Summer
Listen (15 min) | Short Story | Magical Realism
The moment she broke free of her mother’s womb, Annastasia succumbed to the cold. Wrapping her in wool and warming her in a clay pot beside a blistering stove, the midwives warned her parents to prepare themselves.
The infant lagged in a line of lost children. Her father, a chain smith, refused to hand anymore of his offspring to the grave.
He trusted in his craft and his chains. The stories of his youth instructed him in their uses to set a trap. He’d preserve his child by blasphemy.
It was the solstice day. The Bird of Summer, an elemental of eternal warmth, had commenced its yearly nesting in the nearby forest.
Anna’s father—storming out, chains in hand—returned home late that night with the bird in irons.
Binding it to his daughter, everyone in the house rejoiced as she revived.
When he removed the bird, Anna faded.
The arrangement would have to be permanent.
If summer failed, retribution would follow. Once word of the bird’s whereabouts got out, bareness, death, and desolation would drive folk to batter down their door.
The bird’s yearly journey carried the season to every hill and valley. In place of its airy pilgrimage, the family would have to make do with a dirt road.
They sold their home. A team of horses and a wagon served as replacement.
Taking to the trail, they turned their back on all they knew and bore the Bird of Summer, bound to their daughter, up and down the countryside.
When she grew, Anna begged to know how her father trapped the bird.
“Spirits of the other world may be held with iron, but it wasn’t,” he said, his face a rumbling cloud, “a thing that should ever be done again.”
That night, she asked her mother what summer had been before her birth. “Kinder,” said the woman, peering out at the season’s storms, “and scented with lilacs. Sweet, juicy berries of all kinds grew everywhere, and all you had to do was reach out and pluck them. But what remains is just enough. The change has been gradual. Folk get by.”
None of Anna’s recollections contained home. Her life rocked and creaked with the wagon springs, blown by wind and rain. No memory shone free of the iron chain binding her and the creature together.
Linked wrist to neck, Anna and the Bird of Summer walked the world.
Her parents found little work on the road. They lived by displaying the bird for passers-by.
After they’d examined it, none of the customers believed the animal was what they said: The Bird of Summer, behind a curtain for a few coin, attached to a girl on the edge of a chill.
Legends told of a god beautiful as paradise. Summer incarnate, with feathers of ruby and gold, perfumed by frankincense and myrrh, his head crowned with fire.
The tethered creature dragged rust and brown half-full spindles of plumage, his bald head low and whitened with scales.
Every day, in the moments before her father drew the patched curtain for viewers, Anna closed her eyes and pretended the bird didn’t exist.
Once, in that private moment, she’d studied the animal. His eyes, drawn to the clear sky, widened, filling with tears as he followed the arc of a hawk soaring in the blue. She never studied him again.
Her parents, to save her, would’ve tethered the sun to her wrist, even if the rest of the world collapsed in ice and darkness. It was a love determined to give life and take it.
The thought tore her hair out by the roots. Stretched bones against sinew and skin. Strangled, suffocated, and screamed.
In the quiet of the wild, nothing drowned it out.
Pocketing a loaf of dry, brown bread and tucking the Bird of Summer under her traveling cloak, Anna kissed her sleeping parents and fled in the night.
She ran, as far off summer’s course as her legs would carry her.
Winds tore through fields, wrecking half their bounty. Cattle rushed to shelter. Lightning rolled up in the west.
Peering out from the cover of a cave, she shook, fearing to return and terrified to go further.
Grief, in dark and weightless tones, flew from the bird’s mouth. She stared at the creature beside her. Its music drifted to the waring clouds. Cattle lowed in answer. Lightning tucked itself into clouds’ pockets. Wind wailed. Sky wept.
Blocking her ears and squeezing her eyes closed, Anna buried her head in her knees until she fell asleep.
In the morning, she found a road and a signpost.
She’d never been inside a big city, but she’d been near enough to hear the clamor they created. In a city, the wild could be drowned out.
From miles off, she knew the place. Lights—unblinking fireflies floating in straight lines—speckled the darkness. Music, wheels on roads, clinking of forks and knives, shouting, begging, laughing rose in a fog of distraction. It promised everything she wanted.
In the city streets, it was easy to believe that summer was all it’d ever been.
Fields miles around rotted in floodwater, but within its borders, tables bulged with food. Perhaps city appetites are stronger, she thought, swallowing the last piece of stale bread.
Captive animals lived, ate, and behaved just as they were meant to. Beside them, her chained bird, for all his broken heart, burned with a wildness that refused to be extinguished.
“Young lady, that bird,” said a voice, “I’ve never seen one like it, even though it’s clearly not what it used to be.” A man in a patched brown suit, hair in a fringe around his head, and breath smelling of metal, smiled down at her. “How did you come to have such a creature?”
Anna was used to the question from customers, though they never believed her. A twinkle in the smiling man’s eye assured his understanding. She told him everything.
