APRIL 2025

Birdie’s Forever Day

From her modest home surrounded by great old trees in the small river town of Ophelia, Birdie hears the language of the birds and believes they are talking to her. She was born in 1900. Whatever the birds are trying to communicate to her increases in intensity over her life. For many years she works in the telephone exchange of the town and so is privy to conversations in the town. People in Ophelia will not believe her when she says the birds have told her something; they assume she simply overheard someone’s phone conversation. We find Birdie unable to move beyond what she calls her ‘forever day’, the last happy day she experienced as a child before some great trauma that she suppresses and which slowly reveals itself again to her over the course of many years, with the help of the birds. She learns that she can’t fully understand what the birds are trying to tell her until she can move forward from her forever day, but she is terrified to do so. The novel largely centers on Birdie in the latter years of her life, trying to retain a place in her own childhood even as she observes herself growing into an eccentric and increasingly delusional old age. The birds constantly press her to challenge her visions and accept their messages as real. Near the end of the 20th Century and of her own life, she is finally able to understand the birds but unable to warn the world of what they are telling her.