Empty Nesting | Andrea Villa Franco
Strolling, hand in hand, among the honeyed oranges and crimsons of fall, we stumble upon a nestling lying in our path.
“Look, look…”
Creamy brown feathers frame a pale chest; the baby bird lies face up on the bare concrete.
“…he’s still breathing.”
The chest struggles to rise and fall.
“How do you know it’s a he?”
Almost as if, at any moment now, the small rib cage would collapse, caving life into a rubble of bone, feather, and tissue.
“I don’t have to know.”
The last rays of twilight set the leaves ablaze as the wind sweeps them from the branches and onto the indigo sky above. We meander in place. The question of gender only serves as a distraction. It is a detour in our journey together to the inevitable, true question:
“What should we do?”
It was meant to buy us a little bit of time, but every day the sunlight fades faster, if only by just a few minutes.
“Well, I’ve heard that if we touch him, then his parents will reject him.”
“Wasn’t that about bunnies, not birds?”
From here, we can still see the far-off pines that coat the hills that rise beyond the shingles of the houses.
“Do birds have noses?”
She buries her chin deeper into the folds of her fluffy orange scarf. A chill has crept into the breeze, and I realize I have never thought about it—do they, or can they, like us, smell the leaves in decay, the damp dirt, the pines?
“He’s a late nester, in any case.”
“And what’s that?”
“A baby bird that is born late in the year.”
“Too late?”
She lowers her gaze back onto the sidewalk. The question has left a small frown on her lips, and I want to tell her that no, it is never too late.
But I hesitate.
I watch, instead, as she fidgets with an orange strand of wool that has come undone from her scarf.
I shouldn’t have mentioned it.
By the end of the season, all the trees will be bare, but not the pines. They will continue to watch us from the hills and then, one day, through the flurry of snowfall.
Perhaps the time has come. Perhaps I should speak to her now about the cycle of life, as my mother did, on a summer morning, when a bird of prey carried off the squirrel I was chasing across the park. After all, who will feel sorry for the eagle when it starves?
“Why don’t we move him somewhere safer for the night?”
“Somewhere where the cats can’t get to him?”
She watches me as I bend down and gather the nestling into my hands. He is impossibly weightless, almost too light for hands so big to carry. The cold flushes my fingers red.
“Look at how he shivers…”
She speaks in hushed tones as she peers into my hands.
“Do you think he fell from all the way up there?”
And it is suddenly too late to see much among the tree branches that, like dark veins, web the evening above us. The leaves continue to fall, but the early night has robbed them of color.
“Maybe over here…”
It feels like, soon, we will all begin to dissolve into shadow, in the moments just before the streetlamps alight.
“…this could be a good spot for him to pass the night.”
I place the nestling in the small nook of a young tree that sprouts near us, at the edge of the path, and hope that the embrace of wood will be a little less cold.
“Don’t you think?”
She tilts her head and her smooth skin creases around her almond eyes, like it tends to do on those late weekday evenings, when she stays up at her desk, frustrated, under the glare of the study lamp, confronted with some tricky long divisions she just can’t solve.
“I don’t know.”
She looks away and, for a moment, we pause, unconvinced. As unconvinced, perhaps, as when, on those late evenings, I try to make the equations and the numbers on the page make sense, but she knows, and I know that I just can’t make them sit still.
“I think we’ve done the best we can.”
But she doesn’t hear me. And I can feel it now, how she—like a moth drawn to light—is beginning to flutter off.
I watch as she begins to hop around, scattering the fallen leaves that crunch under her knit boots. It will take a few minutes for her to tire, to catch her breath.
I’ve done the best I can.
Even if I can’t always help her arrive at the right answer by the end of the night, not anymore.
I’ve done the best I can.
The temperature drops and the evening thickens; I realize we have lost sight of the tree.
But it’s late now.
She has fallen quiet now.
I see her, wide-eyed, staring out beyond the park’s shadows and into the electric glow of the city. A mug of hot milk, her favorite blanket, the old plushy green couch—it all awaits her. She is ready to go back home.
And I graze, with the tip of my tongue, the words that would bring her back to me. I could do it, I could raise my voice and chart out a new path for us, for all three of us—one in which I would feel, once again, the drum of the tiny heartbeat, between my palms.
It’ll be too cold tonight.
Let’s take him home.
Together, we could find a warm spot near the heater in her room. And with some old clothes, we could make a soft bed in a shoebox for him. I could teach her how to dip the dropper into a cup of water, how to squeeze out tiny, glowing beads like morning dew.
My breath condenses for a moment.
Before dissolving back into shadow.
And I watch as she begins to wander off, beckoning me to follow.
She too has tucked the nestling away into a nook, within her memory, and she is ready to walk away, until one day, without warning, she will find a way back to him, to the tree, and to this evening.
Once we found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest.
I don’t know what happened to it after that night. It was so cold.
Andrea reading a snippet of her story…
More about the author:
Andrea Villa Franco is a writer and researcher from Bogotá, Colombia. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared or is upcoming in Hypertext Review, The Madrid Review, Americas Quarterly, and Pie de Página. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an International Joint M.A. from the EU’s Erasmus Mundus Program. In her work and life, she enjoys blending genres and experimenting with language(s).