she’s

by Frances Gapper

watching baby starling that great fluffy lump of entitlement plumped on the feeder’s crossbar waiting to have seedy mush inserted in its beak shoved down its throat hurry up mummy-daddy / pretend baby starling full-grown bird reluctant to mature putting on an act shivering its wings peeping and cheeping in high helpless voice feed me feed me to parent starling can’t recall any life before this life these urgent routines of hunger and self-denial of extreme organisation of being a streamlined feeding machine like bird feeder once a gleaming tube fresh out of the box certified indestructible destroyed by squirrel hanging from crossbar or stretching from pole using its tail as hook or extra limb for daredevil raids before scrabbling back along the fence and leaping into a tree defying woman with sacks of birdseed in her utility room woman with a depleted bank account who can’t stop ordering seed and suet balls and pink slabs of seed-studded suet and mealworms and new types of feeder tube or dish or guard/protector woman thinking of when she drove back to her old place left empty for months and she’d brought a lawnmower to tackle the long grass while yanking huge weeds but omitted to bring birdseed and suet and feeder equipment having let’s be honest forgotten all about her last lot of starlings who hadn’t forgotten who gathered on next door’s roof and peered down at her excitedly twittering calling to other starlings she’s here she’s here

Photo of Frances Gapper

BIO: Frances Gapper’s work has appeared in e.g. Mythic Picnic, Exposition Review, Pangyrus, Flash the Court, Your Impossible Voice, Atlas and Alice, trampset, Splonk, Wigleaf, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Forge, Gooseberry Pie, Literary Namjooning, Trash Cat Lit and four Best Microfiction anthologies. She lives in the UK’s Black Country region.