An Evening in LATE SUMMER
by Emily Younkin
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
I stood watching the broken goose. She stood, not watching me, her neck bent into the grass to pluck ceaselessly for nourishment. Around her a hundred gray geese with ceaseless necks plucked at the earth of the lake house yard before it sloped into dark water reflecting the light of the orange sky. The earth twitched… twilight, hovering.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
“What’s wrong with that one?” a twelve year old girl asked her father.
The children held fishing rods in tanned white palms and wore those cheaply made flip flops you outgrow in two summers. The girl was a dreamer, the boy was a realist, and the father was a bird in the form of a man.
“Her wing is broken,” the father said. His navy blue t-shirt was frayed only at one hem and the only gray hair he had was in his eyebrows, which he plucked to remain young. He was a dreamer when he was young, he now was a realist, and his twelve year old daughter was a bird in the form of a girl.
The bird-girl furrowed her eyebrows, giving shadow to a smooth face which caught all angles of orange sun. She cast her rod into the sunset water.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
The bird-girl did not know how to lose people gracefully. Neither did she lose people violently. Rather, she let them slip past curious eyes, gray shifting green, wondering why the poets wrote about loss like it was a thing with teeth that bites. Loss was a fireplace set to low, a watching of foggy landscapes roll past, an observation of humanity.
Loss was not a thing that touched a twelve year old girl with the world in the strands of her darkening hair.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
It is a thing as natural as the rising of the moon and the expanse of the stars, a thing any human would know as they stood watching the geese pick apart the pine-shadowed yard of their childhood home. It is a thing one knows like how childhood feels eternal or that we change faster than life does.
It is a thing anyone would realize as they stood, frozen with a fishing rod in hand, trapped on the dock by a flock of geese that took the moving air from their lungs:
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
“But what happens when they fly away?!” I asked, realizing. These birds would free me from my dock confinement and I would dart on silent feet into the air conditioned basement with the worn gray carpet. Naturally, once the sun drifted to the other side of the world and the only remnants of light were the purple shadows on the lake, the geese would take to the sky to find another yard to pick apart. It was what geese do. Everyone knew.
My father dipped his head. My father knew the answer to any question in the universe of my brain. My father was always watching the birds flying between the branches of trees. My father knew birds more than he knew life.
“They’ll leave her behind.”
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
The little girl caught no more fish in the fading day. She watched the lady with the broken wing, the companion faithfully beside her, the repetitive burrows of their beaks into the grass.
“Won’t one of them stay with her?”
Her father shook his head. “They won’t survive if they do. The flock has to keep moving.”
She caught at her brother’s arm when he moved to invade the space of the full yard. “Wait,” she hissed. “You’ll scare them away.”
The boy cared not to wait, for most things in life are inevitable and so was his transition into a practical man. A practical man would say, the goose will die and if I must walk through a graveyard of lost family members to get to my bed, the goose will die and I will walk. But for now the boy was not a practical man, and the goose had not yet died, so he set down his fishing rod and waited.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
One learns a few things about loss. In his younger years, the father learns that loss negates the mandatory nature of love. It flips a person belly-up like the caught fish too small to cook, chumming the waters beneath the dock’s creaky wooden boards. The lost are revealed in too raw a form to swallow, so we make them into loveable memories or hateable demons. And still, they taunt us with their realness. The father learns that loss sometimes reveals the parts of a person they were experts at burying.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
I waited at the base of the dock for the geese to fly. Her companion was the last to depart. For a moment, I believed he would stay. I believed the world was a righteous place in which we’d die to be in the presence of love and we choose one person to never part with. I did not know how loss was all too graceful.
Loss took to the wind of the twilight sky, lavender as the currents of the lake, falling into place at the end of the v. The broken goose watched it go. She called once, echoing, the sound you sometimes hear when a separated goose finds its flock again.
But they knew what they were doing, I said to her.
She looked at me. They knew what they were doing, and I let them go.
My heart, young and desperately pulsing, felt the pull of their familiar wings fading further and further. How?
Because they must live.
I did not believe her.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
There are two viewpoints on loss, that of rational men and that of dreamer girls. To rational men, loss is an inevitability accepted graciously, with a few shameful tears and a brave face refusing to turn back. To dreamer girls, loss is a choice made by the loser, a regretful action of letting go, a grasp at freedom defined by self-preservation. In the simple world of twelve year old girls, a world brimming with complex patterns of beauty, we may choose to stay until the very end.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
“What will happen to her?”
“She’ll probably survive until it starts getting cold, picking at grass around here. As soon as the first cold snap of the fall she’ll be done.”
“But what if she can fly by then?”
“It’ll be too late. The flock will be too far south.”
“She couldn’t catch up?”
“No.”
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
No options left, the girl and her brother and her father pack up their fishing gear and walk up to the basement door in the ringing quiet of a cicada evening. They enter to air conditioning and a worn gray carpet. They enter to a fireplace burning on low and starlight illuminating the foggy landscape out the windows. There are no options but to walk up the rough stone steps and depart from the world of geese and twilights. There are no options but to live alone and die when the first freeze falls.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
As she waited on sleep, who was far more patient than loss, she spoke to the lone broken goose whose sadness permeated the walls of the loving house.
I think it is happier not to love at all.
Is that happiness? the broken lady answered.
Happiness is the blue sky after dawn. They will fly through it without you. A pause. People don’t stay, do they?
The broken goose plucked a strand of grass, resisting her inevitable decease. The happiest moment of my life was when they left me, for I felt a sadness vaster than anything I’ve ever known. And that sadness told me that I had known a life-changing love.
But they still left you…
That is the nature of loss.
The girl would learn this when she was older and more graceful at the art of losing. As childhood persisted, she said, I vow to never love someone enough to be left empty by their loss.
The broken goose looked upward, at the winds she’d once known the freedom of flying through. Then you are a fool, girl.
At twilight, the geese covered the sky.
Click to see Emily’s work in the Spring ‘23 issue