Most babies enter the world sealed.
Eyes shut. Faces curled inward in a relentless endeavor to squeeze out the violent, loud, passionate, everything they've awoken to.
Not Jay.
Jay was born gaping.
Her mouth wide open, not crying, simply hanging. Inhaling the room. Her eyes too seemed to cling at the beautiful new images swarming before them. They clung at everything they touched, but especially at the beautifully battered face on a bed before her. A sweaty face with skin like velvet. She watched that face carefully, reverently. It was soft and familiar, as though it had been crafted just for her.
Something was wrong though.
The woman’s face was leaking.
An endless stream of water poured from the corners of her eyes and dampened the soft pads of her cheeks. A doctor was speaking to her in hushed tones, motioning to her child. His words coaxed the tears from her, pulling them out drop by drop. She was drowning in them. And nobody was stopping the man whose voice held her under.
Distress nipped at the new born babe watching its mother slowly wither. It seeped into the corners of her small body till her limbs thrashed with the excitement of it. She opened her mouth to release a scream and stop the man from whispering his poison into the woman’s ears. That’s when a whirl of motion caught her off guard. Foreign hands took hold of her and began carrying her quickly from the room.
No!
A scream blistered its way up the infant’s throat but too late. Before she could release it, the room was gone.
The drowning woman was gone.
Jay’s mother looked on with dead eyes as the door closed behind them.

Alymphocytosis. A meaningless jumble of letters that destroyed the possibility of their daughter ever living a normal life.
Virtually no immune system…
Fatal upon exposure to the outdoors…
We are very sorry…
And so it was decided by a group of lab coats in a brightly lit room: The baby born inhaling the world was to be locked away from it.
Jay was placed in the first of what would be a series of cages that evening. For her protection, she would later learn. And often forget. The clamor of silent walls does that sometimes.
It was raining as Jay’s parents left the hospital. Theirs tears melted into the damp air as they ran to their car. Their baby safe inside her protective encasing and the words, “We are very sorry,” still bouncing through their hollow bodies.
Once away from the outside air and within the walls of their home they could let their daughter out of her prison.
First things first.
A name.
Not the one they’d given at the hospital, when all that defined her was the disease. That name had been weighted down by the chains of illness. This one would be new, better. A fresh start.
It was obvious the moment they saw her eyes.
“Look at them. Just look at them.” The voice of Jay’s father was warm and crinkly round the edges as often happens with age.
“Look at what?” Jay’s mother spoke. She was much louder than her husband. Firm to his soft, passion to his reservation.
“Her eyes. Look at her eyes.”
Jay’s mother frowned and examined the large blue worlds gazing up at her, observing her. They were extraordinarily vivid, clear, shining orbs that possessed an alarming sparkle of awareness.
“Yes. What about them?” She asked.
“They’re the color of the sky.”
Jay’s mother frowned deeper and leaned in to get a closer look. Teals, greys, greens, and aquas all swirled and meshed to create the broad expanse of blue in the child’s eyes. She could even make out white speckles dashed across the dewy surface, like salt, or clouds.
“Our daughter has the sky in her eyes. A sky she’ll never be able to breath in.” Jay’s father spoke into his moustache, as though hoping the words would become tangled there.
His wife looked once more into her baby’s eyes, then up, around the walls of the house. It was a small house with small rooms and small hallways squashed between two much larger and louder homes. It was the type of house that the eye would gloss right over if not paying enough attention. The only thing it could boast was the bedroom on the west side of the third floor. A room with a dome shaped ceiling and walls covered almost entirely in windows.
She sighed. “Well, if Jay can’t go outside to meet the sky, we’ll just have to bring the sky to her.”
“Jay?”
“Yes. Her name should be Jay. Like Blue Jay.”
Her husbands’ eyes twinkled. “Blue Jay,” he echoed then smiled.
Jay returned her father’s smile from where she lay in her mother’s arms. She seemed to know they were talking about her, and reached out with her tiny hands, grabbing at the air as though trying to catch the conversation in her fingers.
“And how do you suggest we do that anyways?” Jay’s father finally asked.
His wife didn’t say anything. She merely stood up and ruffled through a drawer in the mahogany hutch beside them. After a few moments, she pulled out a paintbrush and held it up wordlessly for her husband to see.
He understood immediately.
It took them four months to finish painting the bedroom on the west side of the third floor. They covered all the walls and ceiling in shades of blue. Wisps of cloud were carefully joined into the mingling of colors. The birds were added last. Doves, hummingbirds, parrots and larks, robins, ravens, red crests, and, of course, blue jays. Hundreds of blue jays. When they stepped back from their work they were pleased with what they saw. A room filled with the sky. And a sky filled with a rainbow of birds.
At first their daughter grew up content with her life locked away. She explored their home till she knew every crevice of the old walls and every crack in the aging wood floors. When she wasn’t exploring she was painting. Creatures she would never be able to touch and landscapes she would never be able to visit all made their home on blank sheets of paper scattered about her bedroom floor. When she was painting she was talkative and eager and her parents felt safe. It was when she gazed out the windows for hours at a time that fear crept into her parent’s hearts. A vacant, subdued silence would grasp hold of their daughter’s features. But what frightened her parents the most was the look that slipped into her eyes. A fierce yearning to escape. A hunger for more than what could be held within four walls.

It was then that she would usually ask, “Can I go outside today, Mother?”
To which her mother would reply, “Not today Jay. You’ll get sick.” Then she would feel a part of herself die.
“Could I at least open a window?” Jay would persist.
“No. No, you can’t. You just can’t. Now, please, stop asking.”
