“Listen, can you hear that?”

My eyes shot open, and I saw an older man standing in front of me. Worn cargo pants, a scruffy white beard. A hanging yellow tooth pressed into his lower lip and there was redness in the corners of his eyes like he’d been crying. Incidentally, my eyes were red too—but that was because I was high, having made my smoke spot at the base of a silk cotton tree in the woods where I assumed I’d be able to space out by my lonesome.

“Sorry, I had my headphones in,” I said politely as I could.

I knew better than to make enemies with strangers in the Trinidadian woods.

“Listen,” he said, motioning for me to take my headphones out.

I obliged and pricked my ears up. And then I heard it:

Meh-ree. Meh-ree.

A bird call.

“Amazing isn’t it?” he said as he hobbled closer, one hand on his cane, the other tracing the ridge of the silk cotton’s giant roots. I’d made my smoke spot out of what felt like a throne built out of those roots. The earth between them was oddly clear of vegetation, almost like the place had been waiting for me.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about birds,” I said, “What’s so amazing about it?”

“That’s a kiskadee. You know kiskadees, don’t you?”

I did. As did every other Trinidadian. They were bright yellow birds that got their name from their distinctive call. Kis-ka-DEE. Decidedly not whatever they were warbling now.

“Doesn’t sound like any Kiskadee I’ve ever heard,” I said. My roll-on was still pinched between my fingers. I wondered if my new friend was the sort of older Trinidadian who was prudish about marijuana. Thankfully, he barely seemed to notice. He only cared about the birds.

“Well that’s just it. Only here,” he said ,”Throughout this entire island, only in this very spot do they sound like that.”

He contorted his face, pouting his lips and squinching his eyes as he copied the call, gurgling up the sound from deep in his throat:

Meh-ree! Meh-ree?

“Not a bad impression for an old man, ey?”

“Spot on,” I said.

“I bet you’re wondering why they sound that way. When all your life you’ve only heard them say their own name. Kis-ka-DEE. Kis-ka-DEE. Well, I can tell you.”

It seemed obvious to me that I was going to hear the story whether I wanted to or not, but the old man, who had come uncomfortably close by then, seemed to be waiting for me to give the OK before he continued.

“Sure. Why don’t you tell me,” I said, “Why do they sound different here?”

He smiled, ground his cane into the earth and rested both hands atop it.

“Because I taught them. Not on purpose, mind you. But because that’s all I could say. The name of my sweetheart. Beautiful like a goddess carved out of marble. I loved her more than anything in the whole world. But she was Indian and I was African. It was a different time. We couldn’t meet out in the open. But out here where only the birds could hear us, could we be together. Until…”

He paused, bit down with that lone tooth looking like it might puncture a paper-thin lip.

“Until?” I asked.

“Until she disappeared. One night when we were meant to meet, she disappeared. So I called her name. Over and over again. And again and again every night since, hoping that one day she’d hear me and come back.”

He slipped down his cane and sat on the ground next to me. I suppose he must have felt like we were friends now, having bared his soul to me and all.

“But she never did,” he said eventually, “And the birds have made her name lose all meaning. To tell you the truth, they drive me a bit crazy. As much as I love hearing my darling’s name.”

Meh-ree. Meh-ree.

“I think a fellow wrote a poem about something like that once.”

The old man made a hollow smile with his lips, fished around in his pocket and pulled out a joint. I guess he wasn’t one of those old conservative types. He passed it over to me and said:

“Sorry I interrupted you. Thanks for listening to my ghost story.”

I flicked my lighter at the joint, but couldn’t get it to catch.

“Ghost story?” I asked.

The old man pulled out a matchbook and lit me up.

“Is that what I said? My mistake. It just feels that way sometimes. I meant the other kind of story. Not a haunting. The one where every trace of them disappears. Never to be seen again.”

I took a drag of the joint and meant to pass it to my new friend, but suddenly the calls of the birds became terribly loud—in fact, it felt like they were closing in around us, screeching louder and louder.

Meh-ree. Meh-REE. MARY!

And I must have passed out, or else that joint was something stronger than weed, because when I came to the old man was gone. I shuffled in my silk cotton throne and felt my leg bump against something. Someone’s leg, hanging off one of the roots. I was getting a lot of guests at my smoke spot that day. A kiskadee way high up called out:

Meh-ree.

I looked up at my new guest. She was younger than me, but her eyes were dull, like those of the old folks in the nursing home. She was rubbing her neck softly, looking up into the canopy.

“They say this is the only place in Trinidad the kiskadee calls like that,” I said.

The girl nodded. She seemed to have heard the story.

“A lover calling out to his runaway girlfriend?” she asked with a voice like the wind.

“Yeah. That’s what I heard.”

“I’ve heard a different story,” she said.

Meh-ree.

“I heard that one day, the young couple who used to come here got great news. That they discovered that they were going to become parents. And the girl—the mother to be—was so excited to tell her beau. She thought they could start to think of names together.”

Meh-ree.

“But the boy wasn’t excited. He didn’t want to think of names. In fact, for no reason the girl could understand, he was furious. And in a flash of rage, he put his hands on her. Dug his fingers into her throat and squeezed the life out of her and the child in her belly. And only when she stopped screaming, stopped squirming did he realize what he’d done. And he shook her, tried to wake her up by calling her name.”

Mary. Mary?

“Over and over. Until the birds remembered. That’s the story I heard,” the woman said.

She looked down at me and let her hand fall from her throat. Her skin was raw underneath and I suddenly notiecd that there was blood pooled in the corner of her eyes. I jumped back in my silk cotton throne and my hand bumped over something hard on the forest floor. Something I hadn’t noticed before. A little button of white poking out, like marble rising from the earth.