FICTION

Words Like Zeitgeist

By Gabriel Welsch     VOLUME 57 No. 2

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The problem was that the birds just shit all over everything. Rob would sit at the oval table and eat yogurt and watch them land with impunity, perch on the chair backs, and then spew drizzly shit down the chair backs.

The birds were slovenly and made him feel slovenly as well, especially when contrasted with his neighbor. A widow, Sue had spent the insurance money to spruce up her little home—a white arbor; a concrete patio that, while square and unimaginative, still looked nice against the yard she paid people to maintain; a new screened porch. Everything a crisp white.

Meanwhile, in his yard, the erratic runnels of bird shit really stood out because the chairs were black. His girlfriend, Lucy, had found them at a yard sale, scraped the rust off, and emptied four cans of black Rust-Oleum on a hot day, sweating and cursing, until they looked new.

The chairs sat on the old brick patio gleaming over the weeds and pebbles kicked up across the bricks. They were new like nothing else they had.

Every morning in the first week since he’d been laid off, he sat and ate cereal and glared at the chairs.

On the Friday of that first week, he shouted to the smart speaker, “Hey Google, how do you get rid of birds.” The answers failed to inspire: Use repellents. Roast them. Put them on the pill. Somehow the internet was practical, macabre, and British, in that order.

With repellents making sense, he headed to Walmart. Everyone he passed in the garden section appeared to look at him. He knew he was imagining it—was certain he imagined it—but knew also how he must look. He had worn the same shirt for a week. He was the last man on Earth still wearing Crocs without irony. His sweatpants had a hole not close enough to the crotch to be a real problem but close enough to make people feel weird about it.

He shuffled toward the register with a spray bottle of animal repellent and a dozen foil pinwheels on plastic spokes tucked under his arm. The logic went, based on the websites he browsed, that light and motion would repel birds. He also got some liquid stink just in case.



When he turned into the doorway of his boss’s office a week before, a small notepad and a pen in his hand, his chest tightened on seeing Grace from HR also sitting in the room. His boss stood, welcomed him with a tight grin in an otherwise static face, and asked him to sit. Rob’s breath wisped out, his chest a balloon with a sudden leak.

“We are going to have a discussion, and when it’s done,” his boss said, “you will no longer be employed at Rothrock Regional Health System.” Something about failing to meet expectations, about not responding to feedback.

Asking me to do stupid shit I told you would be useless is not “not responding to feedback,” Rob thought. Feedback is not an order. Feedback is not an instruction. Feedback is a conversation.

“Can you and I talk alone,” Rob said to the man.

His boss looked at the floor and then raised his face, glancing once at Grace. Grace’s head swiveled almost imperceptibly. But only almost. The surprise wearing off, Rob wanted to jab Grace with his pencil. Nothing like assault, just an annoyance. I cannot believe this shit, he thought.

“I think it’s best for all of us—you, me, the organization,” boss man said, “to keep the conversation open among the three of us.”

Rob did not roll his eyes. He did not cross his arms. In near disbelief at his own resignation, he just nodded. He listened half at attention as Grace outlined the severance package, the recognition of a decade of work, and the confidentiality agreement regarding terms and other details related to his ability to collect unemployment.

He had never in his life been on assistance. Military pension didn’t count; he’d earned it working for people with more integrity and balls than anyone in that room besides himself had ever seen.

When the silence fell, he said, “Are we done?”

They both were hangdog when they nodded. At that moment, he found a bit of spring. He stood quickly, pushed the chair back into the table with a firm but courteous hand. He felt strangely satisfied that the legs of the chair returned to the proper dents in the carpet. He left the office and called JD immediately.

It had been a Wednesday. They said he could go home and come back for his things over the weekend, when the office was empty. He decided it was very much a fuck that moment, and within a half hour, JD was there with a truck and several empty liquor boxes. By midafternoon, every personal trace of the decade Rob Cordon had spent in the public relations office of the rural county’s shitty hospital was gone. Sure, files were spilled everywhere, and papers were in tilting stacks. But as he had just been informed with sedate and legally airtight efficiency, that shit was no longer his problem.



