Fledgling
Ana sits beneath a drawing table. Her back slopes but straightening it wouldn’t matter. Even at its lowest point, the table top is too high for her head to bump. Xylene thick & delicious curdles in her nose. She breathes in and holds the breath until its holding tilts her forward. All around her the attic floor is a splintered mess of cat hair and broken pastels. All the best colors. Taffy blue, fuchsia and Lake Erie green so rich her mouth drops open to taste the biting fullness. Hours she’s been sitting here. Idling like a rocket before a blind date with the moon. Her forearms press into micro artifacts of grit. Again, she inhales. Pushes against the floor and lifts herself from under the table.
Wringing sweat from her bangs, she passes another minute. Dawdle is the word her grandmother uses. Her mother, too. Though she knows her mother holds moments when they dawdle together close to her ribs. The sun is so insistent, choking through the single-pane window, boarded up since before Ana can remember, that it lasers the Picasso print hanging on the wall. Another slope of another woman. She turns to the Matisses and the Lam. Then the series of small Kahlos in gilded frames. These each could fit in her hand and so she likes them best. Tacked up with silver pushpins, the only unframed print in her father’s studio is the Magritte. A brown-haired girl eating a black bird. Blood on her collar. Is it a girl? Ana remembers being very young and praying at her bedside for the bird’s impossible escape. She presses against the drawing table. Her palm slips and a marker backflips through the air. Warm grey. Airy like a cat’s heartbeat. She likes it. Lets its spin dwindle on the attic floor then replaces it at the edge of the table.
The drawing table slants and never ends. Adorned with the same strewn of Chartpak Ads, most of their caps tight, for eleven months. 5B pencils buttery black and a kneaded eraser intersect with the cells of a storyboard. Six cells, one unfinished. A man and woman sitting together at breakfast. First across from each other and buried in newspaper, then side by side. No cereal box and no carton of orange juice. The girl can’t conclude a product or campaign. Months ago, she stopped trying. She runs her fingers across the images. Smooth and gliding and still burning fragrant in her throat.
A boy called Solomon once said her father pays the devil’s bills. “Only foreigners understand foreigners,” her father later told her. “When can I be a foreigner?” she’d asked him with an ember in her eye. He only laughed and promised one day he’d take her back home. His home. She understood. Last week six starlings abandoned their nest in the boarded window. All season she watched from under the drawing table as the mother bird threaded herself through the slats to bring them food. Ana slides her thumb along the cracked paint on the ledge. The attic leaves her alone to wonder. She does because she’s like her father, the girl.
Her mother was once her age. She lights a cigarette and perches by the window. The day the starlings left their nest she pulled apart a slice of potato bread and took Ana out to scatter it in case they came back hungry. Solemn as she stood tossing crumbs. She’s always so solemn. Was she like this even before?
Her mother ashes into a small dish spattered in silver. What’s left of the lusterware she discovered years later was heavily leaded. Above her the drop-door to the attic crumbles closed. She snuffs the filter and leaves it. Rinses her hands and opens the window to let the breeze neutralize her mind. The girl’s footsteps creak then silence. Then creak again until they shadow down the stairs and into the kitchen.
“Nibs got into the nest.” Ana pulls a glass from the lowest cabinet and sits at the counter.
“The birds have gone.”
“They’ll come back next season and I don’t want their nest to be ruined.”
“They’ll build a new one.” Her mother pours Ana some Ovaltine and drops in an ice cube from the freezer drawer. She stirs it with a fork she rinses and replaces on the drying rack.
“I saw them,” says Ana. “Five of them by the blue bushes. The mama bird was feeding them bugs. I don’t know where the other one was.”
“Who knows,” says her mother. “When you’re that young nothing’s guaranteed.” From the window above the sink, she looks out on the small yard. “Anything can happen.”
“Anything can always happen.” The girl finishes her glass and places it the middle of the sink for her mother to rinse.
Walls move in the attic. Ana never catches it happening. When she’s focused on a book or studying the drawing table, she might notice their quivering in her periphery. They stop the moment she looks up. Her father never spoke about the walls but cared for them in his way, searching an hour for termite holes to slide in a nail. The silver pushpins appeared only after the walls’ perspiring caused gobs of Fun-Tak to melt into uselessness. The girl would wait. Not often, but every now and then. The last time she waited for the walls to move was 11 months ago. Maybe to the day.
Her father was finishing a sketch in velvet curves of magenta. A hand-drawn birthday card for a cousin she’d seen in photos. Bougainvillea tendrilled down the F and C. She recognized it. Often, he’d described to her these brilliant tumbling vines, and the tiny purple flowers that veil his city in blossoming fairy dust. The woman wasn’t her cousin, Ana had known for a while. She breathed the rich vapor just to hold in the breath. “See,” he’d said, blowing dry the marker strokes. “When I stop thinking about home, it always delivers me.” He placed her fingertips on the image, lightly so the ink wouldn’t stain. “One day we’ll plan our escape.” He always spoke about his home in words of shelter. His refuge. From what, she never asked.
