The Auspex File by Patricia Bohnert

The Auspex File by Patricia Bohnert

aus·pex 
n. pl. aus·pi·ces (ôsp-sz)
An augur of ancient Rome, especially one who interpreted omens 
derived from the observation of birds.

Chapter One: The County Social Services Office

“Auspex,” she tapped her pencil on the desk. Peck, peck, triple-peck, peck, peck echoed in her cubicle. “Why is that name so familiar?” Ima thought perhaps she had heard it mentioned in the dull monthly meetings they were required to attend. She thought, “Social casework is nothing if not tedious. At least Catherine is done with those.” Her shoulders fluttered in spasm as she realized she had envied a dead woman. Her breath spiraled up her throat and exited as a stuttering, high-pitched series of tsks. She moved her fingers through her feathery brown hair. The wispy and thick strands were the only part of herself that she felt she could never wholly control. She pulled on her hair to tame it and clear her mind. 

“Maybe I’m too old for this work if I can’t keep names straight.” Ima was fifty-nine and single. Her elbow was on her desk, and she cupped her chin in her right hand as she mused, “I’m too old for a boyfriend. Hah, boyfriend even sounds ridiculous. Manfriend? Old man friend is closer to the truth.” 

She stood, and with the excuse of stretching, her eyes searched the cubicles. She thought, “Our staff is down to one man just out of college. Ha. A little too young for me. There was never much to choose from here. Five male co-workers in thirty-odd years. Two of them were married, another was gay, one divorced with five children, and Tillman was just off somehow.”

She sat down, and her head sank to her chest. Ima questioned herself in the drab one-story, concrete block building on Fourth Street. The restless sleep she had had the night before took its toll, and her eyes closed. She would have tucked her head under her arm and curled into a ball, if possible, in the small space of her chair.

A door slammed somewhere in the building. 

“Oh! What did I miss? Oh. Heavens.” Ima sat upright and blinked several times rapidly. “Things will be better tomorrow.” She again tapped the desk with her pencil in a staccato rhythm; peck, peck, peck, peck, peck. She sighed and dropped the pencil on the desk to silence it. At once, Ima’s left thumbnail rasped at the keratin edge of her middle finger, and her right knee bounced. Her thoughts continued to sabotage her existence.

Sally, her co-worker, side-stepped into Ima’s cubicle and grabbed the back of her swivel chair. Sally gave it a quick shake. “Hey, did you get some of Catherine’s cases?”

“Please, don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Sally pleaded as she shook the chair again and laughed a loose bark. “Huh?”

“I have some new cases. I was just about to call the first one when you interrupted me.”

“Well, excuse me!” Sally made ‘excuse’ sound like a thirteen-letter word; she nearly howled its pronunciation.  

“Don’t be dramatic. Bother someone else, Sally. I need to get out of here today.” Ima liked Sally, but the younger woman was an annoyance at times. Sally could dig into a case, find what she was looking for, and then shed a reasonable, thoughtful approach. ‘Get it done and move on’ was her motto. Sally was younger than Ima. She could be rude and exhibit little self-control, but if their supervisor quit tomorrow, Sally would be the one to grab the bone and lead the pack.

“You say that every day. I’d rather be in here laying down paperwork than counseling people who don’t give a crap anyway.” She turned to walk away, and Ima kept her silence. Ignored, Sally trotted off as quickly and as attention-deficient as she had arrived. 

Getting out of the office was paramount for Ima. Visiting her clients meant getting away from her co-workers and Sally, who begged attention. Sally’s pestering and petulant remarks left stains on her soul. 

It was the freedom to make appointments, spend as much time with clients as necessary, or even sit in her car and watch the wind play with leaves on a tree that made Ima’s life bearable, that kept away thoughts of homelessness and dying alone.  

Ten minutes earlier, the supervisor had called Ima into her office. 

“Ima. These cases were Mrs. Felinis’. We all have to take up the slack since her untimely passing.”  

Ima cocked her head and watched her supervisor’s face for signs of fatigue, regret, or sorrow. Her supervisor’s workload remained unchanged except for redistributing Mrs. Felinis’ caseload. Her supervisory position kept her in the office. She never interacted directly with an indigent person, a lonely widower on the brink of collapse, a house riddled with bullying, or a neighborhood where you locked your car and hoped for the best. As long as her supervisor’s paycheck was guaranteed, it was easy for her to ignore Ima’s pleas for resources and ignore the empathy Ima held for her clients.  

