Image: Canva.
‘Birdbone’ is the winner of the State Library of Queensland’s 2024 Young Writers Award.
The bird looked just about ready to burst—and Myra was considering the salt gun.
‘Birds don’t even get pregnant,’ Jelly said one Friday afternoon as he set up his camera. Myra had spent the day whining, threatening to give the bird one good pop. ‘You know that.’
The treehouse groaned. It did that sometimes, when the wind blew. Myra’s dad had built it, so the foundations were mainly silicone and pallet wood.
‘We learned about it in biology,’ Jelly insisted, when she didn’t respond. ‘Not pregnant—gravid. Remember?’
Myra sniffed. She wanted to change the subject.
‘You know they call you Jelly because they think you’re fat, right?’
She didn’t say it to be mean. She had just been meaning to tell him.
‘I am fat.’
Myra flicked a pebble out the window. She lost sight of it about halfway down but heard it clatter on the ring of concrete that circled the base of the tree. It was meant to work as protection from the lawn mower, but the tree had grown much larger than expected and now the trunk overflowed, the concrete cracked from where the roots had wriggled under the foundations.
But you couldn’t see that from up here. Up here there were just branches. And bird.
It sat across from her, taunt and swollen.
She swore it was looking right at her.
They had first spotted it a few weeks ago, when Harvey Chen had lobbed a pebble through the window of the treehouse and clipped Jelly around the ear. Myra had stuck her head out to scream at him and instead found herself cross-eyed, staring at a pair of scaly feet. Standing on the branch above her, she couldn’t even see its beak for the roundness of the bird’s tiny abdomen.
And it had gotten bigger since then. The roundness wasn’t even the worst part—the worst part was the skin. It peeked through where it shouldn’t, in the spaces between feathers, stretched tight and pink and dotted with follicles. It filled Myra with the same sort of anxiety as an overinflated balloon.
It didn’t move much. It mainly just watched.
Sometimes it would float its way down to the ground to collect single strands of hair or fibre to add to its pile in the crook of the tree. Jelly zeroed in on the roost with his camera. Myra poked it out with a stick.
She could see now, though, that it had rebuilt—a new nest the size of a half-orange was nestled in the crook.
‘I don’t know why you hate it so much.’
Jelly was behind her.
Myra scraped her fingernails across the skin of her neck.
‘Well, I don’t know why you let people think we’re a couple.’
Jelly, who always had an answer for everything, was quiet.
The bird whined, filling the silence with the sound of a deflating balloon.
*
On Monday, Laurie Elrod pulled her aside after biology.
‘I really hate to be the one to tell you this but it’s, like, girl code.’
Myra nodded. She knew about girl code.
‘He’s gay, Myra. He likes you because you—well.’
She didn’t need to finish.
*
On Thursday, Jelly finally answered.
‘It’s easier for both of us this way.’ He tilted his head back, squinting upward through the gap in the roof where the planks had rotted away. He pointed his camera at the underside of the tree canopy.
He was right that things weren’t exactly easy right now. The difference between them, though, was that people liked Jelly. He was funny, in an offbeat sort of way. Or at least that was the current consensus. For the first time in his life, he had a reputation to uphold. Myra, on the other hand, was just plain unpleasant.
‘People only think you like me cause I look like a boy.’
‘But you’re not a boy.’
Girls. Boys. Birds. It was a lot to keep track of.
‘And you don’t like boys,’ she said.
Jelly snapped a picture of a leaf, zoomed in right on the veins. She could see them pulsing slightly.
‘That wouldn’t make any sense.’
Maybe he had a point, though—maybe that was the answer.
She imagined them living in a house far away—in the mountains, maybe—holding hands and waving to the neighbours. When no one was watching they could keep doing what they always did—Jelly could take his photos and read his books, and Myra could climb her trees. Maybe she could even wear her hair short, instead of this horrible bob.
Most people didn’t consider tree climbing a hobby. But Myra did. For every book Jelly read, she had four paperbark grazes to one-up him. She was very successful at her craft. It made her feel like something more than she was.
The only tree in the yard she hadn’t explored was the one that held their hideout.
It was the tallest on the property, sitting right on the outskirts. Compared to the others, there seemed something very old about their tree—which had always scared Jelly. Its trunk was grey and weathered like stone, with barrel-thick branches and leaves so rubbery you could barely bite through them. She’d tried to research the type of tree it was but found nothing to match its description.
Often, Myra found herself staring into its tangled foliage, wondering how far up it went. It would be hard to climb, she knew, even for an expert like her. The branches were smooth, and so wide she doubted she could wrap even her whole body around one of them. She’d climbed worse, though—even when it was windy and the trees became mistrustful. But for some reason, Jelly had decided it was too dangerous and off limits.
