1. The owl was always there, keeping watch from the granite fireplace. For as long as I could recall, the stony-faced saw-whet was guardian of the hearth. Permanently perched on a wire branch, amidst alternating seasonal gewgaws, her unblinking eyes were wide and round as an eclipse.
   
   
2. Mother hated that dead thing. But she loved to tell the story of Dad as bumbling rube, how flabbergasted she was by his failure to understand her. She kept the bird front row centre as a trophy of my father’s crude and clumsy floundering.
   
   
3. Father’s story was different. He only told it once. How he’d caught sight of the poor bird at an antique market my mother had sent him to in hopes of bargain jewels. He was enchanted and heartbroken by the bird’s beauty. Mother loved owls—he had already given her a roomful of gilt-framed vintage watercolours, the spooky ghost owls, snowy owls, the great grays. She had hooting vintage brooches galore, and ceramics, and Christmas ornaments. He decided to adopt the taxidermy for her. How lonely this forgotten saw-whet seemed, frozen from flight. Days before, Mother had brought inside an injured pigeon to mend: she often took in strays. He believed there’d be room for another feathered friend, this one that had been thrown away.
   
   
4. To handle Mother, you needed falconry gloves to protect you from her shredding talons.
   
   
5. “Your father never could meet my emotional needs,” she told us often. I hurt for her when I was small, hoped that someday I could fill in for his shortcomings and fix her, give her what she lacked. Later, I knew better. No one could.
   
   
6. Long before he was gone, Mother swept the house of him. Plucked his poetry volumes from the library shelves, tossed all his Audubons out with the rubbish.
   
   
7. She ordered a king-size bed, and banished Dad to the room I grew up in, where the children’s bed was built into the wall and barely five feet long. He slept there like a stowaway, curled to fit, then with his ankles awkwardly stretched out on a chair. I used to pretend it was Noah’s ark, gathered my plush parliament of owls, my blue jays, the king cardinal, all of us safely adrift in the surrounding storm.
   
   
8. Once when I was small I saw a tiny yellow finch dancing on the fresh asphalt they’d laid down on our road. He was twittering and hopping about and I felt his distress, ran to get Daddy to make it better. When we returned, the poor little creature was still fluttering about. Is he hurt? I asked, squeezing my eyes shut tight from the outcome. My father watched him for a bit, tried to walk closer. Then he startled. He tried to shield my small heart too late. I saw it too, the paler finch in a bundle of gore and feathers, flattened against the new pavement. When I understood that the bright bird was crying for his fallen mate, I burst into tears. I could hardly stand the weight of it.
   
   
9. As we came hand in hand up the drive, Mother came out, huffy faced, and demanded to know what I was bellyaching about now. I solemnly told her the saga of the finch’s mourning dance, trying to find the right words to convey the gravitas of what I had witnessed. Go wash your face, she hissed before I was finished. There are millions of those damn birds.
   
   

—From The Rope Artist, Lorette C. Luzajic’s latest ekphrastic collection

* Curator’s Notes:

The Owl (oil on canvas, by 1863) by Valentine Cameron (Val) Prinsep (1838-1904), British painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school, is held in a private collection.

The image above was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons in March 2023:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Il_Barbagianni_The_Owl_by_Valentine_Cameron_Prinsep.jpg

Artist and writer Grace Nuth speculates about the history of this painting in her blog The Beautiful Necessity (20 May 2008): “Il Barbagianni”

Lorette C. Luzajic

reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches flash fiction and prose poetry. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Unbroken, Trampset, The Citron Review, Flash Boulevard, New Flash Fiction Review, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and The Best Small Fictions. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly. The author of two collections of small fictions, Pretty Time Machine and Winter in June, she has also acted as judge for the Tom Park Poetry Prize.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary in MacQ-9 (August 2021) by Clare MacQueen, with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize