By Vati Sreiberg,
The woman is greeted by silence where there should be song, stillness where there is always movement, allowing her imagination to generate dread. She walks cautiously into her garden, the green tips of daffodils everywhere testing the air as the shadows of winter dissipate and the last of the icy snow melts away; the first red buds sprout across bare trees.
Scanning the space held within the old stone walls, her squinting eyes telescope to a horizontal branch where she spots a dynamic, perched figure momentarily stealing ownership of her yard.
“Oh no,” she proclaims, “not my birds for your breakfast, my chipmunks and squirrels for your lunch.” She fancies her property a sanctuary with multiple seed feeders, suet, peanuts, and fruit.
The perched figure turns its head to her, its yellow eyes meeting her green ones, its dark beak pointing right at her nose, and lets loose a hoarse, raspy whistle-scream.
Then, as if a vision has passed from hawk to human, she sees the nest so diligently built by the raptor pair, the fragile eggs that might never have hatched but miraculously did, the gray fuzz balls with wide-opened, yellow-pink mouths demanding food, and understands that they, too, deserve to eat and survive, that their parents must provide.
Perhaps tired of waiting, the hawk spreads enormous barred wings, flaps against gravity, cruises directly over her head, over the yard, spiraling up and up, finally soaring far enough away for the bluejays—the property’s vigilant guards—hiding in the willow to call out to the others that it is safe for them to return.
The woman, craving a harmonious co-existence, pretends she is the goddess of creation and imagines birthing a world in which no one has to kill something else to survive—not hawks, not humans—even as she takes in the mysterious perfection of this world, exactly as it is.
Vati Sreiberg, forced into her bed by a rare disease, recently discovered Flash, her new passion. She has a flash piece coming out this June in Decapitate, another accepted into a British anthology on the Tarot. She is struggling to find that mystifying first-page hook for her finished novel.