The Nesting Instincts of Solitary Birds
My mother laid eggs. Each morning, she woke and found them warm between her legs, the shells protected by the soft rippled skin of her thighs. They were sky blue and rose pink and the soft purple-gray of early mornings. She nested with them in a pile of blankets on her bed.
Does it hurt? I asked.
Not as bad as having a baby, she said, and my face warmed.
When we moved to the tiny beige apartment on Gardenia Trace, the spring before last, I learned how to keep secrets. My secret key, hidden on a chain under my shirt, against my nothing-yet chest. The secret hours between the end of school and my mother’s return to the apartment, when she told me not to open the door, not for anyone, especially my father. Who shouldn’t come around. The eggs were a new secret, she told me. Be careful, don’t break a single one.
What’s inside? I asked, holding one to the light. Against the cinema of the shell, shadows flickered like heart-beats.
Tiny children, my mother said. I imagined my potential brothers and sisters, small enough to hold in my palm.
It was good that we left my father behind. He would probably have crushed them all. He was a destroyer of fragile things, like my mother’s jaw and the three surviving plates from my grandmother’s china. He used to crack chicken bones and suck out the marrow.
Eggs need to be nested. Sat on, warmed. Some mothers took turns with the father, trading duties. Some birds, like the cuckoo or cowbird, laid their eggs in others’ nests, to trick those parents into raising their young.
My mother had not left her nest in three weeks. She cradled the eggs with her body, and she would not leave them, even if I begged. Each morning, before I went to school, I left her a box of cereal or crackers and brushed the lank and greasy hair from her face. If she moved while I was learning about the American Civil War, or prepositions, or long division, she left no sign.
When we lived with my father, we lived in a large brick house in a neighborhood lined with tall oak trees. Our yard was surrounded by a wooden fence, and our windows had thick brown curtains that hung to the floor. My first memory is of those drapes, wrapping myself in their folds, turning and turning inside a dark cocoon, imagining that I could reappear somewhere new.
When we lived with my father, and his cruelty reached its sharpness, my mother would get so angry she’d start laughing. A dark grackle laugh, while she stirred his ties in a boiling pot on the stove, or sliced through the lining of his suit jacket with a razor, or baked a sheet of brownies spiked with shattered glass. My father thought he could beat the crazy out of her, like you would with a dog.
When we lived with my father, sometimes my mother grew sad and cried, and I held her in the warm nest of her bed. There were no eggs then. There wasn’t anyone else for me to care for.
One night, I gathered a large pot of water and a washcloth and a bar of soap and tried to give my mother a sponge bath. She smelled like something fetid, a sharp and rotting scent. I threw the blankets off of her, revealing my naked mother beneath. Her skin was the pinkish yellow of raw chicken. Her veins spread in light blue rivers. Across her belly, an angry red scar. Stretch marks lined her thighs and stomach like desert waves seen from satellites. I began to move the eggs from the folds in her skin, placing them into a towel-lined laundry basket.
Don’t touch us, she said. Her voice an echo from an empty house. I collected the eggs from the divets between her shoulders, the widening space between her thighs.
Please, she said.
I touched her collarbone with the wet cloth and she jumped. Her eyes opened, the gray irises lined in red.
You smell bad, Mama. I moved my hand in slow, circling movements. It’ll feel better soon.
My mother wept quietly as I washed her, but she didn’t fight or run away. After she was clean and dry, I gave her the basket of eggs, and she tucked them around her shivering bones.
Elephants are pregnant for almost two years. Possums, only a couple of weeks. Armadillos can put their pregnancies on pause, waiting for better environmental conditions. My mother had been nesting with her eggs for almost a month, and none of them hatched. They didn’t smell rotten, and they still felt warm to the touch. I imagined that each egg was filled with gems and gold, gifts from some fairytale god. I imagined that they would hatch and release finger-tall children who would follow me like ducklings until they were fully grown.
