Anna Maria
(Prompt: a cynical hairdresser can feel the presence of birds. Idea courtesy of @MagicRealismBot on Twitter.)
Anna Maria Waldstein was many things before she was a hairdresser-- a tailor, a lover, a revolutionary, a governess, a fighter, a wife, a mother.
A coward.
Sixty-two years of running could leave anyone exhausted and sick but Anna pressed on, masquerading as a hairdresser in the backwoods town of Borealis, Colorado. As good a place to retire as any, she supposed, as she snipped at a few uncooperative strands in her customer’s bob.
Small talk revealed that her last customer of the day was a schoolteacher, taking advantage of her afternoon off to complete the errands and jobs around her house that remained unfinished. Anna smiled at the young woman’s enthusiasm for her class and her profession and gratefully took the check.
She waved the young teacher out the front door and waited until the teacher had driven away before she closed up shop; locking the doors and walking the short three-quarters of a mile back to her tiny cabin in the woods.
Anna felt the song sparrow approach before she saw the flash of brown and white feathers. The little bird perched on her finger and chirped a happy hello.
“All right, what’s your report?” Anna asked, stroking the fellow across his head.
The sparrow seemed to clear his throat before he let out a thirty-second stream of chirps and song.
Anna frowned. “So that’s the end of it? They’re coming?”
A single, sad note erupted from the bird.
“That’s all. Go see your family,” Anna lifted her finger to aid the sparrow in his liftoff.
She unlocked her door and entered, the small cabin greeting her after a long, hard day of work. Upon first glance, the cabin was decorated neatly, with little trinkets across tables and exquisite maps across walls; a second glance revealed rough-hewn sketches of countries not of this earth and figurines of birds unfamiliar to North America.
Anna Maria Waldstein was not born Anna Maria Waldstein-- no, she was first known as Anna Maria of Penharrow, the kingdom of the birds.
Her oldest sister, Willow, was the crown princess. Anna was the youngest of eight, always overlooked, never entirely acknowledged when her siblings were in the room...
until her parents discovered that she’d inherited the Penharrow family ability. Not her favored sister, not her other siblings. Little forgotten Anna Maria could sense birds. She could track her favorites: a painted bunting named Percy and a tiny, runt-of-the-hatch field sparrow named Penny-- wherever they went. Anna Maria knew when eggs would hatch, where migrating flocks intended to go, could predict exactly when the little-bitties would jump out of their nests and fly for the first time.
To Anna Maria, her ability was an incredible talent. Her closest friends were feathered and she trusted them with all the silly things in her life. The birds trusted her with their food sources, odd movements from two-legs like her, their young. Her room in the palace turned into a sanctuary for injured birds, who came from all around for her help and healing touch.
To the Penharrow family, Anna Maria was an asset, not a little girl. She was used to track carrier pigeons taking messages to legions of troops across the kingdom, used to spy on enemy movements with her hawks and eagles.
Her falcons were used as executioners, talons flashing across throats and scratching out eyes.
Anna Maria made a brave, brave decision at twelve-- she turned her birds on her family, the Penharrows that usurped the throne from its true owners over a hundred years ago. She joined forces with the revolutionaries and turned the tide of the war, eventually seeing it to its end with her birds and her sword after two hard years of fighting.
Her revolutionaries spoke of a gate just outside of the forest that led to a very different kind of kingdom-- a harsher one, filled with unfamiliar animals and birds that did not speak in their tongue.
Anna Maria took the chance and left in the dead of night, vanishing into the new world. She was many things to many people in Penharrow-- a potential queen, a former princess, a warrior, hope incarnate.
She left behind a future that she’d worked so hard to secure solely because she was too much a coward to watch her revolutionaries execute her family, too much a coward to watch things change from the way they were.
The new kingdom-- no, country-- was very different, to say the least. There were no kings and queens, which was just fine to fourteen-year-old Anna Maria Penharrow. The foster family she was placed with was so kind, everything that her other family never was. She was a baby-sitter, she made clothes for the local children when funds got tight, she wove fabric in the basement to supplement her new family’s small, small income.
After high school, she ran as far as she could from the tiny town where she’d spent the last four years of her life.
She didn’t deserve their kindness, she openly admitted. Anna Maria took the coward’s way out and left again in the dead of night, fleeing to Florida from California on the cheapest Greyhound bus she could find.
In Orlando, she was hired as a governess to a wealthy family. Their three children were small-- smaller than she was when the birds started speaking to her-- and she loved them the way her parents never loved her, the way their parents never would love them.
The birds still spoke to her, but not with words, the way that she was accustomed to. Anna Maria could still pick apart chirps and screeches to pick up meaning, and the little balls of feathers she spoke to could understand her just the same.
The family moved away after four years. Anna Maria asked two song sparrows-- Mickey and Minnie-- to watch over the children for her, to make sure that they were all right.
So she ran again, to the Northeast this time-- where she met Carl Waldstein, an ornithologist, coincidentally enough. They bonded over talk of subspecies and sangria and spent their days watching the Maine coasts for albatross and gulls, notating any new species into their shared life bird list.
Nine months later, a beautiful set of twins came into Carl and Anna Maria’s lives. She named them Percy and Penny, like the friends she left behind in Penharrow long, long ago.
She hoped and prayed that her children would not be like her, that she could spare them the odd twinge of pain that her ability brought wherever she stayed. On the twins’ third birthday, she walked out into the backyard of their home to find Percy and Penny asking a pair of cardinals what kind of tea they liked to drink with their millet.
Anna Maria packed her things and left that night, terrified that her children would be used the same way that she was. She left Carl one final note, explaining what she could do, what their children could do-- and how they should never, ever speak of it to anyone, no matter what the circumstances.
The next forty years were spent running throughout the world, attempting to leave her past deeds behind. She met wonderful people and saw all sorts of beautiful things but couldn’t keep Carl, Penny, Percy, and her siblings out of her head.
When she settled in Borealis, she knew that she had to face what she’d done to both of her families-- birth and chosen.
Anna didn’t think she was ready for that.
She was a washed-up princess, a revolutionary who overthrew her own family, an ex-governess, an ex-wife, ex-mother, a hairdresser who was just good enough at what she did to keep business coming back so she could put a meager amount of food on the table.
Her thoughts drifted back to what the little sparrow told her on her doorstep. A man and a woman, still in the prime of their lives in their late thirties, had arrived in Borealis and were looking for her.
Penny and Percy certainly were determined, Anna thought, putting a kettle of ginseng tea on to boil. The flavor reminded her of the tea she used to drink while speaking with her falcons and eagles in her home kingdom; memories both sweet and stinging.
Three timid knocks on the door resounded through the tiny cabin and for the first time in her life, Anna Maria Penharrow stood and faced her mistakes.
Penny and Percy Waldstein stood on her welcome mat when she opened the door, the love in their eyes just as apparent as the love in the painted bunting and field sparrow she befriended so long ago.