THE THING WITH FEATHERS: Read the first 2 chapters of my new novel

About birds and climate change and grief and memory and healing

“The thirty birds read through the fateful page

And there discovered, stage by detailed stage,

Their lives, their actions, set out one by one –

All that their souls had ever been or done.”

-Farid Ud-din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

Part One: BIRTH

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Chapter 1. Come See

In the beginning was the song. It had no words, but it sang. Like a chorus, like a symphony, like something that wakes you from a dream with desire and a longing for a place far away that you have never seen but conjures the urge to fly and be something that you cannot yet imagine being. Its refrain was simply this.

“Come see. Come see. Come see.”

My heart beat a rhythm in me that matched the murmur of what I was hearing in the dark. Light and fast, this drum within had been going long before I could hear it, and now it was waking me to what lay beyond it. I stayed still and listened.

There was a quiet whooshing like an ancient whispering below me and above me were more songs. Insistent voices beckoning. A whine that carried straight and looped away until it faded. Small taps as tiny droplets fell from leaves like pages that clapped together as the water and words bid goodbye. A rustling of eight padded feet chasing through the damp of pine straw carpet nearby.

I had no names for any of this then. My mother would teach them to me. But first she would have to be my mother. And I would have to be something other than what I was, this blind heartbeat listening in the dark before dawn.

Soon after the Come See song ended, there was another voice.

“Are they ready?”

“One is. Almost. There has been shaking.”

My parents, speaking to each other. But I did not yet know this. In the beginning there was only the music of sound. Later I learned to transform it into story.

Then from outside my closed eyes came a milky glow, and the song intensified. The leaves clapped harder, and their rainwater danced. One raindrop fell on top of the circle I called my world and reverberated like a flood that threatened with a wet death.

It was then that I realized I was feeling.

I had, in fact, always been feeling. It came with sound and it was the same as listening.

Sound and feeling. These marked the moment of my birth.

Suddenly, the world was too small. I reached up with the only part of me that could move in what had become a trap, a cage, a burden to me. What had been my world was no longer everything, and from this all desire is born. And desire is the first true feeling after fear.

My mother missed it. She told me later she was watching heron glide in with those long and milky wings against the coming orb of light, a fish in his long beak for the little ones who were born in the last week, and she missed my first opening.

It happened almost by accident. As I reached my neck up, something clacked against the surface of my world, and I knew limitation for the first time. Fear, desire, and limitation. These are the first feelings, and then comes action and will. And thinking.

If the surface of my face could come into contact with something, I thought, and if there are songs I can hear but they are not with me here, then perhaps there is another world, and I can move and act and reach to find it.

Again and again, my long tooth hammered against the other world. The light was getting stronger now in the east, the place where the heron flew, where my mother was looking.

I heard my father call to my mother to say that the human woman had filled the feeder and he would be home soon with something for her to eat.

And that is when she looked down and saw me for the first time. She moved closer, to encourage me, to shield the sound of world-cracking from intruders who might come if they knew something new was just now waking to this world.

And then it was dark.

I withdrew.

It was only my father with breakfast, but his entrance blocked the light, and I heard them above me. He was feeding her. There was great crunching, louder than my eyetooth against the shell, as my parents cracked the sunflower seeds with their beaks and the great orb broke through the remnants of clouds from last night’s rain and she said to him, “Look. The first one is coming.”

Heron flew over again, this time headed west, his regal feet held stiff behind him as he nodded congratulations from above.

My parents looked at each other.

“Good job, mama.”

“We’ll see, papa.”

He told her he was going to check on the berries near the pond. After he left, I felt my mother’s desire for me to do this act completely, to move from desiring into willing as I destroyed what held me back and was born into this new world of sound and light and air.

Before long, I realized the role of air. As the chill seeped through the hole I had created, my featherless body shook with cold, and I warmed myself by working faster.

And my mother. I felt her for the first time as I smelled her. She bent down over me, and our beaks touched, just briefly, but it was as if a wave had washed over me. I was no longer cold or scared, and even the desire for action ebbed away as I wanted only one thing in this world or any other: to be near her, to have her for my mother, nothing else, no one else, even hunger was not as strong as what I felt.

And then the first sound I ever heard returned again, my mother’s call, her song, as I heard her beckoning my father by the pond.

“Come see. Come see. Come see. He’s fully here. He’s hungry.”

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Chapter 2. I Saw and Did Not See

I felt it. Soaring. At first, I thought it was part of the great orb. There was a heat to it, a flash that I would later come to know by sight.

But it cast a shadow. I knew this not with my eyes but with my whole body, as I could not yet see.

I smelled it and felt the air around it bend to its will as it dipped and rose, then circled overhead.

I could hear its strong wings as they commanded the sky. From the reverberations it was creating, it was more than five times the size of my father.

Where is my father? I wondered, and just then I heard a chilling cry.

My mother looked down from our nest, toward the pond where she’d last heard him.

And then it was over.

I saw and did not see, so fast it happened, the hawk zooming in like a stone toward the earth, and just before crashing, he shifted, and his wings became a parachute to slow him, and his legs jutted out in front, and the talons clenched upon the soft body of my father, blood already coming from the red underbelly where the hawk grabbed him, and they were off, above us, my father’s body held like a small sunset cloud in the blue sky, dripping blood.

My mother squawked and rose from the nest and chased the hawk, but she was no more than an annoying pest to him.

And then what I heard next was something that would wake me in nightmares ever after.

The hawk let out an enormously shrill and triumphant cry. It sounded like the question I was asking in my heart.

“Why? Why? Why?”

This terrified me more than anything, that in addition to killing my father, he might also know my heart and get inside me, inside my thinking.

My mother followed him past our territory, and as her scent grew fainter, I could sense her hesitation as she ventured into fields far away. She looked back in the direction of our nest, once, twice, and then she turned and landed on the top of the highest loblolly pine with its generous green tufts that were the highest in the canopy.

And she sang a song I wanted never to have heard and hoped never to hear again. And yet I memorized every note.

It was the song of my father’s life. How he was born on a rainy day. How he had learned to be a father from watching his father and helping to protect the four siblings who had been born with him.

My mother sang of the first moment she saw him in a dogwood tree, delicate pink blossoms falling around his bright red young body, in the spring. How he had courted her with constant song and promises that he would be a strong father. How he had made her laugh and blush.

The many nests she had made for him. How he maintained his strength and calm, season after season, nest after nest, egg after egg, and fledgling after fledgling.

“Seventeen,” she sang. “Seventeen nests I made for him. And now I am alone with a baby just hatched and two more on the way. How am I going to raise them on my own? I am all alone.”

And in the nest, I made my first sound as I echoed her.

“All alone.”

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Thank you for reading the first two chapters of The Thing with Feathers.

As you know, the world is undergoing tremendous change — climate change, economic change, political change — as more and more power is being funneled into the hands of fewer and fewer people and corporations.

Because I believe so strongly in the power of creativity and the need for the lessons in hope that this story offers, I’ve decided to release this (never before published!) novel here on a platform that prides itself in giving access to diverse voices.

I will release a new chapter each Friday for your weekend reading pleasure, so if you’d like to follow along, click below to upgrade your subscription.

And thank you!