“The top file is Mr. Auspex’s. According to the file, Mrs. Felinis was there on the day she died. She made no notes in the file. She must have fallen ill shortly after leaving the client’s house.”  

While Ima had not been close to Catherine, a woman about her age and in the same position, neither had she wished her ill. They were just two different sorts. When Catherine Felinis did not like Ima’s remarks, she arched her back, pierced her with sharp green eyes, and then walked away without a word. Catherine had an indifferent, superior air to her. Her clients’ problems indeed never intruded on her life. Each was a separate thing. 

Ima often needed to escape from Catherine, even more so than Sally. Catherine had more tenure. She slinked around the office and knew everyone’s business but divulged little of her own. Ima pictured Catherine, her lithe shape and a retinue of gray wool suits; she shuddered.

She thought, “At least she had a husband, someone who loved her. Tom was his name, I think. I wonder if she was as self-centered and independent at home as she seemed at work? Poor man, if she was.”

Ima was poised to ask her supervisor if she had heard what had taken Catherine’s life so suddenly. Her supervisor pointed at the door and wagged her finger. She scratched behind her ear and turned to her computer screen, excusing Ima from her office.

Ima left without asking the question. 

Chapter Two: Ima’s Home

At home, Ima worried over her work and life. Her thoughts coursed the long hours she put in, the overtime. The few acquaintances she had. She looked around her comfortable living room. She traced the raised swirling patterns of her brocade couch with her fingertips. “My garden, the birds. They are the good things.” Ima closed her eyes and heard a chorus of geese honk as they flew south. She looked out the open window and saw their vee formation. 

“I have been alone for many years. Everything could quickly fly south.” She felt saddest for the goose without a gander who trailed. “Will I be the little old lady found frozen and shriveled among piles of newspapers with no heat in the house? Could I bear the humiliation of a county caseworker trying to solve my problems?” Her mood darkened like the charcoal clouds laboring in the sky before a fall thunderstorm. Her internal barometer registered low pressure and sunk her libido.

She had recently and more frequently felt her inner self slip into unexplained periods of melancholy. Books had lost their allure. TV was a noise box. The agitation of being on-call for client emergencies alternately made her anxious and restless.

Reality told her that her house needed a new roof, and her car brakes were nearly worn down to the drums. She reasoned she was not poor; she had a job. A steady income.

“How much longer can I work? Will my clients miss me when I quit?” Her worry circled like a car’s worn and loose fan belt, around and around and getting nowhere. Ima lingered in her couch-nest of blankets. She had neither the will nor the capacity to stir. Her eyes grew tired. In the safety of home, she drifted to sleep with chirping birds lulling her.

The quiet was too much. In two minutes, the deafening stillness woke Ima with a violent shudder. The worry renewed. There were rumors of cutbacks if a tax increase did not pass. She looked out the window, and her eye caught the movement of a bright red cardinal at her Hosta border. She saw him shake the dulled paper sleeve of the plant to knock the seed to the ground. The female cardinal flew in, alit, bowed once to thank her mate, then picked up the morsel and flew off. “Ah. To have someone to take care of you. What I have missed. What I have missed.”

Chapter Three: 247 Birdwell Boulevard

Just east of W. 117th Street, Ima’s clients were a variety of Serbs, Romanians, and Croats. Their traditions and superstitions spilled out of the pockets of their dark clothing like loose snakes. Whistling brings you bad luck, salt over the left shoulder turns it good, cool breezes cause neck aches, enter a house by one door, leave it by the same, and avoid black cats at any cost. The Romanians were ambitious, open, friendly, and talkative. Passion for soccer abounded so much in Croat homes that Ima could not conduct interviews if an important match played on the TV. Croat women cooked throughout the day, producing intoxicating smells from their ovens and cook pots.

Three streets to the west, families had Mediterranean surnames, hard-sounding names for an enclave of warm people of Greek and Turkish descent. Loud voices filled homes, complaints about the government and food prices, and neighbors slapped about as though the speaker held a portable microphone. 

Alman Road and Birdwell Avenue angled together to form a rough southern border for Ima’s territory. The aged offspring of Italian and German emigrants held deeds to the up-and-down doubles that lined Alman. If a Canzano owned the double, a family of Carlucci’s lived upstairs. The smell of roasting garlic pushed through the screens and laid along the sidewalk. When Mrs. Duderstadt swept the front walk, it was so her long-term renters, the Brauns, would not drag leaves into the shared entryway. Here, pungent sauerkraut and the grease of sausages hung like curtains in the front yard.