Finishing her tale, she sighed and glanced down at the creature. “I’m told that once he was very beautiful.”
“Yes.” The man smiled wider. “I can believe that he was. Still, he has power, or you wouldn’t be alive.”
“True,” said Anna, “there’s fire in him yet.”
The man held out his hand. “You look famished, young one. You and this noble creature must come to my home for supper. My wife will be ecstatic to have guests of your caliber.”
Anna took the offered hand and let herself be led to a cottage in the shadowed end of town, the bird trailing in her wake.
Hurrying through the door, it slammed and locked behind her. The man’s arms twined her in a constricting knot.
She kicked. Thrashed. Screamed.
Throwing Anna and the bird into the empty stone cellar, he bolted the latch. “When my wife comes home, she’ll be overjoyed to hear I’ve arranged this supper. The body of the Bird of Summer, as well as your own, will provide meat to extend our lives. Imagine what power you’ve been basting in all these years. No finer drippings than that.”
The man shuffled away. Scraping signaled blade on whetstone.
She scoured the mildewed room for an escape, but the only exit was a small, high window blocked with close steel bars.
If she cried out the man would silence her.
She could draw someone’s attention, but there were no footsteps in the alley outside the window.
Slumping against the wall, she laid her head on her knees and sobbed.
She’d never see her parents again. The wild, the wagon, the curtain, and all the trappings of her rootless life glowed with a newfound brilliance.
Their light cast the shadows of stories unheard, roads untrod, life unlived.
The bird huddled beside her. She stared at it. A deep emptiness surrounded it, its life a spilled bottle. Resigned. Silent.
Her family’s counterfeit pilgrimage on summer’s path wasn’t a makeshift joy to this creature. Every earthbound step wounded. He was ready to die.
She’d never allowed herself to feel gratitude towards the bird, just as she never thanked the breath in her lungs or the animation in her limbs. That was to admit the borrowed nature of life. Little, if anything, belonged to her. She, here a moment and gone the next, could take nothing from the world.
Trembling, she knelt before the bird. Wrapping her fingers around the chain on the creature’s neck, she lifted it over the scabbed head and dropped the burden to the floor.
Raising its eyes, the animal considered her.
Cold fizzed and stung the tips of her toes as she stood, taking the creature in her arms and raising it to the window. “You can squeeze through. Go on.”
The bird perched. Its feet scratched at the stone ledge surrounding the escape. Losing its balance, it flapped and thudded to the ground.
Anna cradled it, weeping into what remained of its feathers.
The Bird of Summer seized once, twice, and fell limp.
Anna pressed her companion into her chest, burying her face in its wing as the cold rolled up her knees. She’d ended them both.
Warmth soothed her wet cheek.
She raised her head.
Flame—silk and liquid light—licked and swaddled the bird’s head, neck, wings, and breast. Fire flared from its heart.
Its body and Anna’s blazed, engulfed without pain.
Fire enveloped the cellar. Anna closed her eyes, yielding to a death kinder than life.
When she opened her eyes, she was warm.
A mound of ashes, fragrant with frankincense and myrrh, lay on the floor. The pile shifted.
Dust rained down from feathers of scarlet and gold, covering the bird’s body. Its tail feathers glinted as it shook and fanned them. Wings spread, casting a ruby sunrise. Its head flashed a crown of fire.
With one flap of its wings, the Bird of Summer floated to the window. The steel bars melted to stumps.
Grabbing the iron chain, Anna hurled the loop over one of them and pulled herself up and out.
She sped to the forest, and the Bird of Summer glided beside her.
Stumbling into a glade, Anna caught her breath, and the bird perched in a yew tree.
Her eyes met her companion’s.
The years to come rolled through her mind. Anna had possessed the bird by way of her own sickness. Without the chain, life and earth would walk the great circle hand in hand, and summer would be gentle again.
She wouldn’t miss the bird, but she wished it joy.
Its eyes were kind. Forgiving. It wouldn’t miss her either.
Gratitude and the gift of eternal warmth danced in her soul. Love, she thought, where no one devours or is devoured.
Placing her hand over her heart, she bid farewell to the god.
Spreading its wings, it soared south towards the fountainhead of its pilgrimage.
Sunlight bathed the glade, the earth drew up its blanket of green, and the air washed itself in the scent of lilacs.
If you enjoyed this story . . .
Spring
Toiling over his homework, Robin grinned, spying the blossoming trees outside tapping hello on his window. Spring burst pink from every branch.
Winter
Winter came with nothing and took everything. That was its way. But year after year, Julia Nielsen, wrapped in baby-blue satins and flowered brocades, refused its entry. That was her way.
Photo by Photo by Rūdolfs Klintsons: https://www.pexels.com/photo/macro-shot-of-red-feather-7072139/
A truly lovely story, Jennifer (fable, even?).
This story is so beautiful, Jennifer! There's such a tender and lyrical quality to the writing and the images are stunning. You do this kind of thing really well. (I am envious.)