A bird-ghost dive-bombed me outside of the Tobago shopping mall, squawking that I was an imperialist, a colonizer of the old Latvian Empire, and I waved the bird-ghost off, calling after it that I was just buying a new pair of running shoes, on sale, possibly knockoffs, and that my low salary as a history teacher in Ventspils rarely stretched to such expenditures, and besides, I shouted at the glassy blur in the sky, the Latvian Empire was tiny, no more than a mad Duke setting off to the New World and claiming a Caribbean island, quickly named New Courland, and a small fort and church built, a few wooden houses, the whole enterprise barely a colony, and the bird-ghost again swooped down, its sharp beak ripping out tufts of my hair, cawing that I was wrong, and then the bird-ghost rose into midair, and I flung one of my new running shoes, which sailed far off-course, so I held up the remaining shoe, ready to strike with the thick rubber sole, and the bird-ghost darted down and snatched the shoe and dropped it on the mall roof, singing about its victory, about the triumph of birds over men, and then the bird-ghost perched on the large T of the Tobago sign, eyeing me, its prey, a simple history teacher, a white man who spoke Latvian and Russian, a little Estonian, who had grown up very poor on a farm in nearby Zūras, raised by a proud Soviet grandmother, who instilled in me a sense of national pride, but also a weariness of Communism, of anything said by Khrushchev or Brezhnev or Andropov, and indeed any quotes attributed to Lenin or Stalin, nevermind Marx, and later she cursed my marriage to a Belarusian, Tatsyana, who fought with my grandmother over the best way to cook potato pancakes and sorrel soup, and Tatsyana forced me to stop speaking to my grandmother, who died a few months later, leaving the farm to a nephew, and in that period of mourning, Tatsyana showed me brochures of Caribbean hotels and adults-only resorts, and I thought of Tobago, though I could never afford it, but I daydreamed of taking Tatsyana on a sailboat, finding our way there, ocean explorers, like Latvians of old, Poles in actuality, Curonians to be precise, not that it really mattered, then or now; however my desire to learn historical details became the undoing of much of my life, including my marriage to Tatsyana, who left me for Maxim, a former champion powerlifter and local coke dealer, and they sued me in court for everything I had, which wasn’t much, a collection of historical volumes and a flat, but they won, so I moved across town to a poorly heated studio and fell into a fit of depression, every night becoming sodden with cheap balsam, before finding God again, praise be, and starting my life over, jogging early mornings in the woods and along the promenade, ending at the Lutheran church, thankful for one more day, and the bird-ghost seemed to sense all of this and none of it at the same time, and shot toward me, pecking at my eyes, so I fled to the beach, the bird-ghost following, attacking me, and I fell at the shoreline, by the gray icy Baltic waters, the waves breaking over my body, suddenly numbed, and the bird-ghost landed on my head and drove its beak into my skull, fracturing it, opening a fissure in the bone, a hole, devouring what parts of my brain were not aswirl in seawater, and the bird-ghost nested inside the empty cavity of my head and revealed to me its pattern of migratory flight, a winter voyage from North America to the Gulf and across the islands and the ocean to Europe, and when I argued that this was nothing but an avian form of colonialism, bird colonies spanning half the world, the bird-ghost labeled me an apologist for the old Latvian Empire, for the mad Duke, for the conquest of indigenous lands, and then the bird-ghost declared it couldn’t inhabit such a creature, however dead it may be, of such bad faith, and the bird-ghost rose from my skull, spread its wings, and headed out somewhere over the sea.
Christopher Linforth is the author of four story collections, Very Short Lives (2027), The Distortions (2022), Directory (Reissue 2026; Italian 2024; 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (2014). Christopher’s stories have been published in more than one hundred literary magazines. Recent fiction appears in the Barcelona Review, Oxford Review of Books, Nature, Notre Dame Review, Banshee, Books Ireland, Witness, The Arkansas International, Fiction International, Southern Humanities Review, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, Hotel Amerika, BULL, New World Writing, Popshot, Prism International, Consequence, Epiphany, and Best Microfiction.