Secret Places

A man, a sick child, a cake slicer, and a four-and-a-half-foot talking parakeet meet in a hospital room

This story was nominated by Soft Star Magazine for the 2024 Pushcart Prize.

Dustin Michael teaches writing and literature in Georgia. He and his wife share blogging duties at phinphans.blogspot.com, where they write about their son, Phin, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

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“We have a pet parakeet at home,” I tell the two nurses. “We named him Pachelbel.” We’re all in my son’s hospital room watching a nature show about wild parakeets in Australia. Actually, the nurses are changing my son’s dressings. My son is watching the show because it distracts him while they work. I’m making small talk because I don’t have anything useful to do. 

“Isn’t Pachelbel the ‘Canon in D’ guy?” one nurse asks. “I walked down the aisle to that at my wedding.”

“So did my wife!” I say. “And so do lots of brides, at least they have for the past 40 years. Before that, ‘Canon in D’ was pretty obscure. It was composed in the 1600s, but it didn’t start to blow up until the ‘70s.”

“Huh.” 

“Anyway, we aren’t huge ‘Canon in D’ fanatics or anything. We just thought Pachelbel would make a good name for a parakeet.”  

“Can he talk?”

“Pachelbel the parakeet? No, he can’t talk. I’ve been meaning to teach him, but there hasn’t been time.”

One nurse finishes changing my son’s dressing and checks the dangling lines for his central venous catheter, then gathers up the old bandages and other medical waste, discards them in the appropriate bin, and quietly leaves. The remaining nurse moves to the hospital bed and changes the sheets and blankets. 

“All set,” she says, piling the old bedclothes into a rolling hamper. “Do you guys need anything?”

“We’re good, thanks. I’m just going to give him his bath and then we’ll hit the sack.”

With a nod, she slips out and shuts the hospital room door. I tear open a pack of antibacterial wipes and begin the nightly ritual of cleaning my son’s skin. It’s been many weeks since he bathed in water, the risk of infection being so great. I wipe him down from head to toe as he silently watches the last of his parakeet documentary. 

“In the wild,” the narrator says, “parakeets possess an uncanny ability to locate moisture in their parched habitat. Flocking by the hundreds or thousands, they seek out any evidence of subterranean springs. They perch near damp patches of earth, staking it out, waiting for the arrival of kangaroos, who will dig down and excavate the underground spring.” 

Just before our son got sick, my wife and I were bathing him in the upstairs tub in our house. Pachelbel the parakeet was chirping excitedly downstairs, inspired as usual by the sounds of water. Our lives were bright and serene. Suddenly, my wife noticed a bubbling discoloration on the wall just above the baseboards on the outside of the tub, like the top of a little thunderhead boiling up from below the paint. 

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it. “Is something leaking?”

I’m not a very handy person, so all I could really do was frown and nod. Something was clearly amiss back there, hidden away in the closed darkness of the house’s interior. Whatever it was, it was worse in the floor than it was in the wall, as we discovered later when we stared up at the puss-yellow water stain on the ceiling in the living room directly below the tub. How had we missed this? When had it begun? 

We thought about causes. It might have been something that wasn’t attached properly when the structure was coming together. Or it might have been a flaw with one of the parts themselves. Or maybe the problem arose from afar, in some remote part of connected system — a corrosive industrial byproduct dumped into a distant stream that had leached in and slowly dissolved a gasket behind our bathtub, or a sudden surge of water unleashed by a faulty valve in an underground tunnel somewhere. There was no telling. Even if there were, it wouldn’t change the outcome or present a solution to our damaged floor. 

I should have gone into the floor right away — sliced into the blistered drywall and dug through to the boards below to check for mold and rot. I’ve been meaning to take care of it, but there hasn’t been time. 

Our son got sick right after the leak incident. The tub has been dry ever since. Sometimes, on the nights when I’m home and my wife is in the hospital with our son, I glance over at the tub and desert images fill my mind. I suddenly picture a ground full of cracks and the bleak shadows of desiccated trees, remnants of a bygone world that was once lush and thriving until every drop of its lifeforce drained out.  

