If You Say So
By Markell Tierney
He buzzed out of a stand of wild yellow hibiscus, right up to my face, so close I went cross-eyed. So close I felt the turbulence from his wings on my cheeks. I recoiled, flinchy about the unfamiliar wildlife in the jungles of West Jamaica. Reflexively, the hummingbird swept away but came right back, as if on a pendulum, as if double-checking me. Then he flashed his ruby throat like a million-watt smile.
At that distance, the tiny blinking feathers reminded me of bidding paddles at a hot auction. His iris was dark brown, like mine, and his black pupil was full of awareness… even recognition. He swept a vertical membrane across his eye, squeaked like a laughing mouse, and rocketed off toward the Blue Mountains.
***
In New York, five months later, orange trumpet vines claimed my garden fence. Where my cross-armed, eye-rolling neighbors had lawn, I had a nectar buffet of bee balm, beardtongue, and Lucifer crocosmia. I wanted my backyard to be an oasis for migratory species like the ruby throated hummingbird.
Had the one in Negril recognized me? Come on, I told myself, it wasn’t like bumping into a coworker on vacation – this was a bird. A bird whose breeding and wintering range spanned a million square miles. A bird so small its main predators included large dragonflies and praying mantises.
I restrained my urge to share what I’d seen, aware of how crazy I’d sound. What I thought I'd experienced was impossible. Clearly, I had imagined the bird’s reaction, anthropomorphized the animal.
Still, my breath caught with every hummer I saw, hoping for a reunion. I tried to pull my head out of the clouds and stuck to vetted references, but each plainly stated fact seemed even more improbable than my encounter.
Rubies, lighter than a penny, can fly nonstop for five hundred miles?
Their hearts, proportionally huge but smaller than a pea, beat twenty times per second?
They have no red feathers? None? The bird creates the fiery effect by manipulating microscopic prisms?
Hummingbirds often return to the exact same locations, year after year?
They recognize and remember individual humans?
***
I used to speak to trees and listen to rocks, before I learned it’s a good way to get laughed at. Before I learned it’s lonely to be an island – to be the only one who believes something – and started letting everyone else decide what’s possible.
I miss the time when my experience was the truth. When I didn’t reflexively leap from wonder straight to skepticism. My little friend didn’t have any trouble accepting that I’d traveled back and forth across a sea and half a continent.
And I don’t even have wings.
THE END
Author Bio: Markell Tierney lives in New York’s snow belt, grows flowers and herbs, and writes a lot of fiction. Markell’s creative nonfiction will appear in the twentieth edition of Stone Canoe.