Blue herons don’t live anywhere around here. We hardly even have any local bodies of water. Even so, every spring the local warehouse clubs and superstores sell life-sized metal decoys, and every year they sell out. The decoys are supposed to deter real herons from lakes and pools. And graves.
Emily added the part about the graves. She said that if a heron visits your grave, it’s bad luck. Towards the end she made us promise that her headstone would be shaped like a blue heron. She said it would act as a reminder. She never said to whom or of what. It always seemed like something we should have already known.
Now, we each carry blue heron tattoos. People who want to be close to us ask what the tattoos are supposed to mean. We say we don’t talk about that unless they have a heron tattoo of their own.
We found someone to pour a concrete heron to place on her headstone. The only way to keep the legs from crushing under their own weight was to make the heron bigger.
We never could have imagined how many people would come back with the tattoo. Granted, they get them in places that are easy to hide, which just barely counts, but barely is enough, so we tell them.
We tell them that the blue heron tattoo means they will be able to keep other people from giving up. They will be able to keep other people from leaving or changing. They can keep people from going back.
They look disappointed, then they find a reason to leave.
The concrete heron is so big that on clear nights, we can see it from every window in the house, and we know that it can see us, too.
Nathan Willis is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in Split Lip, HAD, hex, matchbook, Swamp Pink, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. He is stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.
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