by Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin
Adam Knight's "Little Bird" in Bacopa Literary Review 2021 is a tender story of an adolescent boy who worries over a baby bird. In this piece, tension is woven through in just the right amounts. I can feel the vulnerability of both the bird and the narrator, in this dugout full of young teenage boys.
A fluttering movement caught my eye. I looked down. What I had mistaken for some windblown leaves was a bird's nest, probably knocked down from the dugout roof in the previous night's storm. In it lay a baby bird with a bulbous head and wispy feathers. Its beak opened and shut, emitting the tiniest "cheep" that was only audible in the gaps of teenage conversation.
Hello, I thought. Hello there.
"Little Bird" is a tight, simple story that is also one of those small moments we build ourselves around, a nugget of self-realization.
I felt like the bird and I were in a little, private world. He was my secret. I did not know if I could help him, but I could listen to him. You are not alone, I thought. I imagined what it must be like to be the bird, a tiny waif, perhaps days old, disoriented and scared, flailing and crying in a world full of creatures much larger and louder than he. I hear you, little bird. I see you.
The larger metaphor of this story works without being overwrought. I felt this boy, a small bird, trying not to be crushed by the growing expectations of the aggressive masculinity around him. The triumph of this piece, for me, is the exploration of this small defining moment in a life. The realization, "I am different than this."
Something died that day. Not just a newly hatched sparrow on a high school baseball field, but also something in me. As a boy, I had played baseball on a team with other boys, and though we may have all had different temperaments, we all could play the game we loved. But that morning's events confirmed for me finally that I did not belong. Not on the team and not with other guys. My path to manhood, whatever it might look like, would not look like Nick and Scott's . . .
* * *
Adam Knight is a writer and teacher in northern New Jersey. His debut novel, At the Trough, was published in 2019 by NineStar Press and his fiction and essays have been published in a number of publications, including "Hoping for Red" in Escape Pod, December 2018. He is currently revising a cosmic horror novel about the Titanic.
