A Home Health Aide With Feathers
The following story was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2025 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. This story will be performed by an actor this spring. To hear more great short stories performed by great actors subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts.
Kestrel
You had to call it “The Community Orchard” or Abuela couldn’t hear you, professing deafness to words like co-op, and amnesia to childhood farm. Even if both titles were true. Maybe it’s just the way imagination gets stirred into memory. But I swear there was a time you could watch each tree tilting on its axis. Warming to the glow of her.
Most days after school, I’d drive to Abuela’s. She’d pass me a steaming mug of manzanilla and bundle a cardigan over her knees, though she always kept the house too warm. At any point in our conversations, she could find the exit ramp leading back to her own memories as a girl of my age. Then seventeen-year-old Abuela and I would poke at our manzanilla sachets and laugh about high school and the foolishness young couples get up to.
Now, a low sun squints through rows of crabapple. My hair goes suthering in the wind. Perched on my gardening glove, a small falcon bobs its tail, trills. Impossible sounds from its bird alphabet. Abuela named the kestrel Clementine after rescuing her from a fugitive kite string in a tree. She’d always bring Clementine to the orchard with a little leash and a bird harness. Clementine won’t wear the harness for me, so she clutches my hand.
The first time it happened, I found Abuela slumped over the lip of the bathtub. The CT scan revealed a stroke. Abuela was put on blood thinners and, until she could no longer contain herself, bedrest.
Now, Clementine pecks at my forearm. The smell of the new drainage ditch coats the back of my throat. Here, the soil remembers. A few rows down-slope, Abuela once held a cherry sunward, showing me the translucent flesh kindled red. She told me this was the spot where, long ago, a family witch had lifted a curse cast by a rival farmer. I remember where she used to mound the leaves each year, right where bandits were rumored to have hidden their loot. She’d cover me with the leaves, one by one, until the world went dark and warm. Then crying out that she’d struck gold, Abuela would dig me out again and fold me into her arms.
She discovered Clementine the week after her stroke. Looped up in kite string. The kestrel had no fight left to give her. Abuela simply twisted the string from the under-branches then plucked Clementine, “like a fruit,” she’d told me. The string had bitten into the flesh of Clementine’s wing, and there was ligament damage. The vet prescribed a sling, antibiotics, rest.
After school, I’d help Abuela feed Clementine and clean her roost. We’d talk and Clementine would add her klee-klee to the conversation. If she was hungry, she’d give a low, plaintive warble, a sound reserved just for Abuela, who would admonish her, saying that warbling was only for kestrel chicks calling to their parents. Over time, Abuela took over more and more of her care. Nurturing Clementine didn’t seem to drain her energy so much as rejuvenate it. By the end of the month, Abuela returned to the orchard. I took her return as evidence that the health scare was over. I told Mom about the improvement, and she asked “Who, Abuela? Or the bird?” and I thought, yes and yes.
The setting sun casts the trees in bronze. They give off an almost shadowless glow. As if the light is emanating from every surface. My ankles chafe with the scruff of ryegrass. Last week, community orchard hands found Abuela between the rows of pears. Arm cushioning her head. Like she might wake soon.
I watch now as the cherries burn. Bulbs of incandescent red. Clementine goes suddenly tense. She makes a sound I’ve never heard her make. A gentle, questioning coo. Her head and tail bobbing. Then with a lunge, she detaches from my arm as if from a branch. Her klee-klee sails over the crabapples and pears and the leaves and leaves and leaves while the sun goes to seed, and the wind floats her higher, forever out of my reach. Higher.
