Brevity |
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Archilochus
Colubris, First Sighting By Bonnie J. Rough They are so young, so much younger than I am now. My father with his
trousers hugging his bottom—it’s 1978, and he’s 25 years old. My mother
with her honey-long hair. The little yellow cabin, blackberried, with
a small lawn over a scrubby cliff and a scale of beach stairs. The afternoon
sun blazes but the air is forest-cool. It is July and the mudflats smell
of geoduck, of kelp-wrapped moonsnail. I am a bundle in my mother’s
slender arms. We have just come from the hospital, 20 miles away. She
carries me through the side door and makes two turns. My parents stand
together in front of the picture window, facing the slack-tide sound,
and my mother holds me up, invites me to look out. “This is where you’re
going to live,” she tells me. And up come the ruby-throated hummingbirds:
four, and then a fifth. They swarm the glass, their paths crossing and
looping: a thatch of flight. My parents gasp, both of them eyes-wide
in thrall. For the first time since my birth, they forget about me.
They watch the birds swirling until my father chuckles and my mother
comes to. They stare at one another. “It’s God,” my mother says, turning
her eyes to me. “A blessing.” Bonnie J. Rough lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches at The Loft Literary Center. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from assorted journals and anthologies including The Sun, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, MODERN LOVE: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion (Three Rivers Press), The Best Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton), and The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton Mifflin). |