Straight away, there’s this matter of the quetzal. I know I’ve been puzzled by it before and something about the familiarity that settles like dust when I learn it’s a bird makes me think I’ve learned this before.

The quetzal doesn’t stick. I think it’s a old poetic form, maybe something meant to be sung, like a ghazal. Or a precious gem, maybe one of those shiny ones that somehow looks like wood rather than rock.

Flipping through Graeme Gibson’s The Bedside Book of Birds, I discover the image as though for the first time. So, it’s true. I’ve learned and forgotten about the quetzal previously. (You can see it alongside, painted by Elizabeth Gould for her husband John’s monograph.)

It’s quite possible that I will forget, again, perhaps even by next November, when I return to this collection to read its final four stories. Maybe I will muse about the contents of the last story I’d read before shelving this pocketbook, about the symbolic importance of that poetic form or precious gem. Or was it some sort of medicinal plant?

In “The Resplendent Quetzal” it’s significant that neither Edward nor Sarah has ever seen one. Edward has kept a notebook since he was a boy, recording his early bird sightings: Robin, Bluejay, Kingfisher. It’s a reminder that these birds were once discoveries, they were remarkable for being the first to be recognised and identified and admired, but now they are birds seen so often as to be familiar, rote even.

Sarah isn’t fussed on birds anymore than she’s fussed on Edward’s obsession with them; she gestures away from her, claiming to have seen something amazing, and Edward tromps off in pursuit. But this story surprises readers, with a shift in perspective; after having been so fully absorbed in Sarah’s view of their marriage, suddenly readers accompany Edward into the woods where he is ostensibly in search of an orange bird Sarah saw but instead crouches angry with himself for playing this role in the charade because he figured out this game years ago and knew Sarah hadn’t seen any bird.

MARM 2023 PLANS

Each week I’ll share links to some online sources, so that anyone with a few minutes can join in the celebrations. Some poetry and flash fiction, some interviews and reviews, some fresh reads and rereads: mostly reading with a little viewing and, in particular, short stories.

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Rape Fantasies” (November 3)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Dancing Girls, “Hair Jewellery” (November 10)
Old Babes in the Wood, “First Aid” (November 12)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Dancing Girls, “A Travel Piece” (November 17)
Margaret Atwood’s 84th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Two Scorched Men” (November 19)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 21)
Dancing Girls, “The Resplendent Quetzel” (November 24)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Morte de Smudgie” (November 26)
Wrap-Up (November 29-30)

Sarah wanted to see a bird though—the quetzal, the only bird she’s interested in even after Edward’s announcement that it lives in cloud forests and not in the part of Mexico they’re visiting. She wants something impossible, and she resents Edward’s observation, his insistence on reality. (There’s a whole heap of small resentments on either side: each has changed, each longs for something different.)

Of course this isn’t really about a bird, and I’ve debated whether to share what it’s actually about, but it was such a delicate unfolding for readers to gradually understand, that I hate to spoil it. There is a clue very early in the story when something seemingly unnecessary is stated—a moment of clarity for which there’s no evident need—which one might dismiss as awkward or empty signalling. Only later is something revealed.

Then someone makes a decision which is simultaneously ludicrous and poignant. It wasn’t until I’d sat with the story for awhile (okay, I’m not feeling entirely well yet, so sitting with the story was more like huddling under an afghan) that I recognised how the pieces all knit together.

One element that’s particularly relevant is the site their tour guide presents, a pool where people made sacrifices to a deity in hopes of altering their fortunes. The story is that they were virgin sacrifices, but the guide observes that after testing the skeletons found there, they weren’t all virgins because some of them were men.

Oh, these old stories: the reality doesn’t always match up. Match up with what? Expectations, that’s what. Because it seems unthinkable to the guide that a full-grown man whose remains were discovered at the bottom of a pool could be a virgin. (There were children, too, he notes, so it wasn’t only about sacrificing virgins, he repeats.)

The audience doesn’t seem to question his revelation but readers enjoy both Edward’s and Sarah’s attempts to grapple with the narrative of sacrifice and belief, each in their own mind. In short, they’ve got questions.

At one point, Edward silences the part of his mind that is interfering with his vision. At one point Sarah tells herself it looks more like a swamp than a pool anyway, as though quietly declaring these sacrifices as mere rumours. There’s an overheard conversation between two other women, also tourists, that suggests they have their own ideas about the significance of what they’re hearing and seeing too, that they’re not openly expressing either.

Edward and Sarah are enacting their own kind of ritual, this dance where one gestures in the direction of a bird and the other travels in that direction and then returns, whereupon there will be some discussion of the search results.

And what will Edward say? This is the hook upon which readers swing, free to imagine that this time he will announce that he knows it’s a game and free to imagine that this time he will tell a story that preserves the ritual for another day.

Now that I’ve told you how it ends, are you wondering whether or not it’s worth reading? Oh, but it is, because the story turns on that other event, the thing I haven’t said. And it left a mark.