Abbey Birkhead

Dr. Anderson
Final Draft
Bird on the Wire

When Josie Bell imagined her 23rd birthday, she hadn’t thought she would be spending it

in a graveyard. November 12th, once full of the potential for city lights and crowded spaces now

sat still and lonely. Still crowded though, she mused, dragging her eyes over the toppled graves

that were shoved into lopsided earth. Stuffing her hands into her coat, she watched her breath

swirl up into the air. It was odd, the sight of her obvious sign of life floating upwards in a place

so absolutely dead.

Her day hadn’t started this way. She had woken up at the usual time, drank coffee from a

mug riddled with Shakespearean quotes, and gotten dressed. Pressed white shirt, black slacks,

socks with colorful patterns of animals that would be hidden in her shoes. That was her idea of

rebellion these days. Nothing takes the fight out of you like an unpaid internship and months

spent typing furiously next to a rubber band ball the size of your head.

The Milton Herald had been the focus of Josie’s life for as long as she could remember.

The gargantuan building sat in the center of town, two stone lions gazing soberly at the street

from their respective columns. The paper brought to life in that building functioned as the

powerhouse of her small Michigan town, especially considering the fact that it had been there for

so long that her parents had read it, and their parents, and their parents. At any given time, one

could look into the windows and see journalists clambering about with papers in their hands or

talking in an animated huddle. As a child, their frantic movement reminded Josie of worker bees

in a hive. When she would pause on the sidewalk to peek at them on her way to school, Josie

swore she could hear the buzzing.

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 Working for the Milton Herald had been her mother’s dream for her, but it had been hers

too. Her mom, an avid consumer of everything news-related, picked up on Josie’s love of people

and stories early on. It got to the point where Josie was reading over her shoulder so often that

her mom started putting out two cups of coffee in the morning, one decaffeinated and one strong

and black—both sending paths of steam up into the air of their back porch. They spent countless

Sunday mornings plowing through the paper, making sure to scan every nook and cranny for the

perfect place for Josie’s future column. Once they had dog-eared some of their favorites, her

mom would flip to the first page and jab a polished fingernail at the bold font on the front.

“You would be perfect here,” she’d say with a smile, red-rimmed glasses slowly but

surely slipping down her freckled nose. “Josie B. Front and center.”

She could almost see it there too—the ink morphing to spell out ‘World’s Youngest

Reporter: Age 9’ instead of ‘Political Stalemate Takes Hold!’

Her mom was gone now, but Josie couldn’t help but think of her when she saw the bold

font of a front-page story. It was comforting to believe she’d be proud of where Josie had

clambered to, despite it being just an internship. Internships meant connections and connections

meant a chance at having a job, even if you had to share a cubicle with the company rubber band

ball for a while.

The longer it went on, the more Josie realized that she didn’t really like working at the

paper. It was hard to acknowledge the reality that her younger self glazed over. To know the

buzzing bees in the windows of the paper were primarily exhausted twenty-somethings like her,

running solely on caffeine and the hope that their next story was on the way. That the shiny

bustle of stories in motion was more like last minute deadlines and complaints.

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 Working there at least filled her days with purpose, though, as well as tasks that could be

completed. A cappuccino run here, a proofreading session there—she tried to view everything as

a stepping-stone. Believing there was some brighter, more financially stable future just around

the corner was enough to help her endure the dull ache of the internship.

So, when her boss caught her on her way out of the bullpen and asked her to go to the

cemetery to jot down funny epitaphs for the entertainment section, she said yes. Within twenty

minutes, she had packed her bag, put on her coat, and was making her way there. She knew the

way well enough; she drove past it daily. It made her queasy to see the sloping hills as she drove.

It felt like a reminder. It felt like the dead were suffocating her, placing themselves in her path as

she was trying to move forward. To live. But work was work, and if trekking through a

graveyard was what it took to launch her up the corporate ladder, she would do it.

So, she was in a graveyard on her birthday. Wispy tan grass tickling her ankles, and her

dress shoes were muddied and crusting over. In a moment of examining the ground for rocks, but

really for hands sticking out of the dirt, she realized that the grass was grown from bodies.

Shuddering from the thought, she walked down the jagged rows and scanned them, trying to find

a vaguely interesting epitaph to write down.

THIS LIFE IS BUT A PASSING DREAM,

WE SOON SHALL WAKE IN HEAVEN.

Thought provoking, but definitely more crisis-inducing than funny. Her eyes landed on a

headstone just a few over belonging to a woman named Rosemary.

NOT DEAD, JUST SLEEPING.

Not bad, but she doubted Rosemary was the wittiest one in the entire graveyard.

It turned out that the historic graves were only a small part of the property as a whole.

The modern area, while only a few feet away, truly felt worlds apart from the older one. Instead

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of being crumbled and sporadic, the headstones stood tall and perfectly aligned across the

ground. Josie walked over to them, nudging open the creaky gate that marked off the older

graves. In her haze, she almost didn’t hear her phone ringing.

“Hello?” she said, pressing the phone to her ear.

“Hey Jos,” her dad said. “I just wanted to call to wish you a happy birthday.” He cleared

his throat and continued. “I know we’ve both been busy these days, but I just wanted you to

know that you are on my mind. Your mom would be so proud of the woman that you’ve

become.”

