Category Archives: Fiction

by James Hartman

I stood at the window, still watching those bare limbs on that birch tree along the slope of bright snow in the dark because I wanted to believe I saw one flutter a little red.

“Oh, Jonathan,” my father called.  “It’s there, right?  One has finally come?!”

Cardinals were my father’s favorite animal.  When they were younger he and his brother used to set bird feeders throughout their backyard, strategically placed according to what they had learned from their Audubon book.  My father always talked about them.  He always believed they meant the return of something.
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