We didn't know how long she had been dead. One night, coming home, Amber noticed that the mother splayed her wing over the nest. This might have been a maternal, avian technique we did not know, some method of keeping her eggs safe from the stiff breezes as spring turned to summer.
When her posture was no different in the morning, I let Amber know that the bird had died above our notice. I would give her a respectful burial when I returned home. Amber cannot leave the task that long, not on days with threatening heat, not when leaving the mother on the nest might keep away a father to tend the eggs. I am uncertain that the father of this species - the eastern phoebe - does more than fertilizing, but I would rather preserve the fantasy of hope.
We and these birds were never good neighbors. They nested above our front door light for as long as we had lived here. These tiny birds left their droppings all over our welcome mat. They didn't have the courtesy to sing lilting songs for us or regard us with fondness, instead saying nothing and flying away whenever we came within a dozen feet of our home, making us feel like the interlopers. In a way, we were; their nest was on the light the first day we moved in.
Once, when I was sure no nestlings remained of that brood, I took a broom and knocked the nest to the welcome mat, where it smashed to a dozen scattered pieces. I didn't wish them any harm, but I didn't want to extend the invitation any longer than I had to. Let them nest somewhere more hospitable.
Before the week was out, they had rebuilt their nest. Understanding creatures with brains the size of my pinky nail had bested me, I conceded defeat and left it.
As Amber prepares a site for the bird's internment -- little more than digging a hole on the edge of the forest where we might pretend scavengers will overlook her corpse for a little while -- she studies the bird as we never could in life. A dead bird is not like an expired mammal, not something in immediate need of burial to hide the nakedness of its end. In death, a bird becomes all feather and hollow bone. One can spread out the wings as if the specimen might take one final jaunt, though the air no longer loves a dead bird and will not accept her into its bosom. Even so, we, the earthbound, cannot help but admire how the sunlight plays over even the dullest pinfeathers. She is holy in her element, seeming still to glide on zephyrs even when reduced to immobility.
Inside our apartment, Amber glories over the inside of the eggs, as seen via a flashlight. They are rife with veins that suggest life, though only inasmuch as life had once begun to grow within; even the dead have veins before decay takes over. Her initial assessment discounts one egg as viable, as it comes pre-cracked. This is not, in her words, a terminal circumstance for an egg, as I assumed, but it is not auspicious. We don't know how long the eggs were without a living mother, if these nights on the edge of summer were enough to stop the forming hearts of baby birds. Amber can only proceed with hope. She rigs up a makeshift incubator of a damp cloth and heating pad in a Tupperware container. It wouldn't suffice to hatch most birds. It is better than abandonment atop our light fixture until a new bird kicks them out to lay a clutch in a stolen nest.
They sit at a perfect ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, quiet and unregarded until I endeavor to ventilate the apartment by opening the window and am reminded that a stiff breeze might shift the scales between birth and death. However, they give no indication of life or growth yet. Amber is inclined to research the statistics of any animal put in her charge, but she doesn't rattle off their chances of survival. Just as a dead bird seems more like a still life than a corpse, eggs do not speak to the viewer as anything but the suggestion of potential life. To us, the eggs are not living but something that might live under perfect circumstances we cannot promise we have provided. They would make poor omelets. Of this and only this am I sure.
It is a better chance than I would have given them. I would not have smashed them in sweeping the nest again to the ground, but neither would I have thought to coddle them. I don't think I am cruel, but a lack of cruelty doesn't equate to an abundance of nutritive intent. Without my wife, they would have whatever chance an impersonal nature meant to grant them on the light above our apartment door.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
