The Starling
“Yellow Bird” by Chris Espenshade
After my mother left, the apartment filled with birds. Not in the literal sense, a detail my father insisted on, shaking off his umbrella, finding me at the window with my hand outstretched, palm up, wrist shining with the hopeful sweat of waiting. But if I said, Dad, the birds are back, he’d just say, No birds, kiddo. Just drizzle, just the neighbor’s jazz, just a city that wakes and forgets its ghosts again.
But I could hear them, soft-throated in the ducts, the hush and fuss of their wings against the heat vents, the gentle picking at the threads of my carpet, the sharp metallic chirr when I brushed my teeth too long. Starlings, I thought, but once I caught the glimpse of a cardinal-red wing feather poking from under the oven, and a sparrow’s tail in the clothes dryer. I began collecting their shadows in a notebook, marking days when the cooing grew loudest, or when I’d find a feather stuck to my socks.
The day the electricity cut out, Dad cursed and pulled at the circuit breaker, and I wandered the shadowy apartment, sure the birds would like the quiet, the dusk. I made a sandwich—just bread and honey, the way Mom did when we ran out of everything else—and left half on the ledge beside the open window. The room filled with honeyed light, or maybe the syrupy memory of it, and the birds gathered in the corners, clicking their beaks in gratitude. I couldn’t see them, but I felt their wings stirring the air, like breathing underwater, like the hush before rain.
That night, Dad stood in the hallway, holding his phone up like a lantern, face washed ghost-pale by the screen. I asked if he wanted me to call Mom, and his mouth twisted like a torn pocket, something coming loose. Why would you do that? he said, too softly. I looked at his hands, big and pink and restless, empty as old nests.
I listened for the birds. Sometimes I think they are made of everything she forgot to pack: the chipped yellow mug, the silk scarf with the red tulips, the faint smell of almond oil in her pillowcase. Sometimes I think they are just the shape of her silence.
When the lights flickered on again, I found a starling, a real one this time, slumped in the bathtub, a glimmering oil-slick of feathers, one foot curled like a question mark. I scooped it into my hands. It shuddered once, then stilled. I wrapped the bird’s cold body in the scarf, the one Mom left, and hid it under my bed, next to my notebook.
In the morning, the apartment was empty of wingbeats, of feathers, even of the shadows I’d counted and named. Dad said, We should get breakfast, kid, but his voice was thin as bird bones. I opened the window wide, letting in the cold, the city noise, the wind.
I listened. Far off, a warble, a trill. Not quite here, not quite gone. The sound of a bird, circling and circling and circling.
About the Author
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Masters Review, Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and Fractured Lit, among other journals. His stories have been selected as finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize. His work has been selected or nominated for several anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the online journal The Bulb Region when he’s not working on his first novel. Find his work at www.sarpsozdinler.com or online @sarpsozdinler.
about the artist
Chris Espenshade, a retired archaeologist, branched into outdoors writing and nature photography in 2017. His work has been published in many literary journals. One of his poems received a Pushcart Prize nomination from the Connecticut Review, one of his essays was in the winning volume for the Washington State Book Award for Poetry, and a piece of his flash fiction was in the Saboteur Award-winning 81 Words: Flash Fiction Anthology. He and his wife live in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.