South

by Edelle Dwyer

Gathering on the electricity wires since breakfast. Shuffling, preening, chirping one over another. France, the older ones are saying. Spain, then across.
Across what?
The sea.
Mam nudges closer until our feathers touch.
Disagreement about Spain. Wildfires killed insects last year. Stop in France, an elder three places down insists. He’s done this twice and keeps interrupting. A barn near Bordeaux. Good beams. No cats.
Practising flights over the fields, I lose Mam twice.
Keep up, she says.
I’m trying.
Try harder.
By evening the wire is black with us. The sun drops behind the Galway garage where I was born, under the eaves in a cup of muddy straw and Mam’s feathers.
Who’ll live there while we’re gone?
Nobody, Mam says. We’re coming back.
Roosting together. Chattering till late. At first light, one lifts. We rise. Ireland falls away. Celtic Sea. France. The barn near Bordeaux has vanished into blackened earth. Cattle gone. No flies. We divert. Find beetles and midges by a river. We share. Over the Pyrenees. Spain. Two hundred miles of sky at a go. Tuck up in reedbeds. Fly again.
At the second sea, the wind comes sideways. Mam ahead, smaller in the distance. Flocks tear open.
Mam.
Birds above me. Below me. Behind.
Mam.
We keep going until the sky turns gold around us. Hot Moroccan dust catching underwing. At dusk, we drop into thorny branches trembling with strangers. She’s not here.
Exhausted, eyes open, waiting. They plan tomorrow.
Wind. Water. Food. No stopping. The desert ahead. They count the lost. The dead.
Mam.
I call until my throat hurts.
Mam.
Somewhere in all that noise—
Keep up.
I push through a thousand wings.
I am, I tell her. I am.

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