Kelley Citrin

The next day, as Arkar once again crossed the soccer field, he was gripping the little white ribbon, dirtied from his failed attempts. He’d spent the entire school day forming a new plan, ignoring his teachers to draw diagrams of the shack, and dream up wilder and more elaborate traps. He felt a bit silly for it all.

He’d only just reached the threshold to the woods when a voice cut through the air behind him.

“Arkar!”

He froze. It was Chloe Bennett, and she did not belong here.

She was jogging after him, her bright blue hoodie looked like a bit of glitter blown across the muddy field.

“I was hoping I’d see you,” she called out, not even a little out of breath. “Did it work?”

His thoughts scattered. He could only see her expectant face. “No. I couldn’t get close enough.  They’re too fast.  Or I’m too slow. Or loud.”

Her smile didn’t fall, it changed. “You got close enough to try, though?”

“Sort of. I think they recognize me now. Like, in a bad way.” Arkar admitted.

“You want help?”

Arkar blinked. “With what?”

“Catching the bird. Or, I don’t know, tying the ribbon. Whatever the hard part is.”

“Now?” Arkar said.

“Yea. I have nothing going on.” She shrugged. “Unless it takes forever.”

“It might,” he said.

“Honestly? Probably fine either way.” This girl was not easily dissuaded. His grandfather would have liked her.

Arkar hesitated. “It’s a small hole.” He was suddenly aware that he was the smaller of the two of them. “Sorry if it’s uncomfortable.”

She took one look at the opening, then passed her backpack through first and slid after it, elbows and knees finding the gaps. “Our house has a window that only opens if you, like, dislocate your whole arm. This is fine.”

Arkar smiled, just for a second, then ducked through himself, scraping his knuckle on the way out. They were on the other side now, at the margin where the mown grass gave way to a chaos of seedling maples. A switchbacked gully, dry this time of year, ran behind the fence. Beyond that, the woods thickened fast.

The dew from the afternoon soaked through their sneakers in the first ten steps. Chloe didn’t complain about the wet, or the burrs that stuck to the cuffs of her jeans, or the cold that crept up from the shadowed ground.

He watched Chloe orient herself. She squinted at the sky, then at the ground, then somewhere far-off. Then a smile broke across her face, wide and unreserved, and she started talking, a torrent of happy observations.

“Look at the color of that moss! It’s like, neon green. Do you always go this way?  It feels like we’re the first people to ever walk here.”

 Arkar had only ever known this place in the language of quiet footsteps and the rustle of unseen things. Chloe filled it with a completely new sound. Her light and running titter, like a Carolina Wren, was transforming a place he knew so well. And the surprising thing, the thing he filed away to examine later, was that he didn’t mind the noise at all. In fact, he tried his best to always find something else to share, to keep her talking.

“Yeah, I always walk here. I see so many deer back here, all year long.”

Arkar had always liked how the sounds got softer as you went deeper. After a hundred steps, the noise of the school dissolved behind them.He tried to see the place as Chloe might. The woods weren’t as dramatic as the ones in books or movies: no cliffs, no waterfalls, just a steady up-and-down of glacial land, the kind of place where water always bound the lowest point. There were places where the sun almost reached, and other places, especially along the north sides of the big rocks, where a skin of winter never seemed to leave.

The sugar shack appeared as it always did from this direction: first as a shadow against the green, then as a patchwork of unpainted wood.

“Is this it?” Chloe asked, stepping over the threshold. She brushed aside a spiderweb without flinching.

Arkar nodded. “This is where they nest.”

He waited for Chloe to laugh, or call it a dump, or say it wasn’t what she’d expected. She did none of those things. Instead, she ducked inside and let her eyes adjust to the  light. On the far rafter, she spotted a little pocket of moss and grass clung to the wood.

She pointed. “There.”

Arkar followed her finger. The phoebe sat almost motionless, a little more cautious than usual but not yet spooked. 

Chloe whispered, “She’s watching us.”

“I know,” Arkar said, almost laughing.

“How do you even get close enough?”

Arkar gestured towards the corner, where a wobbly tower of old wooden chairs was stacked precariously. “That’s what I used yesterday.”

“You climb that?”

“It’s the only thing tall enough,” he said, a defensive edge to his voice. “I’m going to try again today.”

“Okay,” she said softly, walking a little closer to it. “Will you… tell me the plan?”

A bit of his confidence returned. “Sure. It’s simple. I get onto the seat of the first chair here,” he placed a foot on it, and the old wood groaned. “Then I pull myself onto the back of it to get to the next one. From the top, I can reach the beam.” The whole stack swayed slightly as he spoke. Above, in the rafters, one of the phoebes chirped a note of alarm.

“It moves a little,” Chloe said.

“You just have to balance against it,” he said, stepping down. “The tricky part is when you have to lean out to get to the nest.”

“And you can reach it from there?” she asked, genuinely trying to visualize the physics of it. “What do you hold onto for balance?”

“Well,” he hesitated, “you brace with one hand against the back of the top chair.”

Chloe looked from the teetering stack of furniture to the nest, then back to him. “Is that… is that the part where it went wrong yesterday?”

The direct, yet gentle, question caught him off guard. His shoulders slumped. “Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “When I shifted my weight, the whole thing started to tip.”

He braced for her to say something mean, but she never did. Instead, her attention drifted up to the birds, who were watching their every move.

“They’re beautiful,” she whispered. “But they seem so nervous.” She looked around the dusty space. “Do you think they’re just how scared they are of us being near their babies?”

Arkar blinked. “I… I mean that’s probably part of it.”

“Because,” she continued, “what if we didn’t have to go up there at all? What if we could get them to come down? Do you think they’d come down for food?”

Arkar considered it. “I don’t know. They’re wild birds, not pigeons. I’ve never seen them take anything like that.”

“Well, my mom makes me carry emergency snacks,” she said, pulling out a ziplock bag of sunflower seeds. “Guess this counts as an emergency.”

She spread them on a high table and waited. After a few minutes, the female phoebe dropped from the beam. She picked up a seed, cracked it, and then her mate joined her.

“Okay,” Chloe breathed. “Let’s go slow.”

They scooted across the floor. A foot. Then another. The birds watched them, wary but tempted by the food. They got closer, the soft scrape of their jeans on the wood the only sound besides the crackle of seeds.

They were within arm’s length. Arkar’s heart pounded. He held the small white ribbon between his fingers, ready. Slowly, deliberately, he began to extend his hand toward the female.

The bird’s head shot up. In an explosion of wings, both phoebes were gone, back on the safety of the high beam, chirping in alarm. His hand fell, the ribbon looking limp and useless in his palm.

“Wait,” Chloe whispered, her eyes still fixed on the rafters. “Arkar, look. Her right leg.”

He looked up, annoyed at first, but his gaze followed hers. The female had settled, and her right leg was clearly visible. A thin, pale line, no bigger than a pine needle, stood out against the delicate scales of the bird’s leg.

Chloe was beaming. “Better than a ribbon, right? It won’t fall off.” Arkar laughed, the tension finally breaking. “Yeah. Way better.”

How foolish he had been, to think the world needed his invention. All it asked was his attention. All it asked was for him to be quiet, and to see.