The Useful Intent

By Ken Poyner

 

 

Our graduation ends with a final question, and to get it wrong is not to graduate.

 

My parents stand four rows back:  proud, if disappointed.  What good is education for the Olomong, they asked.  It makes a bird too soon contemptuous of his elders, too indecently quarrelsome; one standing out too much at public affairs and unwanted in private ones.  The educated think themselves one hop better than the rest of our aggregation, give themselves over to irreclaimable days of plots and theories, devising gelatinous interdisciplinary relationships to explain what is known elsewhere through common sense.  The labor of the uneducated feed them.

 

I heard it all during our migrations.  I heard it at each pre-emptive gathering of the flock.  My mother, knowing my secret choice, would have me preen ploddingly more than my nest mates.  I had to deafly practice my warble an hour longer than anyone, learning to toss my mating calls like furious salt against the earth.  I was made to master seven levels of warning clicks, when even those becoming sentries have to adequately stutter only five.  My mother would extol the virtues of achieving a shared desk in the Ministry of Nesting Material Control, or of being a warehouse manager for the Red-Ferin, or working the pipes on the public baths:  all jobs that require no education, that pay an advertised rate, that allow a bird to proudly fold tired wings at the end of a dull and drumming day, and have balance sheet accomplishments.

 

But I want more.  I do not intend to spend my harvest days cleaning the leaves from Red-Ferin nests, or counting the content of warehouses.  I am more than practiced flight and a vector between roost and job.  There are mysteries to undigest; the mathematics of disorder to be untangled; the character of comfort to be considered and carelessly quantified.

 

I have always known I could do great things with an education.  So what if the pay is commission and not salary?  So what if the hens find it an unneeded hitch in their frenetic and short lived mating dances?

 

My parents still see me as a maintenance technician, a conductor on the statistics flavored migration trains.  They have hope for my failure.

 

But I inch towards the inquisitor, ready to claim the blue buckler of graduation.  The platform sways in the slight breeze and the leaves seem to celebrate as they slice in and out of the day’s fresh squeezed light.  Higher in the trees the Magistrates count blue crests and red crests, compact the sparse crowd with coos of disapproval.  The air is as dead as the underside of a cave, and my heart tongues its own chambers like the harkening timepiece of a dog.

 

When it is my turn, the great, aged inquisitor bends, as cautious as the cracking of the first egg in the driest of mistimed seasons.   Brittle and precise, clicking into my hound hungry ears so only I can hear, he asks with the tone weariness of squealing, “How many Olomong does it take to serve the Red-Ferin?”

 

And in my heart and teeth and hollow bones I know the answer, the truth as resounding as water tapping on limestone:  all of them.

 

But I stand silent, the breath of the inquisitor rushing through me, my wings raised for the buckler and beginning to cramp.  And he then begins the joyous and toothlessly unwelcome graduation dance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIO:  Ken Poyner has placed about 400 poems and stories in the small presses and on the web during the last 40 years. He lives with his power lifting wife, who just won the USAPL National Raw Dead Lift and National Raw Push/Pull in the 48kg class, and five rescue cats in the lower right hand corner of Virginia . Flash fiction is relatively new to him, but you can find some of his smotherings in “Corium”, “Menacing Hedge”, “Blue Fifth”, “Alice Blue”, “ Metazen ”, “Emprise Review”, and the ubiquitous elsewhere.