,” she said. “But I saw a pair.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œYou know where.”
    Faced with her steady gaze, Racquel started to babble. “Sassy, that—it can’t be real. We just think we’re remembering the same thing. It’s like when people drop acid together—”
    She gave him a look so flat and weary it hushed him. “That parakeet,” she said. “The one that was in the hotel. It’s not an escapee from some pet store. It’s a Carolina parakeet.” She showed him the picture. Green body, yellow head, orange eye patch. Blue primaries on the wings. Yellow rump patch. Yep.
    â€œSo?”
    â€œThey’re extinct.”
    Racquel pressed his lips together and looked at the linoleum floor, against which Sassy’s bare feet curled together like white, shivering puppies.
    Sassy said, very low, “The voice said that what I