Nest
By Abby Spanglet
The runner up of Summer 2025 Creative Works Contest
- September, 2025
Do you remember the birds in our yard?
They were mostly sparrows and robins, but when we lived in the old house, a plump mallard duck came along and laid exactly three eggs in its nest, just outside our shed. You were talking about adding a coat of lacquer to it at the time. The wood for the shed was cut from the healthy elm tree from which we once hung a tire swing. I was decidedly too old—-too heavy—- to use it so you chopped it down to build the shed. “We’d save money,” you’d told me, “and we could build it together.” So, one afternoon, we did.
In just a few months, the untreated wood began to wither and grow mold, the tree’s body unwilling to conform to your plans. But with the nest next to it, the shed looked rejuvenated, so you let it be.
About the Author
Originally hailing from Waterloo, Ontario, Abigail Spanglet is a 1L student in the common law section at the University of Ottawa. She has been writing for almost 15 years. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring local restaurants and discovering new music
Every day, for a few hours, you and I would wait by the side of the shed opposite of the nest, standing on our tip toes to see whether any had hatched yet. It was important to give them some space, you said, but I could never see from so far away.
Once, before our normal inspection time, I went alone to the nest. As I held one of the three ivory spheres up to my sunburnt nose, you yelled out from inside the house for me to put the egg down. You watched the egg drop from my hands and crack. I didn’t know you were watching.
A coyote ended up eating it, but spared the other two, and we never saw the mother duck again. The shed was painted coral come springtime to match the bricks of our house, and the other two eggs were gone. After that, not many birds came to visit. I could learn something from them.
“Did your book club assign those to you?” The girl reached into the pantry.
“Very funny.” The woman gathered the brochures into a smooth green folder. “There’s some celery in the fridge, on the middle shelf.”
“I know that. I used to live here.”
“And I still live here. Plus, some things have changed since you did.”
The girl cracked an egg into a stainless-steel bowl while her mother watched. “Like the brochures?” She cracked another. “How long have you been thinking of doing it?” A third egg dropped into the bowl, splattering whites along the rim.
The woman rubbed one nostril. “Maybe since I was your age or so.”
“So, some twenty-odd years and you never bothered to tell me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone, actually.”
You passed a lot onto me: we never hold mugs by their handles, and we both pinch the bridges of our nose when we’re focused. And we both like birds.
The mallard duck family was the last time I watched birds with you, but not the first. One time, you decided to take the afternoon off and show me the gallfly larvae inside the goldenrods. I shrieked when I saw the inside of the plant’s stem. How could such a beautiful yellow flower harbour such an ugly, spongy blister of worms? Before you could answer me, a brown bird the size of your nose stole a bug from the bulb. It was a little plain. I shrieked for a second time, but instead of comforting me, you laughed.
“Do you see how nature takes care of its own imperfections?”
“Uh-huh. What was that?”
“A red-winged blackbird.”
“But it’s brown!”
“The boy birds are black with red wings. Like the one in the tree over there.”
“The boy is prettier.”
You laughed and your teeth were shiny from lip gloss. “The boy birds have to look handsome to attract a girl bird and lay eggs.”
“Why don’t the girls look pretty?”
“They need to hide from other animals that would eat them when they sit on their eggs.”
“Boys don’t?”
“No. They aren’t stuck to their nest. They can fly anywhere they want.”
“They fly South in the winter.”
“They fly South. That’s right. It’s too cold for them, then.”
“Why can’t the girl birds be pretty and safe?”
“They are safe. And they’re pretty too, because otherwise the boy birds wouldn’t try to impress them.”
The woman washed the girl’s dishes, as she had before the girl had moved away. When she was done, she put them into the plastic dish rack and walked toward the foyer. The girl’s light was on in her bedroom, so the woman drifted back into the kitchen and picked up a frying pan and popped some odd suds. She rotated the frying pan slowly in her hands, the middle of her reflection distorting. She combed through the rest of the rack, peering into a teaspoon, a knife, a spatula. Once she had inspected many versions of her face, she placed the utensils next to the sink, but before she could put them away, she noticed her kitchen scissors were missing. She ran up the stairs.
“Oh my God. What have you done?”
“Gave myself a haircut. Do you like it?”
“It’s uneven. If you wanted a new hairstyle, you could have asked me.” The woman began to pull on a tuft of her own hair, as if to make sure it still reached her shoulders.
“It’s my choice to make.”
“Of course it is.” The woman felt a sharp pain just above her nose. She traced the bump where the discomfort seemed to originate. “I wouldn’t tell you how to cut your hair. I just want you to consider my opinion.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“It doesn’t look bad. The edges just need to be fixed a little.”
“So do you like it or not?”
“I think you’re perfect as you are. And you have much nicer hair than me. You should take care of it.”
“Won’t you just say you don’t like it? You clearly think so.”
The woman sighed. “Let me fix the edges a little.”
