Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele

Are the Birds in Bird Suit real? Are they a metaphor? A myth? This is a mystery we are left to ponder as Sydney Hegele’s Southern Ontario gothic folk tale unfolds. But the story does start with the Birds – and the girl they didn’t want. 

Bird Suit’s fictional town of Port Peter could be any number of small towns on a lake, overrun with summer tourists buying ice cream and cheap souvenirs on the boardwalk, filling up the local pubs and motels, knocking up the local girls – before disappearing in September. There are, however, two things that make Port Peter special: its perfect peaches and its Birds. “The women of the town tell one another about the Birds in secret… When a Port Peter girl gets pregnant by a tourist boy, a woman in her life gives her all the information she needs to know.” By night, the girls leave their unwanted babies in a laundry basket on a cliffside lookout. And in the morning, the babies are gone.

 “The women of the town tell one another about the Birds in secret… When a Port Peter girl gets pregnant by a tourist boy, a woman in her life gives her all the information she needs to know.”

What happens to these abandoned children isn’t exactly clear – as with all folklore, the story changes from year to year and ear to ear. The understanding is that the Birds – creatures that are part woman, part bird; both of this world, and apart from it – take the babies in and care for them. But when Elsie Jackson tries to leave her infant daughter for the Birds, they reject her. This is how we meet the novel’s protagonist, Georgia Jackson.

Twenty years after the Birds left her in the laundry basket, Georgia still lives in Port Peter. Doubly rejected by her mother and the Birds alike from the moment of her birth, followed by years of abuse by her mother’s boyfriends, Georgia is aimless, reckless, plagued by guilt and self-doubt. “Georgia doesn’t try to prove something that she knows is not true. She is not good. Everything that has ever happened to her has been her own fault. If pain doesn’t make sense, nothing does.” It is in this moment, that Georgia meets the Blooms. 

Arlo Bloom is a priest returning to his hometown, a place haunted for him by unspeakable loss. His pain has sharpened into violence he cannot control and we see this violence play out in his relationship with his son, Isaiah, in some of the book’s most visceral passages. Hegele writes, “Fear and love are not two strands intertwined: they are the same strand, and Isaiah cannot distinguish one from the other.” Hegele expertly weaves the complexities and contradictions that so often characterize abusive relationships into the fabric of this story, and does so with finely balanced brutality and compassion throughout the book. 

Georgia becomes involved in a sexual relationship with both Arlo and his wife, Felicity. Here, Hegele plays with both queer desire and power dynamics, and the result is a relationship that defies convention. The first time the three of them have sex, we learn, “Plenty of men have hit Georgia. About half of them hit her because she asked them to. She has never allowed herself to imagine what it might feel like to be the one with the power.” There is heat in this scene, but also a realness – a nod to the awkwardness of naked bodies in a room, the uncertainty of first times. For Arlo, Felicity, and Georgia, there are elements of their coming together that are empowering and those that are destructive, and the space between becomes fertile ground for tension, revelation, and decisions that alter the course of all of their lives. 

At the same time, Georgia also becomes close friends with Isaiah Bloom. Their shared histories of abuse and dreams of escaping Port Peter bring them together, even as Georgia’s relationship with Isaiah’s parents has potential to tear them apart. This friendship feels like a pure and hopeful thread holding fast in the sordid, sticky, peachy muck of Port Peter. We learn early on that Isaiah feels he has a bird (or birds) in his head – voices that come to him when he is in pain. Isaiah often questions who he would be without his birds, without his pain. In a moment of shared vulnerability, Georgia tells him, “I would love you with or without your birds.” Isaiah replies, “How do you know?” This question of knowing who you could be, who you could love, and who could love you, based on all you have endured and all you can remember, stands at the centre of the book. With Bird Suit, Hegele offers no straightforward answers, but rather a sensual and slightly surreal modern fable steeped in the sweetness of ripe peaches, and the song of Birds in flight.

Anuja Varghese

Website

Anuja Varghese (she/her) is an award-winning writer and editor based in Hamilton, ON. Her work appears in Hobart, Corvid Queen, Southern Humanities Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Plenitude Magazine, as well as the Queer Little Nightmares anthology, among others. Her debut short story collection, titled Chrysalis (House of Anansi Press, 2023) explores South Asian diaspora experience through a feminist, speculative lens. In 2023, Chrysalis won the Writers Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Find Anuja on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok (@anuja_v across platforms) or through her website www.anujavarghese.com.

• Anuja Varghese

  https://miramichireader.ca/author/anuja-varghese/

  

  September 19, 2021

  The Pump by Sydney Warner Brooman