Free The Stars Can Wait by Jay Basu Page B

had seen a nest of finches high up in a birch, squawking as their mother fed them. He laid down his equipment and tested the grip of the bark and then began to climb the tree. He climbed until he reached the nest. While he was trying to cup one of the young birds in his hand the mother bird had dived down from the higher branches, eyes like angry pearls, beating her wings to keep steady and biting at his fingers. He dropped the young bird and grabbed at the trunk, but he knew he had lost it and fell in a hurtling daze of green and yellow. He hit the ground and lay there panting, shocked. Some of the men gathered around him and offered him their hands to pull him off the ground. But he had just brushed them away and got to his feet and shook his head, as if to clear it of a thought, and then made his way back up the tree.
    He came home that night with scratches all over him. He strode over to his son and scooped him up against him so the boy could smell him, smoke and sweat.
    How’s my boy? he said, and then put him down. I have something for you.
    Where? Where? What is it?
    He turned to his side and nodded down at his jacket pocket. Have a look.
    Gracian, breathing heavy with expectation, hooked one finger over the rim of his father’s pocket, pulled it open a little and peered in.
    The baby finch sat among a small soft cloud of mustard feathers. Its crown was a little black thumb pressing down onto vivid red, its head was darting to its own bird rhythms, its eye was an opal, and from its tiny beak came soft chirpings. Gracian let it hop onto his hand and took it out for all to see.
    It’ll feel free, he said.
    *   *   *
    Later his father made him a proper cage from a wooden disc and strands of silver wire. He kept that bird in his room for two years. The day after his father died, it escaped through the wire and soared out into the yard.
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    It was deepest night now, when the sun is most distant from the earth. Gracian took the photograph from the sill and dropped it on the bed, letting it slip from his hand as a man might let slip a used wrapper or spent ticket. He stood by the window and saw the yard and the forest beyond that.
    Something pulled his eye into focus, a warp of movement out among the shadows of the field beyond the yard. A small black shape was passing from each tree shadow to the next, as if made from the same substance as the darkness. It was making its way slowly, moving in bursts, quick and agile, leaping, stopping, vanishing, and then returning, in a wide zigzag motion down the face of the field. Gracian felt the small hairs rise up on his scalp. He thought what he saw was a phantom, born from the wanderings of his thoughts. But the closer it came, rushing out across the dark earth, the surer Gracian became of its reality.
    Finally he remembered the telescope in his hand. He slid the chest over with the outside of his foot and stepped up onto it and tried to force the top pane further down to give him better vantage. It gave only a few inches before he felt it wedge there. He raised the telescope.
    It was gone. There was nothing but the fields and the still air, in which seemed to hang low motes of dust, catching moonlight. As he moved the telescope in a small parabola around his eye, the scene became nervous, halting to right itself and then shattering again.
    And then, finally, movement renewed. The spirit had detached itself from the far edge of the field and was passing quickly over an area of white. The boy could see that it left behind it a trail of shallow pockmarks in relief against the snow.
    Footprints. It was, then, a figure. A man. A man running.
    The man had reached the low end of the field and was almost at the perimeter wall of the backyard, and when he reached it he stopped. He bent down to catch his breath, his open mouth visible, and then stood again. Although Gracian could see the man now, see the muted colours and contours of his body and