Novel Excerpt

It has occured to me that I haven't shared much (if not any) of my writing on my blog. Considering that I like to feature the various facets of my creative energies, I think my writing should be included. (The same could perhaps be said of my compositions--the few of them that have been performed and recorded, at least, but that's a bit more complicated.) Allow me to reconcile this, and if it's "a hit," I might include more in the future. So, here's a short excerpt from the magic-realism novel I've been writing (well, it's on hiatus at the moment):

Wind shakes the many branches of the forest, and two beady eyes, velvety black, perk at its message—rain, a bit of cold weather. Buckle down, it tells the starling, watch your nest well. And to other ears it might have whispered the same.

Certainly something watches as the little oily bird takes to the air, perhaps to find a berry or a final tuft of grass—observes as the intruder comes to the home of twigs nestled under the eave of a barn, a hen, doe-brown with white on the wings and a butter-yellow belly. A moment’s pause and she flies off, the beats of her wings slow and steady—confident, almost arrogant—as she disappears through the trees.

If the starling notices the hen’s presence, she shows no indication, merely settles, body covering her four eggs—and one extra, this one flecked with brown spots and even slightly larger than her own pale blue eggs.

Unlike other cuckoos, the hen is no killer. She does not, with one nudge of her dark pointed beak, push an egg from the nest before laying her own. She does not crack them and taste of their developing flesh. She merely delivers, takes advantage of the fortune the wind has allowed her. And her nestling does not intentionally harm his adoptive brothers, does not roll their eggs or their frail naked bodies from the nest, and if they die it is because their hunger does not seem as great as his, their need not as immediate. His starling mother flits continuously to and fro, tirelessly—eagerly—to drop insects into his large gaping mouth, her own babies unnoticed.

And something did watch. A boy, it seems. Barely four by the size of him, naked, skin smudged by earth, feet cut, knees bruised and skinned, hair ragged. But his pine-green eyes are worldly, knowing. He will have to work on that, just as he will have to work on behaving like a four-year-old. Details must be perfect. The woman and her husband are not like the starling. It is not enough for the boy to look the same as their son, he must be their son. His habits, his grins.

So he has watched the son—for months, maybe a year. He is not accustomed to their notion of time yet. He has followed them when they moved into the country from a far city, migrating for the season like a pack of animals. He mimicked the memories of each day that passed. Every tumble the son took, he mimicked the bruise, the scrape—practice. Details must be perfect.

He hides behind the bush, concealed by a tangle of branches and leaves. He watches the son as he plays by the barn, climbing and running, and he waits. The mother goes inside to make lunch. The father is gone today—luck. The son is alone, now sitting with his legs dangling from a tire swing.

And it is time.