You’ll know when it’s time to let go. That’s what I’d always heard, although never from my father. My dad was still holding on to things that he should have tossed decades ago. He still had my mother’s 1970s cookbooks with recipes for Baked Alaskas, Ambrosia salads, and Beef Wellingtons, none of which he even liked. He kept them in the attic, long ago converted into an office space, along with yellowed college exams and stacks of journals with outdated theories; with cassette players and fax machines, plural; and tangles of computer cords sitting on top of abandoned bass speakers. He wasn’t a hoarder, just a “collector.”
“Dad?” I asked, holding up an army green Nature Conservancy backpack, one of a dozen bags from his collection of totes, briefcases, carry-ons, duffels, you name it. “How about this one? Goodwill?”
“No,” he said from behind his desk. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with stiffened, knobby fingers worn down by endless hours of manual labor. He’d spent six years working the line in a tire factory, grinding down the joints in his hands. He’d left the job at twenty-three, abandoning a good wage and a healthy retirement package for college, for a promise of something more. By thirty, he’d earned his PhD and had landed a job as a wetland ecologist just west of the Mississippi River in lower Louisiana. His wife, my mother, God rest her soul, hated the humidity of the Louisiana lowlands but loved my dad enough to follow him to the gates of hell, as she used to say. She had been gone now for three years. Every day since, I’d been living with a chronic, dull ache inside of me. He missed her too, though he’d never say it.
“Put it back.” He fisted his right hand, as much as it would bend, and placed it on his knee. The work of both trades, the repetitive machine work and hours of research writing for an R1, had left his hands nearly immobile at seventy-six.
“You have so many bags. Why do you need them all?” I placed the unzipped bag by his feet. Inside were half a dozen field notebooks and some kind of archaic recording device.
“Not getting rid of them. Look, Clara,” he said, “I didn’t ask you to come here. Didn’t ask for your help.”
Suddenly, I was five again, my face flushed and eyes burning at the slap of his words.
I wasn’t there to help him do anything. I was there because he’d called me that morning, saying that his oncologist had reached out to him the day before. “What did he say?” I’d asked him over the phone.
“Well, it’s not great.”
“Dad, I need a little more than that.”
“You know how these things are.”
Yeah, I did know. I took a long, deep breath and swallowed the ache in my throat. “Just tell me what the doctor said.”
Dr. Bollinger had told him that his white blood count was high, way too high, and that all those canceled check-ups were finally catching up to him. My dad was dying. Truth was, he’d been dying for years. His insides were corroded with cancer, like my mother’s had been. All I’d wanted that Saturday morning after he’d called with the news was to spend some time with him, bring him his favorite barbeque from Jackie-Q’s, reminisce, laugh, maybe share that half-pint of Irish whiskey from the bottom drawer of his desk. Losing my mother had been hard enough. Losing him from cancer too, albeit a different kind, was the universe laughing in my face. “I don’t want to fight,” I said, sitting across from him now and reaching for his claw-like hand.
He pulled it away. “Then stop trying to get rid of my things. I’m not dead yet.”
I glanced at his bottom drawer, aching for a shot of that Jameson.
We’d never been close. There were never any hugs or physical signs of affection growing up, something I’d blamed on him being raised without a father. Maybe he didn’t know how to be one because he never had one. It wasn’t an intentional cruelty, withholding his love; he just held it in reserve, afraid to give it away—afraid that if he acted like he loved me, I might actually love him back. That was my theory, anyway. But now, all I wanted from the man sitting in front of me in my mother’s cancer chair was an admission that, yes, he did need my help. “Dad, what did you want to show me up here anyway?”
“You’re looking at it.” He nodded at his bookshelves, at the stacks of papers on his desk, at the piles of dinosaur equipment bordering the walls of his office, at the backpack I’d placed beside his worn-down Merrells.
I reached for the bag I’d tried offering up to Goodwill and stared at its contents, wondering how long he had left. Dr. Bollinger had said a few months, but doctors were wrong all the time. He’d given my mother a year. She had a good five, beating the odds. “What’s all this shit in here anyway?”
He inhaled stiffly at my calling his life’s-work shit. “Unfinished business.”
◊ ◊ ◊
I let him lead the way through the thick, craggy pines. We were both loaded down with the gear we needed for our hunt, which made it near impossible to sop through the remote marshland, thick with the devil’s breath. Even at seven am, the humidity was near unbearable. “You’ll get used to it,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me. His grayed complexion had a purple hue to it under the overcast sky. It was a far cry from the warm bronze I’d known as a kid.
