/lit/ - Literature

>>18269477
>>18271399
My wife and I are having our porch/deck redone, and as the boards were finally removed, we discovered a family of finches had already made a nest underneath the deck. Five newly hatched chicks were being fed by their stressed out parents, their protective cover now gone.

My wife suffered miscarriage twice this year, and we are in our late thirties.

She was very worried about the work disrupting the nest or somehow scaring off the parents so the babies would not survive. She made a little cardboard covering from a canned sparkling water box so that rain would not damage the nest. She called a friend in Germany who was a bird expert and he said not to move the nest, and to give the babies a few weeks to grow before construction resumed.

Last night, our dog discovered a tiny baby rabbit and did what dogs do, overjoyed to have a squeaking plaything to toss around for a few minutes. My wife was beside herself. We pried the creature from his jaws, and as it lay there on the grass, we saw it was still breathing, and no visible blood. We pulled our dog inside (I didn't yell at him, she did). After a few hours we went to check to see if the little baby rabbit was still alive.

Approaching the area of the grass where we'd left the rabbit, we saw was gone. Either its tiny body wasn't so badly broken that it could run, or another predator had grabbed it. I told her we would never know what happened to it. We turned back to the house to check on the bird nest.

Our flashlight beams flitted over the demolished deck, expecting to see the baby chicks huddled together in the dark, perhaps the mother clinging to side, watching us warily.

Omega hung there, black and bloated, the nest's sole occupant. Having completed its long climb up the side of the house, the rat snake's belly bulged with four identically sized lumps. On the dirt below, the uneaten chick lay there. Its body half broken and turned away from us, we saw fluids from it's rock-pierced body leaking out clear-white onto the barren soil.