Goldfinch by Doug Lawson

The goldfinch hit the kitchen window with a knock so dull and hollow we thought, briefly, that someone had come to the door. We went out. The bird was on the patio brick, lying on its side, its yellow as bright as paint and its small black eye open and bewildered. The cat watched us from the porch railing with his usual offended interest.

Yosha, who was five, knelt and put her hand near the bird without touching it. Devraj, who was nearly eight and had read all of the Macaulay books by himself, in English, said that the bird was probably going to die. Yosha said the bird was going to live. Devraj said no, statistically, and Yosha said you don’t know everything, Devraj, and Devraj said neither do you, and we said okay, both of you. We said let’s see.

We found a little Amazon box. We lined it with a clean dishtowel. Yosha picked up the bird with two hands, the way you pick up a hot biscuit. The bird’s heart beat against her palms with a speed that was almost a vibration, almost a sound. We put the box in the laundry room, away from the cat, and turned off the light.

We checked at twenty minutes. We checked at forty. The bird was still breathing. At an hour Yosha lifted the lid and the bird flicked its head and her face changed in a way that was complicated, for a bird. At an hour and ten the bird sat up, and at an hour and twenty Yosha carried the box outside and opened the lid and the bird stood there on the dishtowel for a long second considering us, all of us, and then it flew into the dogwood.

Devraj cried.

It was not the bird he was crying about. He had been wrong, was all, and the wrongness opened in him for the first time the way it opens in everyone the first time, and we held him on the patio, all of us in this strange place, and Yosha stood beside us holding the empty shoebox like a small, solemn celebrant, and the cat watched us from his railing the way the cat would keep watching everything for years, that cat.

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DOUG LAWSON — Doug’s work has been cited as a Distinguished Story by the Best American anthology, received an Honorable Mention from the O. Henry Awards, and has appeared in a number of literary publications, including Brevity, multiple times in Glimmer Train and the Mississippi Review, and in Passages North, the Sycamore Review, and other places. He’s won Glimmer Train’s yearly Fiction Open, received a Transatlantic Review Award for fiction, a Henfield award, and a fellowship in fiction from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Doug has two collections of stories out from Red Hen Press, the most recent is Bigfoots In Paradise.

Art by RAJVI MITTAL — Rajvi is a multi-passionate artist, hobby hoarder, and sleepy human from India. Since leaving her corporate consulting job, she works as a freelance writer and design artist. She has self-published a poetry chapbook titled Reborn: Darkness is the Seed of Light and writes a LinkedIn newsletter SnowFlames Weekly. Her writing has been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency & the Entrepreneur Magazine. Her photography & artwork has been published/ is forthcoming in Reckoning, Blood+Honey, Consequence, Island of Wak Wak, Non-Binary Review, The Scop, Yin Literary and elsewhere. Find her Instagram at @phoenix.dot.rising and Medium at @rajvimittal11