Farah Naz Rishi at Literary Hub:
A few days after my brother died, I sat in the living room of a dead house and made eye contact with a bird.
It’d been raining that day: the world outside had been coated in a wet, pewter varnish, muted and hollow. My mother and I sat on the couch in a stunned stillness, each cradling a mug of chamomile tea we weren’t really drinking. Everyone who’d come to the funeral had left the night before. Now it was just us, trying to make sense of the quiet.
We were mid-sentence—trivial talk, the kind you resort to when anything real feels too sharp to touch—when a red-tailed hawk cut through the gray and landed on our deck railing. Five feet from us. Close enough that we could see the rain slicking its feathers, the slow expansion of its rib cage as it breathed.
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