She never really thought about why she listened to him.
‘That could work,’ was all he said when she told him her plans for the future. It irked her that he didn’t seem more excited. They were meant to be best friends, after all—way back since kindergarten.
She kept pushing. ‘And we could do it when we’re eighteen, so no one could tell us what to do. And we wouldn’t even have to really be together. You could be with someone else, like, in secret, and—’
‘You’d have to have a baby,’ he said, a little loudly.
The tree went silent.
‘What?’
‘That’s what women do. You know that, right?’
He was sat cross-legged, hunched and facing the wall. She could hear him scribbling in his notebook. He always put too much pressure on the pencil.
‘You’re pushing too hard,’ she snapped.
He stopped writing.
That’s when they heard it.
The bird made a strangled sort of sound, like it was trying to caw, but its throat wouldn’t open wide enough. When they made it to the window, they saw three eggs sitting in the nest, all round and wide. The birds’ eyes drooped.
*
By Friday morning, the eggs had hatched. Which seemed weird. But Myra didn’t know anything about birds, so it was probably fine. She certainly wasn’t going to ask Jelly. They observed the empty shells in silence, and when it was time to leave for the bus, Jelly told Myra to go ahead without him. Something about a forgotten calculator. He crouched in the corner as she left, picking at the skin around his thumb.
By lunchtime Jelly still hadn’t turned up to school. Laurie told her he was sick.
*
That afternoon, Myra went to the treehouse alone for the first time.
Myra gripped each rung tightly as she climbed the ladder, feeling the tree gurgle around her. She held the salt gun in her right hand and a cheese stick in the other. It felt like a great occasion.
The top rung wobbled under her weight, and her eyes found the nest as she steadied herself. Inside it were three mouthy, oily baby birds.
They squawked at her hungrily. Myra’s skin prickled.
*
Jelly wasn’t there. But his camera was. After an hour of scraping at the walls with her pocketknife, something drew Myra to the window.
Once, Jelly had told her that he would be better off dead. That a boy’s body wasn’t built to be fat, so why was his? ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ he’d whispered into her shoulder.
And it didn’t, she supposed. She hadn’t said that, but it was true.
But she didn’t make sense either.
She studied the nest through the camera lens. It made everything look sharp and clean and much clearer than real life.
When she stood up, she noticed something else. One of the babies, instead of being nestled underneath its mother, was huddled alone, unmoving. Myra considered this. She pointed the salt gun at the mother, poised for its stomach. Then she dropped it, placed both hands on the window ledge, and hauled herself out.
It was a lot higher than she’d expected. The ground swam distantly below. A breeze rustled the leaves, and the tree swooned. She spread her arms wide the way she’d seen gymnasts at the circus do and started to shuffle along the straightest of the branches. The smoothness of the bark made her feet feel slippery and small. She breathed deeply and focused her eyes on the nest, ignoring the flowers that hung in her peripheral vision, petals opening and closing like strange sea clams. She didn’t even know the tree had flowers.
When she made it to the nest, she made another discovery.
The baby bird was curled in on itself like the tip of a fern, and when she unfurled it, she saw a third, tiny wing, crooked and tucked behind its head. It looked like the type of creature her dad would call an oxygen thief.
But what was more important was that it was turning blue.
She imagined Jelly’s voice in her head: ‘That’s the circle of life, Myra. That’s how things are. You know that.’
Did she know that?
She scooped up the baby bird and held it in a cupped palm. The mother looked on dully.
It was still warm. She felt the bentness of its body in her spine.
And then she heard him.
‘Myra!’ Jelly’s voice sounded shrill and far away. He was leant out the window, pale-faced, eyes swimming the way they did when he was close to throwing up.
‘It’s dangerous!’
The wind began to swirl now.
‘I’m—I’m coming!’ she forced out.
Twigs tickled the back of her neck as she shuffled, clenching the bird to her chest, feeling the beat of its tiny heart. Beneath her feet, she felt the mood of the tree shift. She could smell it like a dog could smell fear.
Could the tree smell fear?
One foot after the other, she thought desperately, trying not to look down. She timed her steps to the beating of the bird’s heart. One-two, one-two.
‘Thank god,’ Jelly mumbled when she was a few feet from the window. He reached out a hand to grab her but came up short, his fingers just brushing the hairs of her arm.
The baby bird gurgled.
The treehouse moaned.
A breeze tickled her skin, and she followed its current, placing her foot just off-centre on the slope of the branch. She looked at Jelly. His eyes ballooned.
Myra shifted her weight forward. The world slipped beneath her.
Her arm met the concrete first, with a splintering snap and a lungful of eucalyptus—the cleanest breath of air she’d ever taken.
