The Silent Quartet
by T. Marie Clover Issue Two: Fiction
Photo by Tom Caillarec
The day the mother died the hummingbirds sat two by two on the citrus tree. A quartet holding vigil. The daughter could not have known a wake was being held when she looked out the bedroom window in amazement. Four green bellied hummingbirds perched on the blood orange tree that had yet to bear fruit. Unmoored by their stillness, the daughter stepped outside and found the mother hanging from the magnolia tree. Eyes wide, the daughter in turn tilted her neck to the side, mirroring the mother’s bent one. She found that the mother had chosen a silken scarf and the just blooming red magnolia to bear the weight of what she no longer could. “Beauty before me” the daughter recalled the mother writing and, in this reverie, she felt a quickening of the child she carried. A first kick. Brought to her knees by the pronouncement of life, tears began to fall on damp soil and crushed fallen blooms.
Unbeknownst to the daughter, one by one the hummingbirds had already taken flight. When she turned to seek their witness, she found them gone, and she alone with the citrus tree had to turn and face the mother. She looked up towards the hanging mother, clinging onto herself, clutching at the newly shaped weight of the child and wept at the beauty and the beauty making.✦
T. Marie Clover is a death companion and literary worker, transfigured by nature, and engaging in art practices that make form out of feeling. From the San Francisco Bay Area, California, Clover resides in New Orleans, where they spend their time curating book selections with the public library, contemplating death and dying, hosting gatherings, crafting books, dancing, loving, praying the rosary, and queer mothering.