Holding the Auspex file open, Ima tried to conjure her new client. It was a game to see how close she could come to discerning the ethnicity and lives of her clients from their files and homes. Her sleuthing went beyond the basic assumption of names that ended in ‘ski’ or contained double vowels. She summoned them by what they requested and their script or painfully penciled print. It might be the quirkiness of their lawn ornaments or the brooms with bristles nubbed by years of wear that leaned in the corners of their porches. Sometimes, she thought she heard music as she approached their doors, the stirrings of their souls: melodic rhapsody, monophonic chant requiems, violin concertos, or oboe yearnings. She was ever watchful, noting, hypothesizing. 

Ima laid her files carefully and in order into her briefcase. 

She was outside, happy again. She whistled nonsense, almost a chirpy tune. She was in the crippled pocket of the city that was her domain. She had no desire to know everyone in the district, but it seemed she was bound to if she worked long enough. 

“You, Mr. Auspex of the empty file, are not giving me much to go on.”  

Mr. Auspex’s address on Birdwell was one of a few scraps of homes held up by their owners’ intent to remain in them until they died. Ima had seen this firsthand. Two years before, an elderly client had passed away, and his house, left empty like an abandoned bird’s nest, came apart stick by stick. Unchecked, the roof leaked, the windowpanes cracked, the porch supports faltered, and the gravel drive sprouted weeds. A contractor for the city demolished the house. Grass grew. She saw a tiny, littered lea, cheerless in its vacancy, where her client had once lived. These were not homes passed on to adult children who stayed and fixed them up, proud of their parent’s accomplishments in the new world. These houses would be boarded up, torn down, or set fire to, and provide land for condominium complexes – not soon, but eventually.

Ima knew the standing homes and so many of the people in them. The structures were smaller than a single extravagant great room for the rich. The residents lived behind curtains blocking the world, closed and locked doors, and blinds drawn summer, winter, morning, and night.  

Still, Ima knew she carried the glimmer of hope, the sun’s ray of determination, the eternal polish of luster every time she stepped inside her client’s homes. They believed in her. They construed her words into afterthoughts of deliverance, the sweetness of the thick syrup, the unopened, beautifully wrapped gift. Those images carried them forward, sometimes until the next visit, only until the bill collector called.

Ima stepped out of her car. The late afternoon, slant-ray sun blinded her; she squinted and paused. Crow’s feet around her eyes moved upward into exclamation marks. She turned sideways from the sun and tugged at one and then the other white cuff that poked out of her blue suit jacket. The temperature had risen to seventy-two in the heat of the day. It was a little warm for long sleeves, but Ima was in control, professional, and safe in her carefully chosen suit and crisply starched and ironed blouse. 

“First impressions.” She murmured her mantra. Her hands went to her skirt to press the pintuck pleats into place. She stroked her hands over her backside to be sure the creases had not unfolded where she could not see. Ima walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and lifted her briefcase by its handle. It was heavy in her hand; it held the tonnage of her client’s sufferings. With the sun at her back, she picked her way over the broken concrete and weedy sidewalk that paralleled the property; she walked up to the house on an even more ridiculously neglected path that threatened to tear the leather from the heels of her shoes.

247 Birdwell was a small home; the exhale of fifty years of neighboring steel mills had stained and mottled the paint to dark grime. Ima noted the chicken wire and post fence surrounding the front yard. It leaned to and fro, bent and unburdened by care. The gate was permanently open and askew. She looked up. The home’s sagging roofline spoke of wood rot, termites, or both. 

The bruised exterior of the Birdwell house was nothing more than a yellow flag to Ima. She shook her head from side to side with the question of what she would discover inside. Crossing the wood porch floor, she heard and felt the crunch of dry leaves; her pumps scattered twigs and broke small, dry, wind-snapped branches. The heel of Ima’s right shoe sank into a rotted plank as she leaned back from the door buzzer.      

  “Oh, my,” she said as she disentangled her heel and moved sideways a half-step to a firmer footing. She fixed her dark eyes on the keyhole beneath the doorknob. Could it be coaxed to show her the life and the secrets inside? She heard birds chirp and glanced up at the corner of the porch. She half expected to see a nest cradled in the cracked-paint porch rafters. Ima waited for an answer at the door. Her thoughts drifted back to the office and earlier in the morning.