Since Mama didn’t leave the bedroom, I took care of cleaning and cooking as best as I could. When the cabinets and freezer ran empty, except for a can of olives and a freezer-burned bag of peas, I took Mama’s wallet to Donn’s Discount Drop-in. I filled my buggy with a gallon of milk, frozen lasagnas and burritos, cans of Chef Boyardee, two boxes of generic cocoa puffs.
None of Mama’s credit cards worked, and my face burnt redder each time I had to set one to the side. I was surprised at the total of my meager selection. It was more than the limp ones and fives I found shoved in various pockets or at the bottom of Mama’s purse. All that was left was a membership card for JC Penney. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling around for a magical coin, anything. The gray-haired woman behind me coughed, gently. She reached over with a purple-gloved hand and gave the clerk a red Visa.
Thank you, I whispered. I looked at the streaked and greasy tile under my feet. I grabbed my plastic bags and ran for the door.
Wait—she said. Dear— where do you live?
She kept calling after me but I didn’t hesitate. I ran the whole way home, my arms and legs aching, the cold air burning in my lungs. I slammed the apartment door and stood, shuddering, in the living room, I heard my mother cough from her bedroom.
She still lay, entombed in her sweaty blankets, hair tangled around her face.
I dumped the bags of groceries on the floor by her bed. Get up, Mama, I said. She didn’t move. I grabbed a corner of her rancid blanket and tugged. She shifted, but was tucked tightly into herself.
We can’t live like this, Mama. Please. I heard the childish, begging tone of my voice.
I remembered a gray afternoon when my mother locked herself in bed, wouldn't come no matter how loud I called. I was about seven years old. My father came home at eleven, smelling like whiskey and cinnamon gum. I told him about Mama and he went to her door and listened for the sound of her breath. He told me Mama was sleeping. He made dinosaur chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese. We took all the cushions off the furniture and sat on the floor in a nest of our own making, and watched Land Before Time. He fell asleep in the first fifteen minutes, but I stayed up till the morning light poured through the curtains, watching the heavy rhythm of my father’s breath.
I ripped the blankets off my mother’s bed, pulling them from her arms and legs. She was still naked, her skin waxy and bruised. Discarded around her, fragments of shell, like pink and gray petals, the greasy sheen of yolk staining her chest and neck and mouth.
I said Mama, you killed them, and she laughed louder.
I saved us.
They were my brothers and sisters. My tiny palm-sized kin.
Sometimes, when birds realize their eggs are damaged, or sick, they destroy the fragile shells. I reached out and touched the yellow stain on my mother’s shoulder. She softened in a silent gasp. The shards were smaller than a fingernail, the yolk slick between my fingers, and before I could stop myself, I slipped it into my mouth. It tasted like salt and sulphur and skinned knees.
I began laughing, then, too. It started as an ache in my ribs and rose to a guttural shudder in the back of my throat. The laughter expelled the taste of salt. It made my eyes water and my ears ring. My face red from the effort, my vision a haze. I fell to the floor. I laughed and laughed, a horrible noise. I heard my mother’s laughter join mine, quiet at first, then louder, till both our voices rang.
She stood from the bed. A blanket over her shoulders like enormous, folded wings. She reached out for me, her fingers curved claws. Her skin like melted wax. Her shoulders and chest brushed with albumen. As she reached, her wings unfolded, and her laughter grew to a single shrieking cry.
My mother wrapped her arms around me, pulling me to her skin. She felt strange and cold, like something buried deep below the earth. I realized her laugh had turned to crying, even as she held me.
Don’t worry, she said. I will keep you safe and warm.
Huddled inside the dark cave of my mother’s wings, I felt our heartbeats in a syncopated rhythm. She rocked me against her, her hands over my hands, her cheek against mine. She smelled like brine and the dry dust of feathers. I closed my eyes. I felt my mother’s breath warm on my ear.
To grow, to grow, to grow, she said.
Jules Hogan (@seektheyonder) is a fiction candidate at ASU and an associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review. Stories and essays can be found in the Sonora Review, McSweeney's, Appalachian Heritage, and other such wonderful publications.