Nesting by Cathal Ó Dubhlaing (Runner-up)

The nest appeared overnight. One spring morning the family awoke to find a small cone glued to the eave above the garage door. The boy stood half-dressed at the foot of a rickety stepladder and rubbed sleep from his eyes whilst his father pressed his ear to the caked mud. The morning sun spilled in thin and elongated shadows across the cobbled yard and the sky was a cold blue like the crust of an iceberg. His father called down and declared it to be the work of a blue tit. The boy yawned and wondered how such a pretty bird could have such an ugly house. His father climbed down and patted his head.

‘Don’t touch it till I get back.’

‘I won’t,’ said the boy.

After school he dumped his bag upstairs, changed and bounded outside. The garage and the house faced one another and were connected on either side by low stone walls, forming the yard. He rolled a dog-eared football out from beneath his sister’s luminous plastic truck and kicked it against the garage. Its walls were whitewashed and prickled and black plastic drainpipes ran along its crevices, shimmering in the dying sun. The door rattled and a thunderclap rang out. His mother opened the kitchen window.

‘How many times, not the garage door.’

He gave an apologetic wave, then kicked it towards the lower wall that looked out onto the distant fields where horses grazed in their sun-speckled coats. The ball hit the chalky stone with a pathetic harrumph and squelched onto the ground. He pressed a heel into the peeling leather and a whistle of air escaped. He picked the deflated thing up and flung it over the wall in frustration. The boy went and sat on an upturned bucket and stared up at the nest. The harsh shadows of the young sun were gone and in the soft orange wash he saw wisps of twig and stone and green moss woven through the dried dirt. He sighed and stood up.

The trucks rusted wheels squawked and fought him the whole way over until he finally wrestled it flat against the garage wall and clambered onto the hollow plastic roof. It popped beneath him and he placed his hands against the wall for balance, raised up onto his toes and stilled his breath to listen. The hum of a lawnmower. Distant neighing. Wings smacking the bitter air. He swivelled his left ear like a satellite dish to lie directly beneath the nest, stuffed a finger in his right and waited. Still, nothing but the outside world leaking past his finger like seashell resonance. A scrape on the concrete.

‘Get down from there before you fall.’
His mother was standing underneath, spatula in hand. ‘I won’t fall,’ he said.
‘Down. Now.’

He grunted in annoyance and jumped, his shin-bones chattering excitedly. ‘Mam, are there birds up there?’
‘Up where, the nest?,’ she frowned. ‘Not during the day no.’
‘So they’re only there at night?’

‘Yes, they’re out getting food for the chicks now.’
‘So the babies are up there? I couldn’t hear them.’
‘They might not be hatched yet, or they could be asleep.’
‘During the day?’
‘Well how would they know that it’s daytime, it’s always dark in there. Come set the table.’

He ate next to his sister and thought only of the nest. The front door opened and his father appeared carrying a briefcase. He leaned down and kissed his mother’s cheek. She pulled away and a strange expression came over her as though she were suddenly ill.

‘You’re late.’

‘Sorry, work was hectic,’ his father said, walking over and planting two meaty hands on the boy’s shoulders. ‘Heard you were messing with that nest.’

The boy wriggled free of his grasp.

‘I was only looking.’

‘Remember what I said? Nests are more fragile than they look.’

His father sat down and dug into his own dinner. An uneasy silence fell over the table. The boy noticed neither parent had looked at one another.

‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are there chicks up there?’
His father peered over his shoulder towards the open window. ‘Bit early in the year. It’s just eggs up there at the moment.’ ‘But they’ll turn into chicks won’t they, when they hatch?’ ‘Yes, when they hatch.’
‘So what do the mam and dad do till then?’
‘They wait around I suppose. Make sure the eggs stay safe.’ ‘So they’re not there when the eggs hatch?’

His father’s fork clinked against the rim of his plate.
‘It depends. They might miss some yeah.’
The boy frowned.
‘But what if one of the eggs hatch really early. The baby might get lonely.’ ‘It might,’ his father said, glancing at his mother.

‘So the baby might think he’s going to be alone forever?’

‘Stop talking about birds,’ said his sister, pulling a pork string out from her teeth.

That night he dreamt that the nest was in the corner of his room. From inside came the frantic scratching of talons and the nest shook and shed dirt onto the carpet. He awoke with his heart pounding and saw only bare wallpaper. He rose and stuck his head through the curtains. A soft blue fog hung over the yard and it was difficult to make out the dark clump above the garage door. He opened the window a crack and a cold breath slunk inside. The boy perched on the sill and pressed his cheek against the glass and stared out into the vaporous gloom until his lids grew heavy.

In school they were doing geography. He flipped through his book to the page on Irish wildlife and traced his finger down the list of birds until he arrived at the blue tit. A plump little thing with a stubby beak like the nib of his pencil and an enormous yellow stomach that dwarfed the rest of its blue and black body. The boy took out a sheet of brown tracing paper and flattened it against the page. Tongue in his teeth, he traced a crude outline of the bird and coloured it in with crayon, then folded the sheet up and slipped it into his pocket.

‘What’s that?,’ his father asked through the rear-view. ‘Blue tit,’ said the boy.
‘Still thinking about it huh?’
‘Can we check it after dinner?’

‘Check for what?’
‘If the birds are back.’ ‘I’ll see.’

They excused themselves from the table, leaving their grease-strewn plates for the girls to clean and walked out to where the setting sun was split by the garage roof like a spilled yolk. His father stood beneath the nest with his hands tucked into the wide squares of his rear pockets and his eyes screwed in concentration. The boy stared at the jut of his Adam’s apple jostling beneath a layer of red stubble. He touched a hand to his own throat and felt soft and flattened skin. The clink of crockery came wafting through the open window. His father climbed the ladder again and tapped the underside of the nest. An echoing knock like the clop of a hoof. He shook his head and climbed down and began folding the ladder up.

‘Anything?,’ the boy asked.
His father smiled.
‘No, not for the moment.’
‘Maybe we need to wait till night.’ He tousled the boy’s hair.

‘We need to be in bed not birdwatching alright. It’s a school night I don’t want you losing sleep. Just leave it for now.’

He waited until the house was silent before rising and throwing on his dressing gown. The boy eased the bedroom door open and slipped out into the shadowed hallway and down into the kitchen where a sliver of blue moonlight stained the linoleum. The window to the yard opened with a terrible squeal. He froze with one hand on the pane and a foot dangling out in the cool night air. When he’d counted to a hundred and only the gurgling pipes upstairs had spoken, he relaxed and followed his leg out into the twilit yard.

Slippers scuffing off the wet rocks he crossed the yard and stopped at the door to peer up at the black mass of the nest with the gutter above and the endless winking dark stretching on and on. He stuffed his hands into the gowns pockets and willed himself into total stillness – of a kind that would render him as conspicuous as the toy truck at his feet. He stood statuesque beneath the door, his eyes flicking in their sockets across the tenebrous yard, taking slow and muted breaths through his nose.

A small eternity passed. Finally, a figure perched itself upon the lower of the stone walls. It hopped from side-to-side on twigged legs before cocking its beak to take in the purple swelling mass above. He held his breath. The bird turned to the garage and leaped. It flew directly towards the cobbled ground and then lifted its head and shot upward in a sharp swoop until it was almost vertical, then disappeared into the nest. Floating down came a chorus of high- pitched squawking. The boy ran back inside, breath catching at the back of his throat.

He slept deeply and dreamed of the nest again. From deep within the caked earth came a voice, echoing as though from down a well.

‘Your shoes are broken,’ the voice said.

When he woke the curtains were drawn and the room filled with blinding light. His father was stood at the open door with red fury in his eyes. Along the carpet was a set of muddy slipper prints leading out into the hall.

They sat opposite one another. His father had his palms flat against the wooden tabletop and between them was the tracing of the blue tit. No one spoke. The boy gripped the leg of the table to still his shaking hands. His father looked at the sheet, ‘What did I tell you?’ The boy said nothing.

‘Well?’

‘To leave the nest.’

‘So you do remember.’

‘I didn’t touch it’.

‘That’s not the point, and you know it.’

‘Sorry.’

His father ignored him. He picked up the sheet and tore it in half, cracking the bird down the middle.

‘I don’t want to hear about that stupid nest anymore.’ ‘David!,’ came his mother’s voice from the doorway.

She stepped into the kitchen, her small pink mouth trembling and her eyes narrowed. His father visibly paled and stood up.

‘Go to your room,’ he told the boy. ‘Your mother and I need to talk.’

He sat on his bed and listened to the screams from downstairs. Outside the sun was falling in thick sheets onto glistening stone. He stood up and walked over to the window. A loud bang, a cabinet being slammed followed by his mother shrieking. He placed a hand on the glass and closed his eyes. The hiss of his father’s voice, full of venom. The boy turned and slipped quietly downstairs where the open backdoor waited like an uninvited guest.

The garage door creaked open. He poked his head inside and was hit with a wave of warm, stale air. Most of the concrete flooring was hidden by bags of coal and turf, draped over one another like mountains of bulging pillowcases. An old sheet draped over a pair of rusted bicycles, grey dust collecting in the folds where the spokes and handles protruded. He looked back at the house and saw his father slam on the table with the energy of a righteous pastor and his mother’s arms folded so tightly around her waist that she seemed without any. He stepped inside.