I sometimes find traces of my wife in our home. A plate in the sink. Her dirty clothes in the hamper. Clues like these are important. They remind me that she still exists beyond the moments when we tag out for our shifts with our son at the hospital. I sense that we are becoming less and less recognizable to one another. For all the years I’ve known her, she has been a figure of ebullience and light. Lately, though, she has acquired the look of someone on the news who has been asked to comment as they watch their home disappear into a sinkhole. The other day, we bumped into one another unexpectedly in the hospital hallway, as I was returning from the coffee machine and she was exiting the elevator. For a moment, neither of us said anything. Physically, we were side by side, but somehow we were like two silhouettes approaching each other from opposite ends of a long tunnel. Finally, as we waited for the nurse to buzz us back into the unit, she asked me softly, “So, what brought your child here?” 

I complete the wipe-down bath, turn off the parakeet show, and tuck my son into his hospital bed. He falls instantly asleep, and I collapse into the chair. Everything is quiet for a moment. Then the bathroom door opens and a four-and-a-half foot parakeet steps out.  

“Hey, buddy,” the giant parakeet says. 

“Hey, Pachelbel.” 

“You don’t seem too surprised to see me.” 

“All kinds of unusual things happen here at night,” I say. “I’ve been visited by the spirits of the dead and the living. The ghost of everyone I’ve ever slighted has slunk through here after dark.”

“Did any of them tell you to dig a hole?”

“No, but I had a demiurge encounter a few nights ago. The demiurge came in and repainted the canvas of the world while we slept and I felt the actual brushstrokes sweeping across my arms and face.” 

“That wasn’t the bristles of the demiurge’s paintbrush. That was the strands of a nurse’s hair as she leaned across you to take your son’s vitals.”

“I fail to see how those things are different.” 

“Hey, buddy, you’re dissociating. I can tell you what happened the following morning. You either woke up in the exact same painting of the world, or in a brand new painting of the world that was exactly like the last. Anyway, no amount of painting will get you all out of this mess. The only way to fix this is to dig.”

“Dig?” 

He hops to the side of the bed where my son sleeps and pushes the IV pole aside with his beak.

“Yes. Straight down. Right here.” 

“But Pachelbel, we’re on the second story of a building right now,” I say. “If I tunnel through this floor, I’ll pop out through the ceiling of the pediatric ER. Besides, I already owe this hospital enough money. I can’t go just chopping through floors and ceilings here.”

Pachelbel says "hey, buddy" again, and I can't help but laugh. It's off somehow, like he means it to sound sharp and aggressive--the "hey, buddy" that you shout when you find a stranger peeing on the rose bush. But the way he's saying it sounds exactly like the gentle, reassuring "hey, buddy" I say when I take the cover off the birdcage each morning. 

"Hey, buddy," Pachelbel says. “I can’t just hang around here while you do all the parts of the thing, okay? Refusal of the call or whatever. Just start digging.” 

“Fine,” I say. “Show me where.” 

The giant parakeet clicks his beak and cocks his head toward the floor. 

“This is the spot. Here.” 

Hospital rooms like this one never get entirely dark. There are the lights from the IV brain, the screen that displays the patient’s vital signs, the moonlight and streetlights pouring in through the blinds. But the place on the floor by my son’s bed, where the enormous bird is indicating–that place drinks light. I never noticed it before. How long has it been like this? 

Pachelbel brings his beak low against the floor and tilts his head thoughtfully, examining the spot from different angles. 

“Once you chop through the surface layer, you should have an easier time with the substrate,” he says. 

I rummage through the pile of supplies and utensils that has accumulated by the sink in my son’s hospital room until I find a stainless steel cake slicer. We used it at his fifth birthday party, which was held right here in his hospital room with his nurses and doctors. Unspoken between my wife and I was the idea that this birthday party might be his last, hence the fanciness of a metal cake slicer instead of a regular disposable plastic knife. A ridiculous detail. I turn the cake slicer in my palm until I see the brand name, Murakami, engraved in elegant letters on the silver handle. 

“It’s probably imitation Murakami,” Pachelbel says. 

“Best I can come up with right now,” I say, and, kneeling, gouge the stainless steel point into the floor. To my shock, the floor gives way and receives the blade up to the handle. I slide the cake slicer through the linoleum until I have made a little manhole next to my son’s hospital bed. It feels like carving a pumpkin. 

