Debut Flash: 'Emptied Nests' by Sue Dewey

She stands in a swirl of calf skin luggage in the doorway across from the dilapidated Ford Fiesta. There is an empty bird’s nest on the bonnet, possibly a Pigeon’s. Perhaps it’s bound together with some of the carpet fluff, maybe it’s entwined with wayward tendrils of her hair and her Father’s, with tiny pickings left over from a former life.

Maybe.

All that remains now is the small act of returning the keys through the letter box. But it is not small this time. Let me go they call from the hallway as she, outside, holds them suspended inside, and in the filtering moment between freeing them and the floor exploding, she is all regret. If she’s left a window open, she’ll crawl back in. Retrieve her keys and open the door to a home with her father still in it. This time she’d be there for him. Nurse and care and be there for him. This time she’ll open the door and make it better.

Instead, she turns away, cracks open the VW boot, feeds in her luggage until it overflows onto the back seat and still, she isn’t sated.

She takes the nest with its cosy fluff and its fragments of shell and settles it into the VW’s passenger well. Tucks it in as carefully as if it were still intact, still containing a living thing, precious, screened from the unknown, still protected from the world.

At the end, they told her, it had been peaceful. He had floated through the downy pillows and opened his mouth (pain free) to the unfollowed breath. And, just like that, he was gone.

But how can I know? Without being there, how can I know?