WE EACH WAIT OUR TURN, knowing it will happen, the only question is when. I try to explain to my son, Mommy might become a bird before you become a bird. He says with hawkish confidence not to worry, that he would keep me as his pet. It’s easy to solve a loss that you haven’t lived through yet. Is the sky now more crowded than the ground? We sit in the grass peeling skins off of oranges, popping them in our mouths like a new tongue. In my lap, his knees, feet, elbows, all of it fits inside my arms like a shopping bag full of doorknobs. He says “flap, flap, flap,” as they fly overhead. When they pass, the shadows they make on the ground are of the people they used to be. I try to recognize the black puddles on the driveway but I don’t. “You’ll know it’s me,” I say, but if his loss caws like mine, he won’t. •





Natalie Warther is an LA-based writer with an MFA from Bennington College. Her story “Ski You Later Langhorns” was a semifinalist in the 2025 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her most recent fiction has been published in Wigleaf, HAD, and Smokelong.

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