Spring
Author’s Note: Written For The Ancient Obsessions Advent Challenge – December 3 (Robin)
He’d died in winter.
Snow had covered the ground.
It hadn’t been easy to bury him, but the local men had managed.
The women brought her food and helped with her son.
They’d done all they could to help her.
But eventually, as is always the case, she was left alone.
Alone with her pain.
She pushed it away as best she could.
After all, she had a child to raise.
But still, the winter was cold.
So much colder than it’d been before.
It was hard to walk alone.
She collapsed into herself.
She didn’t leave the house. She barely remembered to bathe and eat. Her son sometimes cried for hours before she noticed him.
Slowly, the snow melted and the temperatures rose.
She did not notice.
She noticed nothing outside of her home.
Not until the day Garan shrieked.
He shrieked, as if in terror. This was no normal baby cry.
His fear stirred Laira to action as adrenaline flooded her system.
She found him in the main room of the house, his features frozen in horror.
His little head darted about, tracking an object that zipped around the ceiling with breakneck speed.
It took Laira a minute to see that it was a bird.
She sighed and tried to comfort her child. “It’s ok, Garan. It’s only a bird.”
Laira opened the front door and tried to shoo the creature out of the house with a broom.
This served to only make the animal more panicked. It flew headlong into a wall and then fall onto the floor with a dull thud.
Garan calmed as the creature stopped moving.
Laira sighed.
‘Finally,’ she thought. ‘Quiet again.’
She moved to pick up the bird’s body, and was surprised to find Garan following her.
As she bent over to scoop up the bird, Garan surprised her by starting to wail again.
Laira picked up the boy instead of the bird and started to bounce him on her hip. “Sh. It’s ok, my baby. You’re alright. What’s the matter?”
Garan looked down at the bird, then pointed at it. His little voice came out as a whisper.
“Daddy.”
Laira’s heart, which hadn’t yet mended at all, ripped into a thousand pieces.
Garan made the connection that the bird was dead, just like his father.
Laira didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t thought that Garan understood about his father.
But he did.
Laira hugged Garan tightly to her chest and began to cry. Her response was so visceral she wasn’t even aware of it. The tears she’d held in for so many nights fell hard and fast as her son latched onto her in a hug that was as tight as his little arms would allow.
Time slowed. Laira wasn’t aware how long she stood there holding her son and crying, but eventually her eyes caught a tiny movement from the floor and her sobs eased. Garan calmed as well, and looked to the spot that had captured his mother’s attention.
The little bird moved!
Garan’s face lit with joy, and his fear of the creature was replaced by wonder.
Laira hurried to scoop the tiny animal up in her free hand while keeping Garan perched on her opposite hip.
She hustled out the still open front door and set the bird on its chest in the grass that was fighting its way through the melting snow.
It took a few minutes, but finally the little bird seemed to shake itself a little and come to its senses.
When it saw the humans looming over it, it quickly got its feet underneath its body and after a few wing flaps that seemed to be some sort of self injury check, it burst into the sky and flew off into the waiting atmosphere.
Laira smiled.
Not because the bird had lived, although that did make her happy.
She smiled because she suddenly noticed some things she hadn’t before. The sky was blue. The bird flew. And most of all, the grass was beginning to show through the snow.
The world was beginning to end its long winter hibernation.
Garan plucked a short strand of grass out of the dirt and began to play with it in his hands.
Laira’s smile broadened.
Her child was healthy.
The grass was emerging from the cold.
And finally, so was she.
The End
