Spontanéité

The Nest and the Ghost // short story

An exploration of setting and place for a creative writing unit I'm doing in uni; from physical space to subjective experience and social narrative. The Ghost is a summarisation into a single specific detail or symbol.
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There's an electric fence, tall, beige-coloured and rigid, shielding behind it an aged maple tree, one of many lining the quiet cul-de-sac. The concrete floor behind the fence was white once, but it's grey now, darkened by time, much like the house. It's old. There are signs of age wherever you look, from the discoloured tiles on the roof to the flaking walls, the dusty, dull porch with a pile of old furniture to the left. There are couches in that pile, rough and calloused– ugly, really, looking at the patterns.

Regardless of the texture and the careless way the pieces have been lumped on top of each other, there are two children playing on them. Girls, one younger, one older, perhaps seven years old. She's standing, albeit warily, her sister watching. The blinds, grey and nondescript, are hanging closed in the window facing the pile, the children, the street. She stands fully upright now, leans over, reaches up and places her soft palms against the brick column holding the roof up. It's rough, dry on her skin. The colour of Australian red earth.

Not that the girls would know; the younger sister has lived in this house all her life, the other can't remember moving here from the eastern states. It's the only home they've ever known. The elder, still standing, peers over the top of the column, straining for a view of the small, slanted alcove between pillar and roof.

There's a nest.

Small, thatched and crooked pieces of twigs, and seemingly abandoned– She sees a small clutch of eggs. She reaches out, touching the shell of one, slowly, not wanting to crack it, before she makes her way back down to the ugly couches, to her sister, to the dusty ground. She'll tell her mother about it later, pretend she happened to see it sticking out, won't dare mention how she reached it. She'll learn, later, after weeks of waiting for the mother bird to appear, for the chicks to hatch, they never will.

🍃🍂🍁

It's been there years, the maple. Stretched its body up to the sky, standing tall despite the gnarled wood revealing its age. Its arms extend over the concrete grass benevolently, over the fence as well, always reaching out. Every year, with its sibling maples lining the street on both sides, it sheds its colours of gold and warmth, gifting the dull grey with fire of a safely-tangible kind. A blanket to shield from the approaching cold.

It will stand, years after the girls in the house it guards have moved away, and it will remain firm and proud, even after the people in their gleaming metal vehicles and with their electrical axes come to take it away. It will remain, a ghost, once a guardian, of what was and never will be again.