The Twittering Machine, by John Brantingham

The Twittering Machine, by Paul Klee (Switzerland) 1922

The Twittering Machine

Today in camp, you’re playing “first star” with your daughter Cyndi. It’s an easy game. The first person who sees a star, points to it and says “first star.” That person wins. It’s sloping toward twilight, so you sit in your camp chair and watch the sky and play a little music.

You’re playing the mountain dulcimer, listening to the chickadees singing “Cheese-burg-er.” You laugh and play the sound back to them. You and the birds sing back and forth. You’ve got your dulcimer, your twittering machine on your lap.

Cyndi’s got her phone. You ask, “Are you getting a signal out here?”

She says, “Yeah, kind of barely.”

The chickadee’s song changes. It goes “Chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” You stop playing and stare up.

Cyndi asks, “Why’d you stop?” 

​“That’s the bird’s panic call. I don’t want to get in the way of their safety.”

Cyndi says, “I just found you on Twitter. I didn’t know you had an account.”

“I don’t.” You think about it a moment, and realize that you do. “Oh wait, I do. I stopped using it when you were born. When was my last post?”

“2012.” She stares at the phone for a long time. “Who’s this?” She shows you the phone. There’s the picture of Charles and your wife. Charles is holding your wife, and they’re laughing so hard. They’re so very, very happy.

You stare at it for a long time. “That’s a guy named Charles,” you say. “Your mom used to date him. He was my friend.” You can hear the chickadees tweeting in the lodgepole pine.

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. We lost touch.”

You look into her eyes and wonder if she’s figured it out yet. She’s so smart. Can she see that she has Charles’s nose? She stares at the picture for a moment and then swipes away from it.

It might be the time to tell her. You’d always thought, don’t tell her. What’s the difference? But now she’s entering into that time of adolescence when everything is black and white to a kid. That will be here soon. When it comes, will she think that a lie is a lie is a lie? Will a lie, any lie, make her love for you melt away? If she meets Charles, will she feel something elemental and primal that she has never felt for you?

She says, “They stopped singing their warning song. Are they safe?”

You say, “For now they are.” You do a final, “Cheese-burg-er.”

She puts down the phone. The sky is shading into night. She points at Venus. “First star,” she says.

“That’s a planet.”

“Same thing.”

“Yeah.” You nod and smile. “Yes it is. You win.”

​John Brantingham

John Brantingham is the recipient of a New York State Arts Council grant and was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. Check out his work at johnbrantingham.com.