Nest by Inga Simpson

hunter. Or as if she were the subject of a still life.
    You shouldn’t want to tame a wild thing, and you couldn’t. But sometimes she longed to have a robin as a companion, to sit on her shoulder or on her drawing desk, through the day, chirruping away. To be able to smooth its feathers, caress it. Just one. A creature that was just for her.
    This one needed a little smoothing – the feathers on the back of his head were ruffled, as if he had just woken up, the line between body and wing all a jumble. She tried to concentrate, instead, on the detail of his claws, the mix of grey and yellow on his upper back, the touch of white on his wing.
    She refilled her cup. Took a breath. She slit the envelope and spread the pieces out before her, one of the many puzzles of her life. The pictures had all been taken at the mill. Her father, Sam and two men she didn’t know standing atop giant logs. Their eyes in the shade of their caps. A new truck. Neat stacks of lumber.
    Sam had cut out a picture from the local paper back then, all yellow now. That gave her some names for the faces: John Coggil and Colin Yeeman. They were names she knew: men who had cut trees with her father. Colin had given it away after he put a saw through his thigh a second time. She remembered the blood on the floor of her father’s truck and him getting home from the hospital as she was eating breakfast.
    Her dad and Colin had some sort of falling out with John. Probably over money, or a job. He had provenance going right back to the first timber-getters, a third-generation sawyer, who probably didn’t think much of a bloke cutting his own leg. But all she had were the gleanings of a child overhearing after-dinner adult conversation, most of which hadn’t made much sense at the time, let alone years later.
    She had a vague memory of an argument at the house, after she had gone to bed, brown longneck bottles strewn around the yard when she left for school. Her mother making her disapproval quite clear as she gathered them up. But that was the only time the men had visited the house while she was there.
    A brown comb. A packet of Tally-Hos. An unopened pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco. Why hadn’t someone taken that and smoked it? She sniffed – stale. But it still carried the image of her father with his brown forearm hanging out the window, the burned-down cigarette between his first and second fingers. She tucked the packet into her shirt pocket.
    She sipped her tea. There was one of her old school photos, like the one he had kept clipped to the visor of the truck. Faded and creased. Grade six by the look of it. The uniformed girl in the photograph still had pigtails, her best friend and a father. No wonder she was grinning so foolishly.
    It was because of their class photo, taken earlier. Michael had always pulled some stunt or another; it was a tradition. In grade one he rubbed his hair with a ruler until it was standing straight up at the back, and the photographer failed to notice. In grade two, he’d put his jumper on at the last minute – inside out. In grade three, he had an accomplice. He and Jason Ambley, on opposite ends of the second row, managed peace signs above the girls’ heads. By fourth grade, the teachers were on to it. He had to content himself with one sock up and one down. He had been sick in year five. Whether on purpose or not, she didn’t know, but that year’s photo was nonetheless notable for his absence. Grade six had been the best yet, a classic. The grade sevens, due to line up first, had been milling about on the oval with them, in the care of a relief teacher while the real teachers had their group photo done. Michael had convinced the Owen brothers – only a year apart in school – to swap. Somehow, when their own teachers reappeared, they hadn’t noticed. Both classes had managed not to crack up, though their smiles had an unusually uniform brilliance when the photos came back. The Owen boys reckoned their own