Mother Sparrow by Ayshe Dengtash

    She rested her back against the tree’s coarse bark, her breath a ragged rumble in her throat. It had been hours since she’d lost her mother.
A sparrow flew low past her ear, its wing flicking the curve of her lobe. Had it whispered in her ear? A passing breeze of sounds, a hum, a screech, a calling. And then she heard it again, coming from somewhere above her and she glanced up into the thick branches of the olive tree, and amongst the glistening black olives oozing with oil, she saw the sparrow, a mangled moth clasped in its beak. It looked down at the shrieking thing sitting in the cluster of hay and sticks. Crumbs of moth-wing swayed down, caught in between the tiniest beak. The shrieking stopped and the landscape was granted some silence. Mum, she thought, gazing out eager to spot a sign of her mother who she’d long-lost. “Mum,” she whispered, scared to disturb Mother Sparrow and Baby Sparrow. She recalled her mum dropping pearls of pink pomegranate into her mouth, promising health and pupils the color of the fruit. “Don’t chew too much,” her mother would tell her, “the seeds will turn a wooden pulp in your mouth. Just swallow.” A train rumbled past somewhere in the distance, its horn a deafening blare in her ears. But she knew there were no trains in this country that she lived in, just cars covered in thick layers of dust and seats too hot to sit on. The sun burned here, its rays searing at flesh.
She could feel it beating at her temple, and she glided her sleeve across it, wiping away the sweat. Why has mum left me like this? she thought to herself, looking up at the spot they’d been standing at together only about half an hour ago.
    They’d been gazing at the purple wildflowers she’d bent down to pick, visualizing them in the China vase she’d painted herself. She’d cut a few and she now clutched at them, their stems oozing a green liquid like a burst pen within her palm. Where had she gone? How had she disappeared so quick? She gazed up into the tree again, at the Sparrow’s home made of twigs and leaves, dry and brittle. She imagined her own home—where was it? How far away?— with its fragile exterior of mud and white stone blocks extracted from a set of hills they’d once found a cave in from 3000 years ago. “That’s how old our village is, how deep its history goes,” her mother had said. She looked around to see if her mother was somewhere nearby, in the spot she’d left her, but there were only the purple wildflowers swaying in the wind. She remembered the brown shutters of her home, peeling off paint which stabbed at her hands when her mother summoned her to open them on those hot summer days when there was no breeze at all, when nothing ever shook. She had never understood why her mother had asked her to open them. Mother Sparrow chirped above her, a wail like something had died, a death call.
    When she glanced up she saw its yellow beak wide open, a tiny pathetic tongue protruding from within. She held onto one of the branches and pulled herself up, the wood piercing at her hand like the paint on her mother’s shutters. She glared into the nest, wanting to see death, a reason for this pained cry. Mother Sparrow closed its beak, locked eyes with her, and flapped its wings, covering its pink baby which screamed for more moth-crumb. It managed to make its hairless head visible, and she saw veins, thin, purple, meandering, like those under her mother’s pearl-white skin, so thin that she bruised even with a tiny tap. Through the branches she saw a whole village in the distance; small, cubed houses placed on a hill opposite to the one she was standing on. Looking over the tree’s thick dark-green leaves she wondered what lay between the two hills and she jumped down, raising a cloud of soil as her foot pressed into the ground. She waded through the field before her, crushing red and purple and orange wildflowers under her soles. The sun had started lowering before her and she recalled her mother telling her not to stare directly at a setting sun, that it would do something to her pupils. She looked at it. Its rays obscured her vision into a giant black circle that kept
growing, but she still walked, hearing insects buzzing in her ears. And when the circle disappeared from within her eyes she noticed she was near the edge of the hill, the village so close, but so far with the empty space between them.
    A street separated the village into two and donkeys trotted both ways burdened by the weight of plump men with skin as thick as leather. A faded green cloth hanging from the branch of the tree she walked under flapped across her temple, obscuring her vision. She pushed it away with the back of her hand. Something hard swiped across her palm and she looked up to see that it was Mother Sparrow flying low over her head, a torn beetle, comprised of just limbs and torso, clenched between its sharp beak. Does it have babies elsewhere? she thought, feeling the sparrow’s wind on her crown. She thought of her sister, only three-months old, her eyes wide open as her mother, supporting her tiny back with the inside of her pale-white forearm, let her sink sink sink under the lukewarm bath water, her eyes wide open under the rainbow- tinted bubbles, her plump-red lips gurgling nonsense. “Mum?” she’d called out to her. “I think you’re drowning the baby.” And then her mother had breathed and gasped loudly as if she had woken from a deep sleep. She’d lifted the baby up and out, as it spat out soapy water. “Give me the towel,” her mother had summoned. She’d given the towel to her mother, and her mother had wrapped it around her sister’s wet soft flesh, dotted with goosebumps. She had watched her mother as she hugged her sister and decided that she’d imagined everything in her own gruesome mind.
    Tweet, tweet. The sparrow flew past her, brushing the top of her head. She itched the small of her back and walked, allowing the bird to guide her.
    A cold breeze blew from the west and Mother Sparrow swayed left, then flapped its tiny wings, and positioned itself dead-centre to her. She thought about Baby Sparrow laying under the heaps of branches which Mother Sparrow had laid out for it, like her own mother who tucked her in at night once upon a time, maybe five years ago when she was still a child. “Good night,” she’d say, kissing the warm flesh on her forehead with her cold lips. She wouldn’t say good night back but would smile and watch her mother walk away, gently pressing the switch to submerge her world in darkness before she closed the door behind her. Loneliness settled in quite quickly then; it was only her and her breathing. Mother Sparrow stopped; hovered in mid-air and then ducked down and was gone. She noticed she was at the edge of the hill now. Music reverberated from the distance, a jingle of an ice-cream van. Her mother never liked her buying ice-cream from vans. She remembered brutally tugging at her mother’s jacket. “Please mum. Just one.” Her mother would tell her stories about seeping snot and filthy fingernails. She always watched as children her age, bit into brittle Flake bars submerged into creamy Mr. Whippies, chocolate shavings speckling their wet lips. She stood at the edge of the hill and looked down. “Mother Sparrow,” she called out. “Mother Sparrow. Your baby will be waiting. Like me.” And then down down down, several feet below, there was something, a pale form, fur, hair, something embedded into the red soil, amongst the boulders, something small or big. She couldn’t tell from here. She found herself peering down, unable to take her eyes off this thing. Was it moving? She took a few more steps forwards, and extended her neck further down to where the sparrow had flown.
    It was then that she saw her mother’s blonde hair, swaying across the dry earth, dirty with soil. She was laying on her side, like she did when she was sleeping. Her pale cheek blemished with crimson blood. Mum, she wanted to call, but nothing came out. Was she dead? Her surroundings were submerged in silence. The ice-cream van’s jingle had stopped, and she heard Mother Sparrow fly out from a crevice in the edge of the hill, tweeting, making its way to Baby Sparrow, its beak full of a shiny, slithering worm. “Mum,” she shouted, her voice echoing inside the large expanse of emptiness below her. She was sure that the hillsides had absorbed her voice, that this was why her mother lay there still, not responding.