The night before you painted the shed, we slept in it. It was your idea. You said I could have friends over there for a slumber party, but nobody wanted to come because everybody at school called our shed a ‘witch den.’ I never understood what they meant, until one day, a classmate informed me that it was because Papa didn’t live with us and because we both had big noses.
You found me sulking on the rusty metal stool out in the yard when you got home. Instead of asking me where my friends were, you crouched down next to me, and got your work shoes all muddy in the process, asking if you could stay with me in the shed.
We had to move your gardening tools around to make room for our sleeping bags and leave the hose outside. Once you were sure there were no popped nails on the floor, we laid them out. In the yard, you showed me how to build a fire. “Don’t tell the fire department,” you said. I giggled.
I wanted to wake you up. I heard a dog or a wolf howl outside and for the first time since you came up with the idea I wondered if the shed was safe enough for us to live in it. Eventually, I fell asleep because your snores were louder than whatever was outside. Did you know you snore? The next day at the library I looked up books on snoring. It’s a symptom of sleep apnea. A comorbidity? Nose size.
In the fifteen years since it was renovated, the weather had chipped away the shed’s paint, the red surrendering to the wood’s natural beige. The door groaned when the girl opened it and she strained against it to open it more than a sliver while the sun loomed behind her back. She ran a hand over her scalp, as if to pull away her hair, but there wasn’t enough to pull any back.
Eventually, the door relented, and the girl entered. Cobwebs decorated the inside, but there were no signs of spiders. She unhooked a blue tarp from the cleanest wall and was greeted with chirping. The girl ran back toward the house.
“There’re sparrows in the shed!”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Show me.”
I don’t remember exactly when I decided to move out. Maybe it was when I got accepted to a school a few towns over, or when Papa moved out, or when you painted the shed. Either way, I think the trip was the most time I’d spent with you since I stopped birdwatching. To me, it made sense. We didn’t have much in common besides the pattern of the freckles on our forehead, and, as my bullies had pointed out, our noses.
You’d had me at nineteen, just a few months out of high school, and now, here I was, a few months younger than that, going off to university. I glanced over at you and saw you trace the top of your nose.
“Do you regret not going to school?’
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, now, you get to go, and that’s almost as good as if I had gone.”
“But it won’t be the same, right?”
“That’s okay. I’m happy with the way life went when I was your age.” You looked at me and let go of your nose. “I’m glad you’re doing something that will make you feel happy with your life, too.”
“What are you going to do now that I’m going away?”
“I’ll miss my little mini-me, obviously.”
“I’ll miss my big me.”
The woman pinched her nose. It had been a while since her birdwatching days.
“It’s too big to be a sparrow. It must be a female red-winged blackbird.”
“Cool. Let’s move them.”
“We can’t do that. They live here. And look at the babies’ round little beaks!”
The girl tutted her tongue and then rubbed her nose. “They look weird.”
“I thought you liked birds.”
“Sure, when I was twelve.”
“What’s with your attitude?”
“Giving you? Have you ever thought about the fact that maybe you gave it to me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I learned to act like this from you.”
“You’re reminding me of your father.”
“Why? Because I’m interested in things other than birds and the way I look?”
“Because you’re being selfish.”
“You know what’s selfish? Getting a nose job.”
“You have no idea what it’s like to feel uncomfortable with part of your own face.”
Actually, I do know what it’s like, Mom. I know exactly what it’s like. I don’t think you know what it’s like, though, to watch your mother remove your nose from her face, to watch her divorce herself from a part of you. Are you being honest when you call me beautiful or are you being a mother? How can you be honest if I look just like you?
The girl found herself in the kitchen, peering into the fridge. She had used up all the eggs, and stalks of celery seemed to shoot out of the fridge and into her eyes. They seemed to wilt when she flung them onto a plastic cutting board, almost as if they were resigning to something.
There were so many stems that what fit into the cellophane bag seemed to expand like a forest in her hands. Nonetheless, she peeled them away until she arrived at the soft part at the core of the plant. Gingerly, she took a bite of one of the younger stalks, forcing herself to swallow the pulp that seemed to accumulate from nowhere.
She began to chop the stalks into small cubes after finding a knife lying on the counter. She sliced cleanly through the stems, almost as if the fibre she had bitten into had all been concentrated into the one stick she bitten into. She scraped the pieces into a metal bowl.
You must have stayed outside after we argued, because you were already in the shed observing the birds I found when I got there. I felt like there was something I was supposed to say—–something I wanted to say—-but I didn’t know what it was, so just stood at the door of the shed. You came up to me and smiled at me thinly.
“Can I have some?” I handed you a bowl of celery. You put a piece in your mouth and your nose crinkled in disgust. We looked at each other and we started laughing. For some reason, looking at you laughing made me laugh even harder, so hard that I dropped the bowl.
“Look!” you said, still trying to hold back your laughs. You pointed at the ground, where I had dropped the bowl. The mother blackbird had come over, picking up a piece in her beak. We watched as she fed it to one of the little versions of herself. Then she came back to us, and took another, and then another.