She took a deep, cleansing breath and waited on the porch. She closed her eyes. Her mind needed to flow a similar course as her charge’s thoughts to find a way to help them. She needed to be upbeat. Everything would be fine. The sun rose this morning, and it would rise again tomorrow. Streaks of early light had peeked through the trees in her yard and showed her the day’s promise. Before leaving for work, she watched while southward-flying birds had settled at the feeder to bulk up for the next leg of their trip. The early-rising cardinal couple feasted in Ima’s meticulously kept flower-filled gardens. She felt the grace of the world when a ruby-throated hummingbird worked her spice bushes. Warblers sang to her as they flushed their wings with water in the scrubbed-clean birdbath. 

She let her breath out slowly and opened her eyes. Self-reliance was an intuitive belief and unconscious knowledge for Ima. It was there for her or anyone else to grasp, like the gold ring on a carousel. Still, she cautioned, one had to be reasonable. There was only so much she and the county could do. She knocked again, and again she heard birds chirp and twitter.

The paperwork Ima submitted to her supervisor substantiated occasions of deficiency, critical need, turgid neglect, delusion, and derangement. Her reports had an almost bated breath to them on a rare occurrence, a tiptoe of a chance. Income, prospects, or love tantalized her wards. 

More often, even when she refrained from noting it in her report, Ima felt the ballast weight of their false illusions. She feared their dreams would crumble as surely as the rotten wood at her feet. Her clients were like birds trying to fly with a downdraft so strong it slammed them back into the dirt. By sagacity, she knew their hopes of prosperity or happiness were miscalculations. She seldom felt total despair for them; it was like the shadow of a hawk wing overhead. The predator bird was ready to swoop in silently and steal their dreams at the slightest provocation. Fate be damned. Ima’s charges smiled and laughed in ignorance or fearlessness of it. She admired them for that.

Ima considered her obligation to Mr. Auspex regarding Mrs. Felinis’ death. She would need to start over, ask the same questions, probe gently, and discover what Mrs. Felinis had already determined but failed to record. Caseworkers were barred from sharing their private lives with clients. Mr. Auspex would not find out from her that Catherine Felinis had passed away. The official stance was, “Cases are routinely reassigned.”

Footsteps on the other side of the door brought Ima back to the present. The door’s hinges creaked, and it opened a few inches. An odor she tried to identify but could not seeped out as warily as the breath of a gnome whispering in your ear.

“Mr. Auspex?”

The door opened an inch further, “Who are you, Dear?” A vibrating voice, once perhaps a strong tenor, greeted her.

“My name is Miss Melospiza; I’m with Clarion County Social Services. May I come in?”

The consummate sleuth, Ima, focused on Mr. Auspex. She tried to read the crinkly lines around his warm eyes to guess his age, to assign his pink cheeks and short, round body to a particular heritage. Ima checked for details. The man’s hair was clean, long, and brushed back on his head. Perhaps he needed money to visit a barber regularly.  

He smiled, and she smiled back. His quick hands and thin-knuckled fingers jutted and stroked the air. Ima took it as an invitation to follow Mr. Auspex inside beyond the open door. 

She studied the back of his crimson sweater. She noted the threadbare elbows, its tangle of pulled stitches at the collar, and loose, dangling yarn ends here and there. Mr. Auspex turned to her again. She counted two missing buttons and wondered about the contents bulging and weighing down his pockets. She watched as Mr. Auspex half stooped and stroked at his wrinkled pant legs as if to clean himself up in her presence. His pants seemed vaguely brown or a warm, khaki color from many washings or no washing at all.

Ima smiled at Mr. Auspex. A half-dozen overstuffed chairs crammed into the small living room, arm-to-arm and cozied into the corners. Crocheted Afghans were draped haphazardly over every chair. With their colorful yarns, the thick throws overlapped in a dizzying array, spilling onto the floor. Threads poked out, knots were loose, and colors were random even within each piece, as if unsure where they belonged. She wondered if female acquaintances made these for him or if he crocheted.

“Sit, sit!” Mr. Auspex turned and pushed on a door at the back of the room. “I was just about to have tea. “Will you join me? Without waiting for an answer, he turned and said offhandedly, “Of course, you will. Sit, sit. You wait right there, Dear.” His voice trailed off as the swinging door closed, and Ima caught only, “We’ll have tea and crumb…”

“Hmm, English perhaps? Tea and crumpets? Fits with his rosy cheeks.” Ima perched on the edge of a chair. She laid her briefcase flat on her lap. She snapped the locks open with the county’s authority and the righteousness of one who thrived on doing good. She heard chirping again and tsked in resignation, “Little old men and their caged birds.” She had often seen how isolation worked on people’s minds. She lifted the Auspex file from her briefcase.  