I wiped my brow with the faded red hanky he’d given me. “Don’t think so,” I said, sweat already seeping through my white, cotton-blend shirt. It took some kind of love to wade through muck and mosquitoes to help him finish his business. All for a potential glimpse of a phantom bird.
I’d heard about it my entire life, but I was never interested enough in knowing exact details. Maybe, at one time, he’d hoped I’d follow in his footsteps and continue his search, but hundreds of hours of patiently listening for a bird and thousands of pages of empty observations in field notebooks, that was his thing. Not mine.
“How’s Jake doing? You should have asked him to come with us.”
It wasn’t Jake’s thing either. He was one of three men in my life, each one slowly slipping away from me for different reasons. “He’s golfing today with friends.”
“Golf, huh? Guess he gets that from his dad.”
My boot lodged in thick mud, sucking me deeper into the earth. “How much farther until we get to the spot?”
“We’ve got a ways to go,” he said over the choir of mosquitoes in my ear.
I pulled my foot free and followed him deeper into the canopied marsh, praying that the damn bird would show its beak or bill, so we could get back to civilization.
“You know its history, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dad.” I forced a smile, hoping he’d forego his best David Attenborough impression of the detailed history of the bird. I’d hated biology in college. I’d scraped by with Cs and thanked God for each one, so the last thing I wanted on a precious day off from Madison, Tibbs, and Crocker was an ecology lecture on a likely extinct bird that might not be extinct, according to a handful of people who’d claimed to have seen “field markings” and “foraging sites.” The only problem with their claims was that there was no actual evidence. No photos, no sound recordings of the actual bird. Sure, there were these “multiple lines of evidence,” according to my dad, but it was all circumstantial. The last actual sighting, caught in a grainy photo, of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was back in 1944.
“Dad, can we take a break?” We were barely half a mile in, but the blood-thirsty bugs were relentless, swarming in my face. I needed a minute to regroup, maybe apply more Deet.
“Let’s keep going. Don’t want to lose momentum.”
I clenched my fists and proceeded to follow in the shadow of his six-foot-three, now slightly bent, frame. As I waded in muck behind him, a yellow-bellied frog, bloated and still, stared up at me with dead eyes. It made me think of Jake’s dad—the other man in my life. What had I become, relating a dead, fat frog to the man I’d been married to for twenty years?
“What’s so funny?” Dad asked, glancing over his shoulder at me.
I pointed to the frog. “Looks kind of like Charlie, don’t you think?”
My dad squinted at it and then at me, scratching his jaw with two crooked fingers.
“Oh, come on, just a little?”
Dad heaved in a deep breath and kept walking. “Everything alright with you two?”
After the latest affair he’d had, no, everything was not alright, but the last person I wanted to tell was my dad. He had enough to deal with. Besides, our day together was about finding a bird, not about discussing a failed marriage. I’d tell him later, next week or next month, that I was biding my time until the end of summer, when Jake would leave for LSU. Then, I’d get on with it, filing papers. We’d already started selling off the antiques we’d spent years accumulating, both of us agreeing that there wasn’t any reason to stay in the four-bedroom colonial on Ivy Drive. It was too much space for two people; too many rooms filled with blame and resentment. But those particulars were for another day. “Same old Charlie,” I said.
We marched on in the sopping heat, trudging like soldiers in wet marshland and through quiet, little wars of our own. We didn’t say much. It took too much effort to speak. All of our energies were spent on fighting kamikaze mosquitoes, watching for rebel snakes and gators, and praying to God for the slightest breeze—just one breath to cool the skin. We kept one foot in front of the other, not slowing down in fear that we’d never make it. That was my fear, anyway, quitting on him—now.
By noon, we finally reached the site. Deep into the thick, swampy forest, we set up our perch on a rotted tree trunk and waited for the bird’s call. My dad had been coming to this very spot for years, sometimes alone and other times with other researchers. But every time, he had left with hours of recordings and dozens of pictures, none of which produced any evidence of the bird’s existence.
“Dad?”
He bit into a waxy green apple as bright as the neon moss on the banked trees surrounding us. “Yeah?”
