The Nest

I wrote a short story a few days ago and made some drawings to go with it. Also, I just made a new title banner and background using pictures from Santa Lucia! Enjoy.

It sees everything. From its solitary vigil suspended above the dusty road, clutching to an electric line headed to the mountains and oblivion, the nest observes the bustling of humanity below.

It sees the men chopping down trees for firewood and carrying the logs back to the houses on horseback. It sees the women washing clothes in the river that winds its way through the valley below. It sees the shoeless children playing baseball in the street with a stick and a ball made of sewed-up scraps of cloth.

It looks like a drop of water on a clothesline, this lonely nest, distended, ready to drip. But it won’t. Made of scraps of reeds and straw woven together by peculiar birds called oropéndola, it hangs golden through the wind and the rain, watching.

This particular forgotten corner of earth over which the nest keeps its watch has been changing. The trees are less and less. They are disappearing, slowly consumed by fire. Fire that cooks, fire that clears fields, fire that claims the forest for the people. There used to be monkeys howling in the valley but now the only howl is the wind and the flames. Every time the rains come there are more corrugated zinc roofs roaring back in opposition to the pounding water.

But the nest has nothing to say—an unwavering observer, it just is. It has no voice, no opinion, no counsel.

~

One day a little girl who lived along the road that winds under the electric line came with her mother to sit and wait for the bus to pass by and take them to the city. The day was bright and new but the girl was in a foul mood, angry with her mother for dragging her along.

She sat down huffily on a stone and stared at her bare toes wiggling in her sandals, her elbows on her knees and her hands supporting the weight of her heavy head. An ant made its way towards her, navigating terrain that must have felt like an expansive desert, carrying a giant Ranchitas crumb on its untiring insect shoulders. Ants have it easy, she thought, they don’t have to take a bus into town. But she felt glad that the chip wouldn’t go to waste.

Floating down from the mountains came the bleat of the approaching bus. Several birds squawked in reply. The girl lifted her gaze from the world of ants and watched as the birds took flight, their black and yellow plumage flashing in the morning light. Following the trajectory of one of the birds, her eyes fell upon the golden honey-drop form of the nest, still and pendent on the electric line.

In that moment a thought seized her—or maybe it was more just a wordless feeling—she kept her eyes gazing upward. The great contradiction of the nest filled her up.

She saw it then as nature’s sentinel, gazing down untiringly upon the human world. She knew that it saw her petty anger and she felt ashamed.

But wasn’t the nest dependent on humanity as well?

It was anchored to a manmade trellis after all, an electric line surging with the energy that drives insatiable human consumption. But only for a lack of trees was the nest want to clutch to a cable suspended over a road.

The bus pulled up, interrupting her reverie. Her mother called to her brusquely and she climbed aboard. In her seat squashed against the window, she craned her neck and watched the nest as the bus pulled away.

The nest, hanging as always, watched back.