“Thanks Dad,” she replied. He was right about the distance, but not so much about her

mother being proud. She moved out partially to be closer to the Herald, hoping it would

transition from an internship to employment in enough time for her to be able to afford her

apartment. But, if she was honest, a lot of it had to do with sharing the house with her father’s

grief. It was painful in the beginning to watch him stumble through the day, blinded with the

pain of missing someone. It was painful now that talking about their memories comforted him.

Most of the time, Mom was the last thing Josie wanted to talk about. Not because she didn’t care,

but because she cared so much that the thought of what she had lost had the potential to crush

her.

His voice broke her out of her thoughts. “I was going to stick your card in the mail, but

then I thought that we could celebrate later this weekend instead. How does dinner and a movie

sound?”

“That sounds great, Dad, I’ll let you know by tomorrow” she replied. She didn’t tack on

the If I’m not busy that followed silently after the words she spoke out loud.

“Great. I love you, Jos,” he said.

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 “I love you, too.” A pause. “One more thing,” she sucked in cold air, feeling it burn in

her lungs. “Do you know where Mom’s plot is? I’m at the cemetery for work, and I want to see

her.”

He didn’t hesitate or question why. Instead, he just said “Your mom is over by the white

birch. She picked that spot years before she was even sick. She told me once that it represented a

new dawn, that being buried there would be wonderful because it would remind her loved ones

that death is not the end.”

“That sounds like Mom,” Josie said. She felt tears start to prick in her eyes, but she

leaned her head back. The gray sky stared down at her while she stared up at it. Blinking hard,

she mustered up the strength to place the pain into a box and put it back on the shelf. “I should

probably go, but thank you for the birthday wishes and everything else.”

“Of course,” he said, “Just remember to call.”

As she ended the call, she felt uncomfortable. That feeling of guilt that she always tried

so hard to keep at bay rushed in. She saw it all. Her mom, healthy. Her mom, sick. The bedroom

wall that she stared at for the entirety of the visitation and funeral services. That whole year and

the ones after it that felt more like a dream than reality.

She knew it was wrong that she hadn’t gone to the funeral. She couldn’t bear to spend the

rest of her life with the image burned in her brain of the person she loved the most in the world

as just a shell. Or even words, seeing that shell in makeup, surrounded by faces that Josie would

have traded for her in a heartbeat. Instead of powering through that fear, she stayed home. Her

father, wrapped up in his own grief and the duties of a new widower, allowed it. It happened and

it shouldn’t have— and she was the one who had to carry that burden for the rest of her life.

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 Now, she saw the birch tree and the brilliant fire of leaves falling from it. The closer she

got, the more that the specks on them looked like the freckles on the bridge of her mom’s nose.

She rested her hand on the small grave, feeling the chill of the stone. Tracing the letters of her

mother’s epitaph, she hummed the lyrics she knew so well but had misplaced.

LIKE THE BIRD ON THE WIRE,

LIKE A DRUNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR,
I HAVE TRIED IN MY WAY TO BE FREE.

Even when she was gone, her mother knew just what to say.

In that moment, with her hand pressed against the headstone, Josie felt her mother’s hand

on top of hers. She felt the warm steam of coffee and the worn smoothness of paper. She closed

her eyes and truly let herself break for the first time since it happened.

When she was done, she stood up and dusted the crumbled leaves and dirt from her

knees. Taking her car key from the pocket of her coat, she walked under the birch. In the blank

whiteness of its paper bark, she carved the word FREE and stepped into a new dawn.

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Abbey Birkhead
Dr. Anderson
Prose Fiction
“Bird on the Wire” Process Note

The first thing that I did to edit this story was go through and look for common threads

within my critiques. Most of the comments had to do with the story feeling “unfinished,” as well

as a conflicting feeling having to do with the first paragraph. After I went through and collected

these similarities, I then started to work on my piece as a whole.

One of the hardest things that I dealt with while editing this story was the first paragraph.

I am very attached to it, mostly because of the fact that I have always been a writer that started

with a first sentence. To me, changing the first sentence to something new felt like chopping off

the lifeline of the entire story. I knew I had to work on it though, so I ended up editing it to be

more straightforward and less convoluted. I also edited the entire first paragraph to be more

concise.

The largest change that I made to “Bird on the Wire” was cutting almost the entirety of

pages 3 and 4. A few people pointed to Josie’s conversation with her boss being a weak spot in

the story, as well as drifting too much into summary mode. To fix this issue, I removed this

scene from the story and made it an implied scene by saying “So, when her boss caught her on

her way out of the bullpen and asked her to go to the cemetery to jot down funny epitaphs for the

entertainment section, she said yes.” As Dr. Anderson suggested, cutting the summary from

pages 2 to 4 could work to revive my ending and help it not feel as incomplete.

I also removed a large amount of self-analysis that Josie had. I completely understood in

retrospect how that could come across as not being genuine to readers throughout the story. In

addition to this change, I decided to bring back the image of the “new dawn” in the last sentence.

Overall, I am happy with how the story turned out. I had a really great time writing it.