Broken Cages

by Andrew Siegrist

Cristian Siallagan

The woman tied the brick to the pedestal inside the broken birdcage. The brick was painted blue. She stood at the trestle bridge railing and dropped the cage when the wind calmed. The river was quiet before the splash. Cold ripples moved across the surface. She held her breath but still she couldn’t remember the song they sang as children when she chased her brother barefoot through the snow to scare away the winter wrens. She thought of her mother standing at the kitchen door with a thumb laced through a tear in the screen and how her mother’s voice sounded like split wood as she shouted the children back for their shoes and the children laughed as the birds flushed from the yard and disappeared beyond the trees. She wondered how far the bird cage would sink before it settled against the mud at the bottom of the river. The broken birdcage with a brick inside, cool water moving through its wire body. She wondered if fish would get stuck in the cage and fight and thrash until finally it found the empty place where the cage door had once been latched shut but the cage door was missing now and the fish could escape just like the bird had escaped if the fish could find that empty space. A fisherman would snag his lure on the wire cage some day and think he’d caught something heavy and if his line didn’t snap he could reel the cage to the surface and find the painted brick and drop it back into the water. He would take the cage and mend the missing door with scraps of chicken fence and his children would come home from school and ask their father if he’d bought them a bird to keep hung in the window of their room as a pet. The children would promise to feed the bird and to teach it to remember words like please and thank you. The father would scrub the rusted wire with a steel brush and paint the cage white. He would tell his wife he hadn’t bought a bird as a pet and she would fold a dinner napkin into the shape of a starling and tie it to the pedestal where the painted brick had been tied and the children would leave a thimble full of milk in the cage and open the window. A breeze would flutter the starling’s cloth wings and the children would whistle and laugh and shake the cage with their fingers woven through its wire walls. The fisherman would tell his wife he caught the cage in the river and that there was a brick tied inside. His wife would ask what he did with the brick and he would tell her that he released it back into the water. He wouldn’t tell her the brick was painted blue, or that after it sunk, the water was quiet and cold.

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Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His debut collection of stories, We Imagined It Was Rain, was awarded the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and published by Hub City Press in 2021. His work has appeared in Wigleaf, Mississippi Review, Arts & Letters, Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, South Carolina Review, Bat City Review, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Nashville, Tennessee.