Her mother would throw down her dish rag and rush from the room to a quiet corner where she could silently piece herself back together. And Jay would look back out the window at the green grass she longed to roll in and the tall, climbable tree beckoning to her with its twigs. Then the images would blur together as the tears in her eyes spilled over.
Up until her ninth birthday Jay’s life flowed together in one long, meaningless, string.
Then, one day, something changed.
After another day of same Jay entered her room to find something extraordinarily different.
One of the many windows on the walls was halfway open.
How it had opened Jay didn't waste a thought on. The whisper of a breeze trailed into the room and raised the hairs on her neck. It was as though it was beckoning to her. She didn’t think. She didn’t wait. In less time than she thought possible she crossed the room and slid the window the next half of the way up. With her heart beating in her throat and an exhilarating wave of feeling she’d never experienced pumping through her veins, Jay leaned out the window and took her first breath of the outside air.
It smelled like life.
The cool air, like milk, seeped over her skin. A bird nearby opened its beak and chirped, the sound lovely and new. And the sun. The sun separated from her by a thick sheet of plastic her whole life finally reached out and into her body. Warmth she had never known existed stirred inside her very core.
That was when her parents found her.
“What are you doing?” Her father’s voice was more stunned than angry.
The same couldn’t be said about her mother.
With a loud, furious exclamation Jay’s mother tore her daughter away from the window and slammed it back down. And in the resounding echo of its shutting Jay could hear the closing of hundreds of doors.
“How could you? How could you?” Her mother repeated herself in blind fury as she paced back and forth across the living room. “After I’ve told you a hundred times. A hundred times.”
Jay simply sat on the couch. She could faintly detect a trace of the sun’s fingers on her cheek and the clamor of cars echoing in her ears.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” her mother hurled the angry words at her husband who sat beside Jay, just as quietly.
After a moment he stood. His eyes were sad.
“I guess…we’ll have to bolt the windows,” he whispered the words out of the corner of his mouth as though hoping they’d get lost in the air before finding their way to his daughter’s ears.
Nothing, however, could stop her from hearing those words. They fell on her like dead weights. Her shoulders sagged with them.
Her mother quickly agreed. And within a week bolts were placed over all the windows.
The day after the bolts were in place Jay caught a cold.
“That’s what you get for opening that window,” her mother lectured, as she gently brushed through her daughter’s golden locks of hair.
After another week that cold turned to a fever.
“Why on Earth did you open that window,” her mother asked, this time the concern in her voice leaked through.
Jay didn’t respond. Ever since the bolts she had become uncharacteristically quiet. Her mother and father kept her confined to her bed and fed her medicine as though it were water.
After another three days that fever turned to something much, much worse.
“You should never have opened that window.” Jay’s mother said as she and her father piled blankets on top of their daughter. They kept watch over her day and night. When one parent needed to leave the room to cry the other was always there to stay and keep up the brave facade.
Then, one morning, Jay didn't wake up at all.
Mother and father found their daughter on a morning the color of night. She didn’t look like the child they loved. The girl with the sky in her eyes. She looked wilted. Drained.
Days swirled together in the weeks after Jay’s death. A funeral was held. Condolences were given. Life began to take on a shade of gray for Jay’s parents. Nothing seemed to matter the way it used to. The emptiness of the room on the third floor burned a hole through them. But they continued living as they did before. That’s all one can do in this world. Just continue living. Neither parent would enter Jay’s old bedroom. Though it seemed to call out to them, beckon them.
Then one day while passing Jay’s old room, her father felt the strangest of feelings. The sharp nip of a cold breeze on the back of his neck. A breeze seeping out from the crack under Jay’s bedroom door. Curious he opened the door that hadn’t been touched in months. The room was exactly as they had left it the morning they’d discovered the body. Yet something was profoundly different. The room was breathing. Hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of wings were softly flapping against the wall. The birds they’d painted what seemed like a lifetime ago had taken up a life of their own. Their bodies still glued to the walls but their wings free to thrash and flap and beat against them, the movement stirring up a gentle breeze. It was as though they were watching him expectantly. As though they wanted him to do something for them. Just then, the breeze pushed him gently towards the windows.
And that’s when he knew what it was he had to do.
Jay’s father rushed downstairs and returned with a drill.
As each screw he undrilled hit the floor and each bolt came crashing down, the birds became more excited, more eager. It was obvious they were pleased with his actions. When he had finally finished unscrewing them all, the room had become alive with the roar of shaking feathers.
There was still one last thing to do.
Jay’s father walked towards the first window and opened it as high up as it could go.
The reaction was instantaneous. Birds beside that window began peeling from the wall. Their bodies gained weight and color and depth as they ripped themselves off. They flew around the room, and circled Jay’s father as though to embrace him before shooting out the open window and into the air. As each window was opened, more and more birds began springing to life. When finally they were all opened, the room was mad with birds who spiraled around Jay’s father. Their wings never hurting him but rather caressing him, embracing him. It was a living, breathing, chirping, rainbow and Jay’s father was the center. After a few more turns about the room each and every bird flew out of the window and into the sky. Jay’s father watched them go. They spun and twisted in dizzying loops in the air. The sight brought a pleasing sense of calm over him. He smiled as the furthest of them began disappearing from view. That was when a blue jay appeared, fluttering before his face. It stared at him closely with an awareness beyond anything he had ever seen before. Then, it too gracefully spun off into the air and disappeared from sight.
Jay’s father watched it go sadly. Something about it had looked familiar.
It wasn't until later that he realized its eyes had been the exact color of the sky.