Little Bird

Chapter One

My laces trail in the mud as we walk: three plastic grocery bags in one hand, two more and Rosie’s pink-mittened hand in the other. The November wind brushes my chestnut hair away from my face and creeps down the collar of my jacket. I glance down at Rosie, her wispy blonde hair escaping from its French braid and twirling in the wind, a plastic doll wrapped in a blue baby blanket tucked under her right arm. The heels of her yellow rubber boots are slipping off her feet as she steps and dragging little ditches in the gravel. She pulls on my arm slightly, and stomps hard in a murky puddle. The brown water splashes up and spots her jeans and jacket with tiny, brackish polka-dots.

The road is quiet and lined with trees and over grown bushes, the limbs of the trees winding together, reaching out and knotting, dead branches being held up by healthy branches, growing in and on each other, like a family. In the summer this family is green and brown and thick and humid, but now it’s barely more than alive. The trunks of the trees look cold to the touch, grey and naked. Some are rough and crinkled, others are papery, but mostly they’re smooth like a stone. Only a few leaves are hanging on, clinging by their stems to the limbs of the trees, brownish-yellow and trembling in the wind. One lets go and dances to the ground, floating on the wind. I reach out and catch it in the palm of my red mitten.

“Gotcha,” I say quietly. I hold it closer to my face. It’s a birch leaf coloured yellow and browning on one side. “Hey little fella.”

Rosie looks up at me, her blue eyes wet with wind-made tears. I show her the leaf and she lets go of my hand to take it.

“I caught it in mid air,” I say, “So that means you can make a wish on it.”

“Why?” she asks.

“I don’t know. That’s just the way it is.”

She looks up at me, then back at the leaf. She holds it close to her face, stops walking, squints her eyes closed and whispers to the leaf. Then she lets go of it. It tumbles across the ground, then the wind lifts it into the air where it twirls and dips, and gets lost in the thick wall made of the trees that line the road.

She takes my hand again and we keep walking.

“What did you wish for?” I ask.

“I can’t tell you! If I tell you it won’t come true!” she exclaims.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. It’s just how it is.”

“Will you tell me when it does come true?”

“If I remember,” she says.

“Okay."

We arrive at the end of our long, dirt driveway. Rosie spots Penny and Gabriel jumping on the old trampoline at the side of the yard. She calls to them and races up the driveway to join them, her boots kicking up bits of wet dirt behind her as she runs.

Our driveway is pretty long and sloped upwards, the entrance nearly hidden by trees and bushes. It leads up to our house, a small, rundown thing with a porch along the front. It is completely covered in light blue siding that is fading and dirty. The few windows have fading off-white curtains tinted grey with age and life. An oak tree sits sleepily in our front yard, a tire swing hanging from one of its strong branches. Wooden planks have been nailed into its trunk and lead up to a tree house balanced precariously within its branches and nearly falling apart. A red tea towel is hanging from the side of the tree house, flapping in the wind as a sort of flag.

Penny runs past me, her coat undone, and scampers up the tree to the tree house. “Quick!” she shouts. “The pirates are coming!”

Rosie comes running towards the tree house as quick as her tiny legs can carry her, and Gabriel speeds past her, knocking her off her feet.