At the back wall was an old set of plywood drawers, beneath a yellowed and cob-webbed window, through which the weak midmorning light passed and fell in strange dappled patterns onto the dusted wood where a red oil canister lay in a dark circle of it own dried excrement next to the remnants of a dropped mug. All but one of the drawers had been removed and he grabbed its handle and pulled. His father’s blue toolbox sat in the centre. It opened without a word and he peered inside and saw the striped black-yellow handle of a screwdriver. He picked the tool up and examined it; a thick steel shaft converging into a sharpened drive tip that caught the yellow light along its edges.

In the corner of the yard were a pile of blocks – spares from when the house had been built. He put the screwdriver between his teeth and began hauling them over one by one to the door. The blocks made a sharp teething sound as he dragged them, their scraggy edges clawing into his palms. He piled them two abreast until he had a tower four blocks high, tall enough to tap the screwdriver against the base of the nest. He looked out over the yard and saw the toy truck lying beside the back door.

He placed the truck atop the tower and leaned it against the garage door, leaving enough space for him to vault up onto the roof. It popped anxiously beneath his weight. He grasped the drainpipe and craned his neck so that he came eye-level with the nest. An earthy scent surrounded him and he plucked the screwdriver from his mouth and held it against his heart as though swearing an oath. The truck swayed and his ankles rolled with it. Birdsong rang overhead and he shivered at the thought of being caught, by human or animal.

He drove the tip in. Dry mud spat out along with a pebble that bounced off the truck roof to an empty pat. The plastic drain squeaked in his grasp, feet planted onto the bulging roof, his forearm twisting back and forth. Flakes of debris fell and tickled his fingers and the driver gave a chafing screech at each turn of his wrist. He swung his head back to check for a flutter of wings or the scrape of a heel. The sky and the yard empty reflections of one another. He switched and let his aching hand lay limp against his hip whilst the screwdriver poked and poked.

The screwdriver broke through and a penny-sized hole opened up in the middle of the nest like a dark and cyclopic eye. He balanced a palm against the wall and pressed his face against the mud, closing his free eye and peering in. Brambles scratched at his nose and cheeks and a sultry gust of trapped air streamed onto his cornea and he had to wipe the tears away with his sleeve in order to see. Through the murkiness thin shards of sun poked through like spotlights onto a pile of small blue eggs. The floor of the nest was curved like a saucer and black as though burnt and lying in its centre just beside the eggs were two featherless infants, pink and raw with milk- white dots for eyes. His heart leaped and he jammed his eye further inward. One of the chicks cocked its wet neck towards him and shrunk behind the cracked remnants of its own egg. The boy smiled.

Unbeknownst to him, each thrust of the screwdriver had inched the truck closer towards the pile’s edge. By the time he felt the roof give way he could only look down and see it slip beneath like a rushing river. He lost balance and fell. The wind whistling in his ears. He collapsed knee first and lay splayed out on the cobbles with his hands held out before him torn and bloodied. Distant ringing all around him. A large gash over his knee, the skin pulled back to reveal a bright square of red flesh and the pale bone beneath. The air had been knocked from his lungs and he lay flat on his back panting up at a wisp of cloud rolling past in absolute indifference.

He rose amid hacking sobs that left him doubled up and clutching at his chest. The kitchen was silent. He limped over to the truck and hunched over its shattered ruins. The roof had split clean in two and lay atop a hill of fractured plastic, the wheels poking out like the stiffened legs of a corpse. The boy rubbed his bloody knees and looked up at the nest, a singular eye staring back. Hot rage built inside him. He picked up one of the wheels and kicked it against the door where it shattered into a rain of black plasticine. His eyes scanned the yard and stopped at the flattened football. His bottom lip trembled as he picked it up, terrible fantasies unfurling in his mind. He rolled the ball between his tender palms and ground his teeth. The nest; so smug and unreachable. He threw the ball up and kicked it skyward.

The ball sailed in a direct line up and up towards the corner of the garage door. He watched it sail as though in slow motion, his mouth agape, and in that microsecond realized that the nest had not been the cause of his anger, nor the toy truck for collapsing, but something unnameable which had receded back down his throat having realized its hand had been overplayed. This was, however, too late. The nest exploded on impact. Mud rained down like volcanic ash and coated him in sour-smelling powder. Three flashes of pink. He wiped his eyes and saw what he’d done.

They lay in pieces, like something from a warzone. A green ooze climbed up out of the shells and sat jellied in the open air. Mud and stone and twig splattered across the cobbles. The babies were dead. Bloodless and still – staring blindly at the morning sun. None bigger than his thumb. The boy crouched over them in silent grief until his father came and carried him inside.