The card arrived nine days later and one day too late. Now Ana sits under the drawing table and stares at the wall of prints. An empty swaddle of quilts and sheets gives the pullout couch a half-welcome presence in an unlit corner of the room. She breathes out. Her eyes center the bird in its moment of torture. As the sun drops, the sliver of light forced through the boarded window dims to dark.
Weekend nights are disarming. They arrive without invitation. Ana had disappeared from downstairs when the yard was still dream lit in lavender and orange. Now and then her mother hears movement in the attic. She ashes and eyes the microwave. For more than an hour it’s been past the girl’s bedtime. She sits another minute without lighting another cigarette. The girl reads, she knows. How much and how often impresses her though she keeps quiet on it. These days the girl spends chapter books of time in her father’s studio while her mother scarcely passes by the drop-door, even when it’s closed. Sighing walls, scattered pencils, stenches of ink. Everything up there scrambles her thoughts until she hears only the distant part of her mind repeating, “Release him.” But night’s been night for a while. She dumps her ashes in the compost caddy and leaves the kitchen without flipping off the light.
The hallway to the stairs is short and wrapped in paisleys. Plans to strip & repaint the walls are long discarded. She’d wanted the two of them to work together on something. On anything. Her fingers trace a large paisley. They smell like tar.
“Mom!” The sound is sudden. Ana’s voice, sharp and high. Her mother grabs the bannister and hoists herself over the first five steps before she takes off running. “Mom!”
“I’m coming.” The words only murmur. She clears the drop-down steps in twos and threes. Inside the attic, Ana is standing by the wall of prints. “God.” Her mother’s hands drop to her thighs and she lifts her head. “What happened?”
“It’s gone,” she says. Still now, she stares at the unframed print by the boarded window. “Look.” Her mother dispatches something buried so deeply it had almost stopped being. She’s not in his studio. The walls aren’t coughing sawdust. The naked bulb isn’t swaying over the drawing table. The room’s incandescence tightens her throat as she crosses the floor. “Look,” the girl whispers. They stand shoulder to chest facing the Magritte, blood drops staining its young subject’s curling fingers. The faraway look perverting her eyes. Ana’s mother squeezes a blink.
“Where’s the bird?” She steps back.
The girl steps forward. She runs her fingertips across the image so lightly they don’t feel the wall behind it. Then, a mutual surge of something — adrenaline? — breaks their breath, and in the only synchronized moment they’ll ever share Ana and her mother turn and rush the boarded window. There, in the rumpled nest a small bird roosts. Is it a bird? Feathers cottony and slick. The attic light slides like liquid through its tucked wings. It’s not a blackbird. Not a starling, Ana’s almost certain. She reaches out her hand to touch its oily softness. Her mother grasps it. Pulls her back.
“It might be hurt,” says Ana.
“It’s sick.” She releases the girl’s hand.
“How do you know?”
“The others have gone. This one’s dying—”
“No.” The girl steps forward. She turns to the print on the wall. First unsteady, she closes in on the space where the dying bird should be, her shadow lapping over the image until it stills. “It’s home.” Her mother places her hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Nibs can stay downstairs for the night,” she says. “Ana.” She squeezes and releases. “This is all we can do.” With her hand wrapped meekly around the girl’s shoulder, she leads her from the center of the room. They leave the attic one after the other.
Morning doesn’t feel like morning but the two are used to it. At 5:30 the girl gathers herself and tiptoes through the hall in her socks. No one closed the drop-door the night before but she can see the cat gate in place on the downstairs landing. The hallways are dark. Nibs is prowling or sleeping, she guesses. Ascending, Ana separates her feet on the sides of the plank steps so the middles won’t creak.
Inside, she glows amber. A crack of morning light diffuses on her figure and the sighing walls. She crosses the attic floor, her steps light and even. Shadow shrouds the drawing table but the man and woman in the storyboard remain strangered. The markers lie about, tightly capped. Ana almost turns as she passes the wall of prints, keeping their splintering umber in the sharpest point of her periphery. The Magritte is unchanged. Thank god. She reaches the nest and peers down. Her mother was right. The bird isn’t moving. Its feathers are stiff. She lifts the nest from the window ledge and gently wraps the bird in the cotton of her night shirt.
In the yard, the sun’s a vine glittering up the sky. From the kitchen window, her mother exhales a plume of frosted smoke. She ashes in the dish. Observes her daughter kneeling between bushes. Each solemn movement, she watches in secret. The girl removes her shirt and lays the bundle beside her in the damp earth. As she lowers her head, her hands begin to dig.
Stephanie Jones is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a Mediterranean Jersey girl, with bylines in The New York Times, HuffPost & elsewhere, and literary works appearing/forthcoming in The Santa Fe Literary Review, Midway Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Nulla, Encyclopedia Prismatica & elsewhere. She’s a 2026 Rhysling Award finalist.
Website Links:
stephaniemariajones.com
Instagram: @meetmissjonesny