There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway. It makes me nervous. I guess I first noticed it after my mother died. It looked like a large pile of brush in the clearing. Maybe from a storm or from the efforts to rid the area of an invasive species like buckthorn or thistles or the contents of my mother’s hospice supplies. But it was in a perfect circle.
The circle, the size of a small house, was furrowed in the middle, like something was lying there at night, and I wondered what could be so big. I thought of a bird the size of a hatchback car, and when I thought of the car, it was the car my father drove when I was four. A black Volkswagen Rabbit. I remember driving behind him in my mother’s car, in the passenger seat, and seeing the muffler drag on the pavement, making small orange sparks. My mother saying he would explode, and sometimes he did.
New things started to appear in the tree limbs of the nest. I saw my father’s pocket knives that fell between the couch cushions over time. Once, I saw a chair, and I had seen that chair before. It was in my parents’ living room when I was small. My father once threw its matching ottoman across the room. There were ash marks from my parents’ cigarettes on the seat of it, and a perfect circle burn. I would bring my father pepsis while he smoked and read to me. Scary stories or even just my name written on an envelope, so I would know it.
Once, during a fight, my father slammed an unopened pepsi can against the counter so hard it burst. My mother, in silence, cleaned it, while my father apologized, circling her. Now, the chair looked just the same, still stained with ash, and it was covered in leaves and empty pepsi cans and little, yellowed, sharp crescents, my mother’s fingernails that she tore off with her teeth.
My mother’s clothes weaved their way throughout the nest. My father has been asking me for years to look through her closet–her drawers for anything I might want. But there is nothing I want. I’m afraid to open the door. I’m afraid of what could be hiding in there, now. It would be dark. She wore black because she believed in black, but there were embellishments. Gold buttons. Large plastic jewels glued to the sweaters in purple and gold and silver. What is the bird that collects shiny things? What color is it? I’m very nervous.
The nest is getting bigger. My father has been doing work–making it more and more like home. The oriental rug that is soaked through with dog pee and baking soda lines the bottom. There are eggs, now, a bluish-green with spots of brown. I know that color. My father’s eyes are that color. He is stopping to rest more and more on his walks. And I want to tell him no. Do not stop here.
I can see something else in there. Something is moving. It’s crawling. It looks like it’s made out of the trimmings from my father’s beard he collected with his white electric razor. They would spill all over the sink in my parents’ bathroom and my mother would peck at him about it. The shedding. Brown at first, but as the thing moves, it goes gray, then white, then patchy and I can see the skin. It is not smooth. It is papery and thin and folds over itself like an envelope. I imagine it would be soft, but I won’t touch it because you are not supposed to touch the babies, or their mother will not come back. Your smell will get on them and she will know it. And this is what makes me nervous. I do not want their mother to know my smell. Though, I suspect, she does already.
Mary Thorson
Mary Thorson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. Her stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Reckon Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Milwaukee Noir, Worcester Review, Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, among others. Her short story, “Book of Ruth,” was included in Best American Mystery & Suspense, ’24, edited by Steph Cha and S.A. Cosby. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, A Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two feisty daughters, the best husband, and a dog named Pam when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories. Lori Galvin represents her at Aevitas Creative Management. Thorson is currently working on a novel.