The sticks on which the pinwheels were mounted—white plastic, wispy, flexible things—were still tough in a key way: Their ends did not fit into the mesh backs of the chairs. Rob had figured he would just thread them into the back to mount them. They’d flutter at the slightest breeze. If anyone wanted to sit, they could just slide them out and sit, and put the pinwheels back when they were done.

Of course, the plastic sticks were thicker than he had guessed. He stood in the sweltering sun with an X-ACTO knife, whittling curls of plastic off of the sticks until they fit into the chairs. As he stood back to admire his handiwork, Sue floated into his periphery.

She was the quietest neighbor he had ever had. She did yard work in light-colored pants and never looked dirty. He would see her in town taking her aged mother out to lunch, the two of them eating silently, the same tight perms curled atop their heads, the same bifocals—only the mother showing she was the elder by the number of rings on her hand and the deeper grooves around her eyes.

He regretted more his ridiculous pinwheels when Sue turned and saw him and then strode across her yard and into his.

“Good morning,” she said. “Rob, I just want you to know that there was a bear spotted in the street last night.”

“Who saw it?” he said. Sue was newer to the neighborhood. He knew bears, while not common, were also not that unusual a sight after dark in the spring.

She said a name he didn’t know, then explained how she had purchased new, stronger trash cans just that morning, and she would have to make sure to bring in the feeders each evening. She said a few other pleasantries, but he was then thinking about the feeders. Of course. The feeders brought the birds. Her yard was the buffet. His yard was the restroom.



He was surprised when he reviewed his bank statement a few days later. He knew he had a number of weeks of severance payments, recognizing his years at the hospital. It was nonetheless odd and mildly enraging to see they were still paying him. It’s a small amount to pay me off, he thought, when I work in PR and know all the editors around here. I could say things--

But he shut that line of thinking down. He had signed the papers in a fog but knew later—after he had a lawyer review them, a lawyer who said Rob really should have had the papers reviewed, you know, before he signed them—that the legal securities in which his silence was enmeshed meant however satisfying his engendering an exposé on infection rates or some other topic in the local paper would be, it would neither provide him groceries, mortgage payments, nor comfortable answers to questions in any future job interviews.

He told Lucy he was not optimistic about those interviews if they ever came along. “I’m fifty-four, a white guy, with no other skills than being able to write one-sentence paragraphs on a deadline,” he said.

“It’s probably not the time to complain about being a middle-aged white guy with a college-educated daughter and a low mortgage who can’t find work for a couple weeks. The world is not solely concerned with you,” she said in a tone he thought was a little unnecessarily rough. “You have a Twitter account. Do you not know how the zeitgeist is behaving?”

“Maybe we can not use sentences with words like zeitgeist in them for a while,” he said.

“I gotta do something,” she said. “I have a stack of papers to grade that don’t have any interesting words in them at all.”

Always with the grading. She had been his daughter’s English teacher. They met years ago at a parent-teacher conference when Rob and his ex had already burned through the farms and villages of their marriage and were nearly arrived at the sea. The ex had said he drank too much and had decided life was a series of disengagements. Rob thought the ex had become boring and angry. He also knew he lacked the balls to tell her. He considered going to a therapist but was self-aware enough to guess at the first few things he’d hear in counseling and stubborn enough to know he wouldn’t take any action.

Their daughter, Carmen, in the process, put her feelings into alarming things she wrote for her English teacher. He loved Lucy right away not because she was especially charming but because he saw her in some of the same ways Carmen did: a dispassionate helping hand, a smart destination, and someone who could love with distance to let a person be, even if perpetually on the way to becoming.

He waited a long time. He knew enough about projection, about looking for saviors. He had papered over so many scandals, buried so many stories over the years that he knew what stupid looked and felt like. In the last few years, he had begun to understand it differently, though. Stupid could be seductive. No wonder ignorance was purported to be bliss. It took a lot of energy to be better.

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GABRIEL WELSCH is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his family and works at Duquesne University.


VOLUME 57 No. 2