ANNOUNCEMENT: Jessica Zelli wins the November WWWC!

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the final WWWC for 2024: Jessica Zelli. Responding to the prompt ‘rolling back the years’, Jessica’s ‘Empty Nest Syndrome’ takes a flight of fancy.

Read Jessica’s winning piece below.

Empty Nest Syndrome

Does the baby bird feel guilty when it abandons its mother in her nest? No, because the mother is already gone. She flies elsewhere. The nest is wholly abandoned, by both. It is left behind. It dries in the summer heat until it falls apart and twigs roll and flutter away in the warm breeze. It is forgotten.

But she doesn’t forget how to fly. She feels no guilt when the baby’s chirps deepen and its trembling wings take to the air. She flies away herself – rapidly, almost as if she couldn’t wait to shake free of this brief, entrapping interlude in her life. She doesn’t necessarily return to the life she had before, rolling back the years; she simply goes.

She is accustomed to exploring. The wider world does not scare her. She is comfortable in her loneliness. She doesn’t need another bird prancing in front of her, colourful feathers spread, birdsong husky and trilling. She is content to admire the beauty of the shaking trees, their skirts dappled in a thousand shades of green. She admires her reflection in rippling pools of water, in the ponds and the lakes. She sees through her reflection, beyond it.

She doesn’t need him to dance for her, or wrap his wings around her, or hold her down by the base of her tail with his ridged, clawed feet. She doesn’t think back on these things with regret; they simply were, as were the pearly eggs that dropped from her, warm and fragile. Back then, the nest was freshly decorated, and it felt like home. Is it still a home, when it lies in pieces in late summer?

She imagines that each of them has taken a piece with them. That the baby, awkwardly taking flight from the ground, clumsily trotting around, tore the home out of the mother. It wrenched their home apart with its soft, uncalloused foot when it tripped free from the nest and brought parts of it to the earth – to the mother’s dismay.

Would she, if it came to it, frantically hold its bursting twigs together, willing for the nest to hold, for at least another summer? No, the baby will take its piece and go on to make its own nest – and she will take the leftovers and thrust herself away from the baby at her side. She will tear that temporary thing to pieces with rage, or grief, or satisfaction.

Perhaps, with each portion, they will remember the nest both mournfully and fondly. Whoever dismantled the nest, and however its ruin came about, it happened for both their freedoms, whether desired or unwanted. She did not die with the nest; she was transformed by it, but like her baby, will now again take flight and is free.

She has the world, its soil, its roots, and its worms. The nest served its purpose. In late summer, however, its warmth is no longer needed.

She belongs everywhere and to no one. She will make another nest when the time comes, if it comes, but for now she looks outward and tastes only the wind, with feathers ruffled, wings askew, eyes bright. She skitters and jumps away, and then is gone.

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