Year's Best SF 17

Kaylee pictures KY 44 as it looked before the tornado, two lanes, no shoulders, a steep wooded bluff on one side and Indian Creek on the other, with another wooded bluff across the creek. The road follows the creek. If all the trees on both sides of the valley went down the whole way to town, like they did here, she can’t imagine how they’ll ever get the road open again. Worst of all in a way, her wonderful new SmartBerry, her Christmas and birthday presents combined, that keeps her continually connected her to everything that matters, is useless. She’s worried to death about her family and friends, and there’s no way to find out if they’re okay. From being in constant touch with everybody, suddenly she’s out of touch with everybody! It makes her feel lonely and frantic, and furious with Jane, because of whom she’s stranded in this war zone. “How can you stand living out here all by yourself?” she yells. “Something like this happens and you’re stuck, you’re just stuck!” When Jane reaches toward her she jerks away and takes off running, crying hard, down the mowed path to the garden where things still look almost normal, away from the wrecked house and jagged devastation in the other direction.

She’d changed out of her sneakers into flip-flops after visiting the nests. Running in flip-flops on a path grown up thick in clover and scattered with broken branches doesn’t work, so she’s walking and crying when she gets to the path box, which is down on its side, metal post bent and half uprooted. It’s empty, the baby bluebirds fledged over the weekend, thank goodness. The box in the garden has been knocked over too—but that one’s not empty, Kaylee remembers now, there were six new hatchlings in that one this morning. She shakes off the flip-flops and runs to the gate, left open in Jane’s haste. The latch on the box popped open when it hit the ground; the nest has fallen out, scattering tiny pink bodies and loose feathers on the grass. Quick as she can, Kaylee stands the nest box up and steps on the base with her bare foot, to jam it back into the ground. She picks up the nest, built entirely out of Jane’s straw garden mulch—square outside like the square nest box, a soft lined cup inside—and fits it back in. Then, one by one, with extreme delicacy, she picks up the fragile, weightless baby birds, puts them back in their cradle, and latches the front. She can’t tell whether the tiniest are even alive, but a couple of others twitch a little bit when she’s handling them. It’s a warm day. Now, if the parents come fast, most of them ought to make it.

But then Kaylee thinks, Where are the parents? She’s never once checked this nest, not while it was being built and not while the eggs were being incubated and not this afternoon, when the parents weren’t carrying on something terrible. There’s been no sign of them. With a sinking feeling she faces the truth: They were almost certainly killed in the tornado.

She hears footsteps swishing through the clover and starts to explain before Jane even gets to the gate: “The garden box was down and the nest fell out, and I was trying to put everything back together, but the parents haven’t come back—what should we do?”

Jane comes in carrying Kaylee’s flip-flops, looks into the box, then scans the sky, then shakes her head. “I doubt the parents survived. These babies won’t either unless we hand-raise them, which is a big job under ideal conditions and right now—nature can be ruthless, Kaylee. You did the right thing, and if the parents had come through, they could take over now. But as it is—”

“You said we could hand-raise them? How?”

Jane makes a pained face. “I’ve never tried it with swallows. With robins or bluebirds you make a nest, using an old bowl or something lined with paper towels. Then you soak dry dog food in water and feed them pinches of that every forty-five minutes, for a week or ten days. You have to change the paper towel every time you feed them, because they’ll poop on it. When they get bigger—”

“Do we have dog food?” Kaylee says. “I want to try! I’m sorry I behaved like such a creep,” she adds contritely. All at once she desperately wants to try to save these morsels of life, helpless and blameless, from the wreckage of the world. How badly she wants this amazes her. She can see Jane thinking about it, wanting to refuse. “Please!” Kaylee says. “I’ll do everything myself, well, I will as soon as you teach me how. Do we have paper towels? Please, Jane, I just have to try this, I just have to.”