The Oldest Baby In Town Oleg Daugovish   © Copyright 2026 by Oleg Daugovish

Image by Petr Ganaj from Pixabay

My life could have ended in thirteen days. The first memory after the egg shell cracking was of sunlight blinding my sticky eyes and three hungry beaks snapping and screeching from above. My brothers pushed me down every time mom coughed up the yellow puree. Already a skeleton of a chick, I got nothing. Dad jumped around tilting his bald head, surprised that mom wouldn’t want to mate. After avoiding his advances and stuffing the insatiable throats for a moment of calm she’d shut her brown eyes and sit on the edge of the perch swaying in a trance. I was so afraid she wouldn’t wake up.

Behind the glass that separated us from a big room, faces appeared with mouths opening and closing, just like my siblings, only bigger. Fingers pointed at our nest. Then, a window slid open and a man in blue jeans and white T-shirt climbed in. Before I could wiggle away, his fingers closed around me, forming a warm cave.

The giant placed me on his lap and a plastic beak with grain puree approached. It smelled of millet, just like mom’s, but with a hint of coffee.

“Open wide!” The man insisted.

I did not. But during my vocal protest, he squeezed the slurry into me.

Not sure if mom felt challenged or if she regained the energy after the man caught my dad with a net and placed him in a cage, but from that day on I managed to get scraps from mom’s offerings. After a few weeks I began to resemble a bird.

One by one, all of my family members disappeared into a long -handled net.

“They are going to good homes.” A woman in the black sweater assured me.

I had the atrium to myself. But I wasn’t alone. A gray mouse came through the vent hole to crunch on grains dropped from my feeder. A long-legged spider hung his web in the corner.

Outside the closed window, a squirrel walked on the wooden fence, stopping to eye a hawk floating in the sky. Blue jays hid their treasures in the leaves below the sycamore tree. Through the open window on the opposite side, hands dumped seeds and placed green leaves near my water cup. A comforting routine of my home.

After a few days of absence, the man and the woman returned. He approached my window with a large package wrapped in a blanket. A bald head with brown eyes protruded from it.

“Sofie, this is Baby, your older brother!” the man exclaimed.

He pushed a tip of a plastic bottle with a slurry into Sofie’s mouth. Unlike me, she didn’t protest and pumped it with her pink lips, not taking her eyes off me.

Delighted, I tried one note, then another and like a stream that gains volume, the song began to flow from my lungs. The ode to my survival and to this new human being, to the fluffy cloud in the azure sky and to the attentive jays on the sycamore tree.

And that’s how it went, every sunrise to sunset, until the night when I was awakened by the howling wind. The adults rushed out of the door holding little Sofie by the hand, flashlights bleaching their ghostly faces.

Right then, the sky began to glow with an early sunrise. Only it wasn’t the sun. A fire-breathing monster danced on the roof. It threw embers around the canyon that sailed like meteorites, crashing and burning at landing. The tilted V-shaped crack formed on the glass of my home.

Menacing spirals of smoke snaked into the hole through which the grey mouse was long gone. The spider rolled into a ball in his web. Instead of the brown squirrel on the fence, golden flames danced on it. I wanted to become small again and hide back into my egg shell.

When the morning sun lightened the gray air, the door rattled.

Will the house collapse now?

The man in the blue jeans rushed through the doorway straight to me. A warm cave of his hand, now covered with soot closed around my body and lifted me into a small cage. The solitary confinement I inherited from my dad.

I could barely keep my balance on the perch in the cage and not only because the man galloped down the hill. The landscape outside was of a foreign land: no fences, no sycamore trees, only the chimney of the neighbor’s house rose from the scorched ground.

The car at the bottom of the hill took us toward the ocean and stopped at Sofie’s nanny’s house. I remembered that lady in glasses who hummed with glee when Sofie spooned her rice dishes. Now she was also babysitting Sofie’s parents and me. All screamed with joy when I arrived. The man let me out for a bath in a dish and offered a juicy leaf of lettuce and a pile of grains.

“The canary from a coal mine!” they pointed at the black fingerprints on my yellow feathers.

They didn’t matter to me. A song as bright as life cascaded from my smeared beak and widened the smiles on everyone’s faces.

After that day, the scene changed often as we moved from place to place. A shouting match with a landlord in one, an all-night wailing of sirens around another, a tiny room in an old house, barely fitting three humans, to say nothing of a bird.

Unfamiliar people brought Sofie books, old toys and a wooden play theater. No place to store it all and no time for the show. The woman in a black sweater crouched above the laptop and as the mountain of receipts and papers on the desk grew, the level of the red liquid in a green bottle next to it lowered.

And that’s how it went, day after day, until one morning I woke up to an open door of my cage. A rectangle of the blue sky and tree branches in the white doorframe pulled me like a portal to a new life. I took a leap.

“Baby is out!” I heard the cry behind me as I flopped my wings to a limb in the green canopy of a nearby tree.

The man in the white T-shirt and Sofie ran to the tree trunk and waved “Come down, Baby!”

Neighboring kids gathered, their curious faces turned up in search of a climbing infant.

I have never been so free! The curious blackbirds and sparrows next to me and the shouting humans below remained in a different world. Mine became a never-ending song of independence.

It stopped when my tree branch shook. With the next tremble I flew off, pirouetting into an unknown landscape. People holding towels and shirts dashed after me. From a purple-flowered bush to the patio of an old lady who could only watch the chase through lowered glasses. From a hot lid of a garbage can to the top of a plastic fence behind which angry cars ripped the air in opposite directions.

Should try to fly over this line of death? If I manage to cross, no one will follow. Would I survive on the other side? Will I starve like in my young days or get caught in the claws of a ruthless predator?

My heart, unaccustomed to long flights and life-altering decisions rattled fast. Another moment of hesitation and a towel landed on me and it became dark.

Next, I was back in the cage, door closed. It didn’t open the next day or the day after. I sat in the corner, opening my beak only to pick a few grains of millet. Indifferent to the events outside, I lost track of monotonous days until the morning when the cardboard boxes reappeared, crowding the room.

“Baby, we are going home this weekend. Aren’t you excited?” Sofie jingled.

When the truck with all the possessions puffed its way to the to the top of our canyon, the house with a fresh coat of white paint glared from an empty lot.

My atrium was gone but a large cage with an open door waited in the living room.

After a reconnaissance flight I landed on top of my new home. Humans too sat down at the shiny brown table that smelled of glue.

These three are the only family I have; they care about me as they do for each other. Their life is not free either. It is arranged in a series of cells with numbers they post on the fridge.

The man pressed the paintings against the wall while Sofie poked the air with her finger in four directions from the distance. One landscape of a sunlit emerald forest and another of snowy plovers combing the sandy beach. The woman slid the metal rings of the crispy beige curtains on the rods to reveal the view on the canyon.

Is the hawk still patrolling the sky? Did the blue jays return to recover their buried loot? I craned my neck to inspect the scene.

I opened my beak.

Have I forgotten how to sing?

A black cloud devoured the sun and it began snowing. Only it wasn’t snow. Waltzing in a rhythmless dance the flakes landed everywhere. The kind I saw on the day of my escape from the fire dragon. The gray snowflakes of sorrow.