“Why is finding this bird so important to you? Is it the fame or notoriety?” Even though I’d asked, I already knew this wasn’t the case. My father cared nothing about being famous, but still, I was curious, maybe even irked, how someone could spend forty-plus years chasing after an animal that was likely extinct.
“Gave me purpose, I guess.”
“A bird you’ve never even seen gave you purpose?”
“The search for it has.”
“But all that time wasted with nothing to show for it. That’s got to be frustrating.” I paused, suddenly picturing the belly-up frog. Even though I’d wasted all that time on Charlie, at least I had Jake to show for it. My dad had nothing but empty field notes.
“I did see it once.”
“What?” I asked, shifting my weight on the submerged log we were both sitting on. “You never told me that.”
“Never told anyone.” He adjusted his green, wide-brimmed hat, shading his eyes from the sliver of light peeking through a shaggy cypress. “Saw it right here, as a kid. In 1958.”
“But…that was, what, fifteen years after the last official sighting?”
“Something like that.” He inhaled then slowly released his labored breath.
“Did you get a picture of it? Could be worth a lot.” I balked at my own greedy-sounding words, but the truth was, Dad had barely scraped by after Mom’s medical expenses, and now, he’d be facing his own. The system was broken, making seventy-year-olds jump through hoops to afford chemo treatment at $17,000-a-month.
He shifted his weight on the hollowed tree trunk then lowered his head, staring into the murky water. “I was eleven. I’d taken my daddy’s gear and loaded up his old fishing boat. The only problem was my kid brother followed me down to the swamp.” Dad paused from his storytelling and lifted his camera, pointing it into the thick, green canopy above us.
“Wait,” I said, swiping at the mosquito whining in my ear. “Brother?” In all the years that I’d known this man, he’d never once mentioned a brother.
He lifted his finger from the shutter-release and shushed me.
I bit my tongue, waiting like an obedient two-year-old for what came next. Would it be the quiet, hollowed trumpet of the woodpecker I’d only heard in sample sound bites?
Dad slowly lowered the lens. “Thought I heard something.”
I wished he had. I wished more than he could ever know. “Dad?” I finally said, “why didn’t you ever tell me you had a brother?”
He shrugged his shrunken shoulders, keeping his gaze on the oily-brown water. “It was a long time ago.”
“What happened to him?”
He sat there for a minute, lost in thought or memory, but then something inside of him shifted, bringing a light to his eyes. “Doug was obsessed with that woodpecker. I couldn’t give two rips about it. All I wanted to do that day was go fishing.” He took off his hat and wiped his glistening brow with an arm sleeve. “Doug came spilling down the hill from the house, all arms and legs with that huge camera around his neck.” He laughed. “Thing was near as big as he was.”
The sick rolling of my gut was telling me where his story was headed: a kid brother obsessed with a bird. A kid brother who had probably died, since I’d never heard of him before, and an older brother who’d been searching his whole life for something—redemption, maybe forgiveness, or answers about an untimely death? The phantom bird was my dead uncle. It had to be.
“So, you let him go with you?” I prodded.
“Don’t know if I let him. He just got in the boat, saying he’d heard it that morning, calling him from the woods. Kid was right, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Dad pointed to the same spot where he’d just aimed his camera. “Right up there. It was just sitting there, watching us with its majestic red crown and its lightning bolt on his black body. Prettiest thing I ever saw.”
“Did he get a picture of it?”
Dad leaned his large hands back against the hollowed log and rested on his elbows. “Can’t remember.” He bit his flaking, purpled lip and smiled at some distant memory only he and his secret little brother shared.
Whether he couldn’t remember or didn’t want to, it was none of my business, but I started to ask him about it anyway when a large black bird, not the phantom bird, flew from one branch to another, squawking at us to vacate the premises. But my dad wasn’t going anywhere, not for a while, despite the growing heat in the afternoon swampland. He was settling in, staying so he could finally find what he’d come for. This was it, his last chance to voyage into the devilish lowlands for a while. Maybe for good. Soon, his body would be too weak to walk, much less carry any burdens on a two-mile hike through muck.
The cancer had spread. That much, he’d told me before we’d started on our pilgrimage that day. Dr. Bollinger had called him with the news two days earlier, wanting to push up his first chemo treatment. “I’ll take you,” I’d told him over the phone, but he fought me, not wanting to “mess with it.” “I’ve had a good run.”
