My latest micro-fiction is featured over at CHEAP POP today. “Monstrous, Chaotic Things” was inspired by my dear friend Paige, who died two years ago of ovarian cancer, leaving five small children behind with their dad. Although Paige did not give her family an ornithology guide, she did pass her faith to them. I see the birdwatching in my story as metaphoric of her beliefs and boundless optimism.
It seems fitting that my family and I went birdwatching for the first time the very week “Monstrous, Chaotic Things” was published—while we were in the Adirondacks. (I was greatly relieved to find that my book-learning around birding was mostly accurate!) We saw pied-bill grebe and alder flycatcher. The flycatcher kept calling to us: “wee beep.” We watched a great blue heron rest on a beaver house and heard the hermit thrush, which is said to have the prettiest voice in the bird kingdom. It is lovely indeed. Gentle and delicate. We saw belted kingfisher, black-capped chickadee, common yellowthroat warbler, and goldfinch. We fed gray jays and watched blue jays steal the food they’d cached. Our guide wasn’t able to show us an osprey, because the local nest had fallen the week before. It was a monstrous, chaotic thing. Apparently, a retired gentleman used to spend every morning watching and photographing the goings on in that nest. Our guide has been worried what he’ll do now, but we spotted the man parked alongside a local bog—telephoto lens pointed out the window, making new bird friends.
The day my story dropped at CHEAP POP, by pure dumb-luck, we happened to go to a restaurant that was hosting an event with an owl handler. We got to see an enormous owl with piercing eyes, a medium barn owl, and a tiny screech owl. My girls held the screech owl and petted its downy feathers. They were overcome with emotion; so was I. On the way back to our hotel, we came upon a pair of robins feeding their babies in a nest. It felt like Paige was everywhere, all we had to do was keep looking.
Thank you to the good folks at CHEAP POP for nominating this piece for both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
