Weaning Dove

elise cheesman

“In April / I will go away / to far off Spain / or old Bombay / and dream about / hot soup all day” — Chicken Soup with Rice, Maurice Sendak

Mourning doves are most active in the morning, because they are known to be the bringer of new beginnings, and because they are beautiful birds, not the type to disappoint. However, there is something about the sunset, the late bloom that marks a different set of new, that draws them back out. It is probably because of the food, the new foam-like layer of seeds on the ground that they swing downward downward downward to find, hold in their stomachs for later digestion, in a warmer, more comfortable environment, like their nests. The space where they hold their food is an elongated part of their esophagus, called their crop. They make a milk-like substance for their chicks there—in the front of their throat, a fingerprint’s width away from their heart.

When the Arkansas sun stopped thieving layers of bark and paint and soft child skin, when it was cool enough for creatures to flutter and roost under the layers of wet fall leaves, my mother would make Avgolemono. Her midterms had just finished, so she was at home, instead of a green cinderblock room or the campus library. She usually began around sunset—she gutted lemon halves and let their husks flutter against the blow of the ventilation fan like thin-stemmed flowers. She pan-fried the tender chicken until it had a new skin of oil.

If I had thought to look outside, there would have been more things that crackled, like the skin of fall leaves breaking off their exoskeleton, or the mourning doves settling, laden down by their season’s worth of work, their stomach full of seeds, their heavy crop. In return, the chicks caw, with their tiny stomachs that so quickly fill with air, they beg and they beg for more.

I was small, too small to see over the counters, too small to provide any real help. I hadn’t quite realized that I would need to learn one day, although the future’s shadow—darker than dried hollyhock—was beginning to perch over me. My mother could no longer fit both of my hands into one of her own. People were beginning to expect that I cared for things I had no interest in, like putting my hair up with thin rubber bands my chubby fingers couldn’t touch without breaking.

After egg and lemon juice had been whisked together, and then into the soup—carefully, so nothing would curdle—and the rice was soft, and the still darkness of fall night was settling in the glass door, she left the pot to simmer near the still-buzzing cooker and read me a small book of poems called Chicken Soup With Rice. I relished her time, the feeling of her fingers in my hair.

It was fully dark now. I couldn’t have seen the scuttle of creatures outside, the mourning doves settling into gutters and the lowest branches of trees, right across from the clear glass panes of the back door. I could not have felt the way the chicks, gradually growing into not-chicks, dug their talons into the bottom of the handmade nest and tore it, the soft pulse pulse of their maturing crop, striding in time with their heartbeat, slowly and carefully moving the throat too. I could not have seen the way they lay in wait, until the crop milk had turned to bone and muscle and glossy feathers. But maybe, I could have felt the time when there was no room for them anymore, their bodies bursting the edge of the nest open, when their stomachs call for seeds instead. They fly south, their round stomach bending backward, begging them to fly back.

Poem after poem about soup, and listening to the murmur of the broth on the stove, it was still always somehow a surprise when she brought a bowl over to me. I was old enough to remember what I liked, but too young to remember the way my favorite foods tasted, or how they got in front of me. Each meal in front of me, for now, was the greatest it ever could be. I ate — the avgolemono thick, hot like crop milk — until I did not have the will to chirp or chatter, only feel the sway of my full belly. I asked my mother to read the poems again.

Elise Cheesman — or Cherry, as she’s known by friends — is a senior at South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where she studies creative writing. She is inspired by the small details that differentiate human lives, and the different ways she can write about them. She has been published in Élan literary magazine.