“Got it.”  

A single gray feather drifted down and settled on Ima’s hand.  

She lifted her head. She blinked. There, above her, were birds. Branches were nailed haphazardly on the walls. At first, she thought the birds were porcelain knick-knacks. A lift of a wing, a head twist, and a quiver of feather told her the birds were not ceramic. Live! Live and not at all caged.

As if on cue, a titmouse tweeted. Two mourning doves bobbed their necks, cooed, and seemingly gave their approval to Ima. A female cardinal uttered a staccato chirp, then another. Her partner across the room and above the door responded.

Ima’s mouth dropped open. In response, a lampshade vibrated violently when a brace of warblers took off in flight and circled the room. Ima ducked. The birds swooped, landed, and seemed involved in a serious discussion, talking simultaneously. A tiny finch hopped off the back of a chair. It approached her polished pumps, and Ima instinctively moved her feet back an inch. The finch hopped forward, flew up to the chair’s seat, and pecked at a loose string on her skirt as if intent on pulling out the entire hem.

Ima pulled her skirt away and looked at the floor. Bird excrement was everywhere. That was the smell her nose could not identify; it was the white and gray marks on the floor she had mistaken for an old linoleum pattern. And on the walls that she had thought was wallpaper. She was sitting in bird droppings. 

“Oh, my God,” she said out loud, startling the birds into nervous chippings, chattering, chirpings, fluttering from one branch to another, pecking at each other for the best roosts, and at the same time keeping a wary eye on Ima. 

“I am sitting in a crocheted Afghan nest.” Ima sucked at the foul air through clenched teeth, then realized there was a clean slip-stream of fresh breeze mixed in with the offal.  

Was it her mind, or had the room begun to sway as if it was rocked ever so gently by the wind? An easy chair that showed its pattern through pecked-apart yarn now sat where she was sure the door had been only moments before. The excrement-streaked walls receded and became the sky with scuttling clouds. Ima blinked and grabbed her hair, which felt fluffier and more feather-like than ever.

“Am I going mad?” Ima put one hand over her mouth and another to her heart. 

She heard Mr. Auspex call from the kitchen, 

“I have a good feeling about you, Miss Melospiza.” He pushed the swinging door open. His wings held a tray with tiny teacups and conical piles of breadcrumbs. “You seem much nicer than the last woman social services sent.”  

“Mr. Auspex. You. You have wings,” Ima heard herself say, yet she could not believe those were the words out of her mouth.

“Heh. Heh. Yes, Dear. And tailfeathers too.” He leaned a little forward, the flight feathers in his tail spread out to show her their splendid brown and russet colors, and he shook them in a very sensual way.

“I. I thought you were English. The tea and crumpets?”

With a smile, Mr. Auspex held up the tray. “Crumbs? We have sourdough, whole wheat, and Italian today.”

Ima blinked several times. She let his calm, happy voice wash over her, and she felt a release, a floating free of her soul. A feeling of pleasure coursed through her. The nag of self-dependency left her; the worry of administrative cuts, job loss, costly car repairs, and a new roof vanished.

“The birds have always been my friends,” she said. “I’m not alone in the world. Look at these magnificent birds! Mr. Auspex you are a, a kindred soul.” A tear slid down her cheek. A sense of well-being settled in her chest as her eyes took in the world through new lenses. She was not alarmed when she broke his gaze and looked down to realize her thin legs had sprouted bird’s feet. Her blue jacket fluttered on the breeze, and her pintuck skirt was growing, no, turning into contour feathers.

“Oh, my,” Ima chirped as she cocked her head and smiled. She was intoxicated with joy.

Mr. Auspex melodiously warbled, “Our last visitor from your office told us her name was Catherine; she said to call her Cat for short. It was a shame what happened to her, wasn’t it?” Mr. Auspex winked a beady bird eye at Ima. He reached out with his wing and laid it gently over Ima’s feathered back.

Her grounding to the earth was released.

The house at 247 Birdwell eventually crumbled and was torn down. A single tree grew in the vacant lot, and birds flew in and out of its branches. A mated pair returned to their nest in the tree year after year.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Patricia Bohnert 2024