“Dad,” I’d said, picturing him in his attic office, sitting in Mom’s chemo chair.
“Not sure I’m going to do it.”
For months with Mom, we’d waded through waiting rooms filled with hunched-over bodies, paled and ravished by chemicals. We couldn’t unsee the wheelchairs and walkers, the oxygen tanks and IVs, the scarved heads and lowered eyes. “We’ll beat this,” we’d said.
“Dad, you need to fight it.”
“Don’t think so.”
The day trip to find his phantom bird was our compromise. It was also my chance to convince him, somehow, that he wouldn’t end up like my mother in the waiting room.
The blackbird squawked again. Dad squinted up at it then pulled a silver flask from his backpack, taking a hearty swig. “It’s the good kind,” he said, handing it to me.
I kicked it back, welcoming the slow burn against my throat. It would be our last field trip together. My last biology lesson with the hard-nosed professor-dad. That thought was a tough one to swallow. “So, your brother,” I treaded lightly.
“What about him?”
“What happened to him?” I asked for a second time, sitting on that rotted trunk.
Dad took another pull of whiskey and placed his hands in his lap, staring down at his well-worn boots. “Well, I guess it was my fault. Least that’s what my daddy told me. He blamed me even though no one else did. Guess it just stuck.”
“Did he drown?”
“No, no nothing like that. He was just a sickly kid. Born with something no one could diagnose back then. But…he did fall in the water that day, trying to get a picture of that woodpecker. Lost his balance and fell right in.” Dad pointed to the water, slowly rippling from a fish or frog playing. “He wasn’t in there more than a minute, but it was November and cold.”
I rubbed my goose-bumped arms, slick with sweat under cotton sleeves.
“He stayed sick after that. Sicker than normal. A month later, he died. Pneumonia, lung infection, bacterial virus, no one really knew, but my daddy said it was my fault for letting him get in that boat. He left us not long after Doug died. Said it was too much for him to see the pain in my mama’s eyes every day and too much not to blame me for what happened.” He wiped his eyes, glossed with tears.
I’d only seen the man cry a handful of times in my forty years: at my wedding, when his mother died, and when mine did.
“Clara?”
“Hmm?” I glanced up at him, the once imposing, broad-shouldered monument, now slighter. How many times had I sat on that split-wood bench in our backyard, waiting to hear him say how much he loved me? Was he now, all these years later, finally going to say it? He opened his mouth to speak but turned his gaze back to the water’s edge. “I know,” I said.
He nodded then peered, again, high into the trees.
I wanted more than anything for him to find that bird and for him to make his peace with it. Would he agree to the chemo then? Did I even want him to do the chemo?
“How’s work?” he asked, shifting the conversation.
“Um, good I guess.” I bit my lip, feeling it pulse between my teeth. “Actually, no, it’s not. I’ve been thinking a lot lately.”
Dad turned to me. “Oh, yeah?”
“About changing careers. Maybe following in your footsteps…teaching. I applied for a position at LSU Law.”
“Bet Charlie had something to say about that.”
I still couldn’t tell him about the impending dissolution, not after all those years of scripture teachings on the sanctity of marriage and biblical covenant. Even grown, I was afraid of disappointing the staunch Catholic in him.
“And here I thought you were going to keep tracking my bird after I died.”
My chest tightened. “I have a feeling we’ll find it today.”
“Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t it be something.”
I’d love to say that we did see it, high in one of the bald cypress trees, double-knocking its ivory bill against hollowed bark, or that it sang to us in its lovely clarinet tone, but it didn’t. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker didn’t make an appearance just for my dying father. And so, after hours of stalking the elusive bird, we packed up our gear and trekked out of the swampland. I’d come to realize, on our father-daughter pilgrimage, that things didn’t always work out the way you wanted them to, or when you wanted them to, but I guess I already knew that.
As we neared his beat-up, doorless 1979 Wrangler, he tossed me the keys.
“You drive. I’m beat.”
Blasts of furnace-hot air lashed across our bodies as we drove along graveled backroads to the highway. Every inch of my exposed skin itched or ached, either gnawed on by insects or inflamed by heat rash or sunburn. I wanted AC and a bath of calamine lotion to ease the pain. My poor dad was eaten up too, with dozens of tiny red bumps along his neck and arms, but he didn’t seem bothered by it, not even a bit. “Aren’t we a sight?” I yelled over the road noise.
