Sharing my last workshop assignment from Craig Clevenger’s Storyteller’s Workbench workshop; this is week four, the final assignment, meant to combine the various lessons, tips, and tricks. This is the one I expect will break some of you.
If you’re interested in taking one of these workshops, I cannot recommend it enough. Clev is a great teacher and has a surgical eye for prose. Check out burnt-tongue.net for updates on the next course availability.
He holds it in the soft cradle of his hands, feathered neck askew.
“Momma, what this?” He proffers his hands to her, yellow against his pale skin.
It is a dead bird. The fact of it arrives before anything else. The weighty droop of the head, the glassy lifeless eyes. Its resting place between her toddler’s fingers. It is a dead bird.
“Where did you find that, sweetie?” She speaks softly and crouches down to his eye level, trying to control the flutter of my heart. She knows better than to reach for the bird just yet, to avoid the ever-present risk of the tantrum lurking behind his cherub’s cheeks and his father’s eyes. The bird’s bright yellow plumage is streaked with dirt.
“On the ground,” he points to a shaded spot near the trash bins, “It’s a bird.”
It is death.
“That’s right, honey. It’s a yellow bird.”
He repeats “yellow bird” in a quiet voice, testing the feel of it, “Why it not flying?”
Because it is dead. Dead things do not fly.
“Well…”
“It sleeping?”
“No, honey, it’s n– ”
“Wake up, bird!” His shriek is joyous and hopeful. She flinches as he shakes the bird in his hands. He grins without guile. “Wake up!”
“Honey, honey, honey,” She reaches for his hands, but he pulls the bird closer to his chest, twisting his little body away from her. The lifeless head flopping over.
“No, I hold it!”
“Okay, okay. Gentle, honey.” Gentle hands, palms down. Gentle voice, volume down. Breathe gentle. Eye contact.
“Momma, it not waking up,” his smile fading as recognition of some new phenomenon encroaches on his little life.
“I know, honey. It’s not sleeping.”
“No, it sleeping.”
“No. It’s not sleeping.”
“No! It sleeping!” This shriek is not joyous, but punctuated with little tantrum stomps. His babyfat fingers squeezing the lifeless thing. “Wake up, birdie, wake up!”
“Adam, sweetie. The bird’s not going to wake up,” she holds his gaze, his eyes are an insufficient dam. She swallows, “because it’s dead, honey.”
“Dead?” His head cocks slightly, as if the slight tilt might realign his world to some known perspective. The tears slide out of his eyes and along his face.
She nods. Lips pursed tight.
“What dead?”
Inevitable. Inescapable. Inexplicable.
Like a sleep you don’t wake from? No, that will make him scared to sleep. Like being really hurt? Like endless nothing?
He’s looking at you. He’s looking to you.
“It’s… you know how you sleep and wake up and eat your snacks and go play?”
He nods.
“Well, when you’re dead, you don’t do those things anymore. You don’t do anything.”
The tears start to dry on his cheeks. He blinks and extends his arms to her, fingers uncurling from around the limp yellow body, “Momma, fix it?”
“No, honey. Momma can’t fix it.”
“Why?”
Because you can’t fix death.
“Because,” delicately she removes the dead bird from his hands, covers it with her fingers.
Because that is how it is. There is no deeper explanation. Death is immutable fact.
“Hey, why don’t we go watch some TV?”
“Yeah!” His eyes alight, smile returning, this incursion on his innocence receding.
“Okay,” she exhales and stands, “Go get ready to wash your hands. Momma will be right in.”
He does a little hop and toddles to the door, feet slapping the ground and arms erratic. He’s newly able to reach and open the sliding screen door.
She watches him go before she looks at the dead thing in her hands; then to the spot on the ground the boy indicated, and finally up to the branches of a nearby tree. In a low branch, overhanging the trash bins, is a small cup-shaped nest. She moves to it; places the dead bird back in the nest before tugging it loose from the branches.
The nest is a mix of twigs, shredded bits of paper, part of a torn condom wrapper, and other small detritus. Inside are three small eggs, green-blue and speckled.
Potential outcomes appear in her mind: the eggs could be eaten; the eggs could hatch and the hatchlings could be eaten; the hatchlings could starve to death; the eggs might never hatch. Every path ends with the same terminus with one obvious exception.
The cascading internet queries materialize next: how to incubate birds, how long until bird eggs hatch, what can baby birds eat, can you keep wild birds as pets, how long do birds live, pet stores near me…
You need to choose.
A shriek from inside the house interrupts her rumination, “Momma! I ready!”
She looks at the yellow mother, her eggs, her home. The entirety of a small universe nestled in her palms.
The world is too cruel a place for delicate things.
She opens the lid to the trash bin and drops the nest, bird and eggs, with the rest of the discarded.
“Coming, sweetie!” The lid claps shut.
It is not true that only God must choose what lives and dies.
She slides the screen door open and steps into her home and back to her life. Reflection is not a luxury she can afford.
When the trash collection truck comes the next morning, birds will be singing. They will sing as the bin empties, and as the compactor makes space for more garbage cast in the wake of living. They will sing but she will not, cannot, hear them.
Thanks to Lou Reed's Juice Box (my favorite handle on Substack) whose Note inspired this story.
As a final note, if you do not want to receive my original fiction or would like to make any other changes to your subscription settings, you can do so at https://substack.com/settings/subscriptions
Fucking haunting. Punched me right in the parent-of-a-young-child guts.
I loved this. It deserves a re-read. Subtle, full of reality, and the navigation of life’s weird little tests. Dope stuff