“Good work!” Pachelbel says, the claws on his scaly, zygodactylous feet tapping eagerly. “You’re through the surface. Now, dig!”

I peer down into the hole — absolute darkness. The beam of my cell phone flashlight disappears instantly. Tapping hesitantly with the cake slicer, I find the bottom only a few inches down. 

“How deep do I need to go?”

“You’ll know when you’ve gone deep enough. But hurry! There isn’t much time.”

I jab down with the cake slicer. Whatever material I’m digging through is hard, but crumbly. Some kind of shale? As I work, it breaks away from the sides of the hole easily and disintegrates to powder. Soon, the hole is deep enough for me to stand in. I scoop out as much rubble as I can and pile it onto the hospital room floor. I check on my son, still fast asleep in his hospital bed despite my having turned his room into a construction site at the behest of a massive talking parakeet. 

“Why haven’t I busted through the ceiling of the first floor yet?” I ask, wiping my brow. 

“Let’s not get too hung up on details here,” Pachelbel says.

“Also, what’s the point in doing this, anyway? Why am I digging?”

“Hey, buddy, what did I just say about details? It’s not my job to know how things work or why they happen. It’s my job to know the right places for digging. Secret places. Were you even paying attention to the nature show? Pretend we’re in the wild right now, okay? I find the right place to dig. You dig in the right place that I find. If it all goes well, things are suddenly much better for everyone. Why make this hard?”

“Okay,” I say. “But please tell me whether this digging is just some symbolic lesson about accepting uncertainty or dealing with trauma in my subconscious or something, or if it’s actually going to manifest some sort of change here.”

“I fail to see how those things are different,” Pachelbel says. 

“Are you just repeating me because you’re a type of parrot?”

Pachelbel clicks his beak and stares at me. I return to the hole, chiseling away at the rock with the cake slicer. 

The deeper I go, the more the total darkness engulfs me. The hole is deep and narrow now. The gloom of my son’s hospital room shines through the opening like a navy blue marble floating high above me in a pitch black sky. The beeps and gurgles of the IV machines are all silent down here. The only sound is the scraping of the cake slicer against the rock. Down, down, down. I lose track of time, of distance, of self. I am no longer a person. I am water carving a channel through stone. Perhaps I have been doing this for millions of years.

Suddenly, I hear a fluttering noise from far above. Alarms blare. My son’s crying echoes down the hole.

“You’re almost there!” Pachelbel shouts. “You just have to dig through the last little bit.”

Frantically, I stab into the bottom of the hole, which begins to flood. 

“Don’t give up! You’re close!”

The water rises to cover my knees, waist, torso. I can no longer hit the bottom with the blade because I’m floating back up toward the top. If I’m going to give it one last attempt, I’ll have to dive down headfirst.

Above me, my son’s cries grow louder, more desperate. The alarms on his monitors are deafening. I look up, and at the opening of the hole I see Pachelbel’s head poke up and hear him speak for the last time. 

“Hey, buddy,” he says, “don’t be afraid. It’s going to be okay.” 

I dive into the blackness, expelling all my air so that I can sink more quickly. When I hit the bottom, I stab mindlessly at the rock as hard as I can, over and over. I hear a roar of something above me and a distant ringing, then the hole collapses. The dim light from the opening disappears and everything goes dark. I close my eyes. The last thing I feel is the hands joining with mine in the gushing torrent. 

“There you are,” my wife says. “We lost you there for a second.” 

I open my eyes. My wife and I are kneeling beside the bathtub in our upstairs, bathing our son as the water from the faucet cascades over him. His bandages and dressings are gone. His central venous catheter is out. All that remains is a tiny hole in his chest that will close entirely once his stitches fully dissolve. My wife warns him not to submerge that spot, which is already a lost cause because of all his laughing and splashing. A shadow of concern crosses her face as she gestures to the water damage above the baseboard. 

“We still need to do something about that,” she says. 

“We’ll fix it,” I say. “We have time. It will all be okay and it will all be fixed.” 

Our son splashes happily. My wife and I interlace our fingers under the faucet. The water sliding over our hands looks like a cathedral of glass. The bright chirps of Pachelbel the parakeet drift up from his cage downstairs.

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