He let out a large, bellied laugh, making me laugh too. “Yes, we are.” He eased back against the headrest and closed his eyes.
We drove for maybe thirty minutes, neither one of us talking. At one point, I looked over at him, slumped in the seat with his purpled, unmoving lips, and watched for the gentle heave of his chest. Panic tore through me, waiting for it. God, please. Not now, I prayed under my breath, watching his chest, not the road. When he woke, coughing, I nearly drove us straight into a ditch.
“Hell, Clara, watch the road. You trying to kill me?”
He laughed. I didn’t. I didn’t want to be there again, not so soon after my mom. That road had been hell. But I’d travel it again for him if it gave us more time.
“Dad? I—”
“—I’ll do it,” he yelled over me and the roaring tires.
I glanced over at him with his white tufts of hair wild against the wind.
“I’ll fight it, the cancer.”
My breath caught in my chest. It was as close as we’d get to an I love you.
“And, dammit to hell, Clara, get a divorce already.”
◊ ◊ ◊
The fluorescent light in the half-bath was unforgiving. I dabbed at the crow’s feet finely etched into my skin and cursed Mother Time. But it wasn’t her fault, not really.
“Mom? You alright in there?” Jake asked.
“Be out in a minute.” I gave myself one last look, trying again to convince myself that it was going to be okay and that my son didn’t hate me. I had, after all, divorced his father and killed his grandfather, all in the span of five months.
“What are we supposed to do with this stuff?” he asked as I emerged from the small bathroom in Dad’s attic-office.
I took a deep, achy breath. “That’s a very good question.”
To be honest, I hadn’t thought it out completely. I’d called my realtor only that morning, saying I was considering selling the place. “These things are never easy,” she’d said. “Take your time.” I figured the sooner I got on with it, the better. And since Jake was home from college on Christmas break, I asked him if he’d help me clean out my dad’s office, knowing I couldn’t do it alone—at any point in time. I guess I was hoping, too, for a connection with a kid who was more like his father than I ever wanted to admit. I thought maybe we could bond over my dad’s phantom bird, that maybe Jake could learn to appreciate the lore, especially after news of it had hit the New York Times: a “vanished bird” that “might live on.”
The article had been published a week after my dad died at the end of November. The timing was just wild, considering our somewhat recent pilgrimage. Then again, knowing Dad, he had probably got wind of someone writing an article on the woodpecker. Maybe it had even initiated, partly, his return to the site months ago. Anyway, I’d hoped deep down that Jake would show some interest in his grandfather’s legacy, but from where I stood, it didn’t seem likely. I smiled at him now, my sweet little boy, six foot two with a patchy chin beard and a new tattoo of a wolf, of all things, peeking out from under his shorts on his thigh. How had I not noticed it before now? My eyes trailed from the tat up to his muddy green eyes. “When did that happen?”
He stared at me for a second then shrugged. “Few months ago?”
Now wasn’t the time to press him about it. He had, after all, spent his entire morning helping me with Dad’s stuff, pulling decades of files and books deep from within the bowels of the closet. Besides, he was an adult. “I like it,” I said.
“Right.” He shook his head, stepping over landmines of files and books on his way back to the closet. “Did the old man, God love him, ever throw anything away?”
“Well, you know what he always said.”
“Yeah, yeah, he was a collector. Hey,” he looked over his shoulder at me. “Do you think there’s anything of value up here? Maybe we can make some money selling his stuff on eBay.”
I swallowed the burn in my throat. “I don’t know, hon.”
“We should definitely think about it.”
My realtor had been right. It would take some time. Hell, it had only been a few weeks since my dad had been up here himself, taking stock of his goods. I sat down in his desk chair, breathing in the sweet smell of pipe tobacco, faint but still present in the fabric.
He’d tried his best, fought like hell like my mother had, but in the end, it wasn’t enough. I kept thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have let him do it, get in that metaphorical boat. No one could blame me, though, wanting more time with him. But the chemo hadn’t worked. All it did was weaken his body even more, to the point where life had become unbearable. By the end, he’d asked me to take him out to the site one more time. He wanted one more chance to search for his phantom bird, but I told him no that day. It was late November, cold and rainy, and his body was too ravished, too weak, to make the trip. Sometime in the middle of the night, he took the old Wrangler and drove himself there. He didn’t make it far. We found him the next day, a half mile down the trail.
“Mom?”
