by Melissa Goodnight

1. When my kid goes to school and my husband goes to work, I stand in my dimly lit kitchen and sip my coffee and consider the stained glass pieces hanging in my window.  
2. I collect the pieces from flea markets and thrift stores because they are heavy and old and they remind me of a time when one person taught another the art of something complicated and delicate. 
3. I grasp for a sound to articulate this feeling, a tink or a clang or a clink. 
4. I admire the soldered joints and wonder who made the turkey from the flea market off I-285 or the cardinal on a pear from a thrift store in Arkansas. My pieces are birds, save for the fruit and a solitary heart, dangling from a black chain. 
5. I sip my coffee and eye the mourning dove from a place I’ve already forgotten. 
6. The dove reminds me of my mother’s pet bird, the one that kept her company for over a decade when I moved away, whose feathers fell around her like Midwest snow and I’d come home to find my mother vacuuming and mumbling about caged animals and speaking in clicks and coos to soothe. 
7. I wonder what my sister told my mother at the vet’s office the day the doctor said it was time for the bird to be euthanized, that she’d lived long enough. My sister signed the paperwork and the doctor administered a tiny needle to a tiny bird and my mother walked outside with a wooden box. 
8. I can’t remember where I found the stained-glass dove and I want to know what my sister said to my mother the day they buried her bird.  
9. Once, I drove my mother through the Flint Hills of Western Kansas. We had no words left between us and the car filled with the hum of straight-line prairie winds and staticky songs from Wichita. My mother tapped her ring on the wooden box she held. Inside was my brother’s only son, all five-foot-something of him, all of his 33 years, in a box on his grandmother’s lap. 
10. I finish my coffee and decide it’s okay that I don’t know exactly what my sister said to our mother. It’s okay if I don’t remember where I found the mourning dove.