I cleared my throat. “Sorry, what?”
“Want me to trash these old exams?” Jake held up a handful of yellowed papers. “There’s a box full of them.” He kicked the open-topped box with his crisp, white Nikes.
“Yeah, you can probably toss them.”
He nodded, lifting the box with ease and moving it to the trash pile.
“Wait.”
“Mom.” He sighed. “We’re never going to get anywhere at this rate.”
“I know. Why don’t you go and grab us some lunch while I figure out what to do with all his stuff?”
“Okay,” he said, placing the box on the desk. “What do you want?”
I paused, unsure of how to answer that. “Whatever you want.”
As he shut the door to leave, I leaned in, looking more closely at the box’s contents. On top were the old exams with my dad’s familiar handwriting. I brushed a finger over a “well done” and moved the stack to the side. Underneath were a few old books, still nothing of value to Jake. I pulled out each item one by one: a black Gideon Bible with faded, red-edge paper; a field notebook from 1962; a couple of daily newspapers with ads for the new Plymouth model, oat cereal, and ladies’ beauty products. There was also an old cigar box at the bottom filled with matchboxes, marbles, and a few black and white photos. Some I’d seen before, like his high school yearbook picture and one of his mother in a kitchen, aproned and middle-aged. But my breath caught at the sight of one I’d never seen before. I held it up to the light, focusing my eyes on the grainy image of two boys standing in front of an old wooden shack. On the back of the photo someone, not my dad, had written: “Gary and Doug, 1958.” I found another photo, with the same date and handwriting, in the Psalms of the Gideon Bible. It was a picture of my dad in a boat; miraculously, in the background, was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, perched in a tree.
I held my breath, glancing over my shoulder at the wall behind my dad’s desk. There, under glass, matted and framed, was the 1944 “last-sighting” photo.
“Well,” I whispered, seeing my dad’s tired, sad smile on the day of our last outing, “isn’t that something.”
Jake returned an hour later, maybe it was less. I’d lost track of time, studying the old photos then combing through the rest of the box, first through Dad’s field notebook and then the newspapers, one of which had Doug’s obit in it. He was only eight when he died. So young. I glanced at the photo of little Doug and my dad again, standing side-by-side when Jake came barreling in the office with a greasy sack of burgers in hand.
“Hey,” he said, leaning over and placing it by my arm. “Isn’t that Grandpa’s bird?”
My heart palpitated as I moved the bag away from the newspapers and photos splayed on the desk. “Yep,” I smiled up at him. A part of me wanted to share the big secret with him, but another part wasn’t quite ready to flip the pictures over and show him what I’d found. Not yet anyway. That would take a little more time.
“Cool,” he said.
“Yeah, cool. Hey, maybe we can drive down to the site one day,” I offered. “See for ourselves if we can find your grandfather’s bird.”
“Maybe.” He headed back to the closet, probably to look for something more valuable than an old box of college exams.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked him.
“Already did.”
“Right.”
I leaned back in my dad’s chair again, taking in the wall-to-wall heaps, piles, and stacks of stuff he’d curated over the years. In the time Jake had been off fetching burgers, I’d decided I’d call my realtor first thing in the morning and tell her that I’d changed my mind about selling. This place, with all its old junk and with all its unfinished business, would be my home again. All my mom’s dated cookbooks and my dad’s audio tapes, field notebooks, and dozens of backpacks, they were all staying right here. No Goodwill. No trash. No eBay. Besides, I’d need my dad’s stuff when returning to the place where his Ivory-billed Woodpecker had once sung.
Chris Bailey holds an MFA in Fiction from Murray State University as well as a Ph.D. in Composition from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Bailey resides in Tennessee, where she teaches English at a mid-size university. Recent works have appeared in the journal Research in the Teaching of English, in the book Changing Creative Writing in America (Multilingual Matters, 2017), and in International Perspectives on Creative Writing in L2 Education (Routledge, 2022). Bailey has published short fiction in various venues as well as six young adult novels; her latest book is titled Burning Little Lies (Artemesia, 2024). Bailey is also the recipient of the 2024 Rick Bragg Nonfiction award. Before teaching, Bailey worked as a journalist and as a marketing/PR writer. The story “Phantom Bird” was inspired by Catrin Einhorn’s 2023 New York Times article, “A Vanished Bird Might Live on, or Not. The Video Is Grainy.”
