The Bird's Nest

by Shirley Jackson

Elizabeth, looking down, sighed because she had a headache, and because she had a headache nearly all the time,

Me

as though stretching, or rubbing against a doorway like a cat, would relieve her—that she was in danger of another attack of what Aunt Morgen called migraine and what Elizabeth thought of as a “bad” time, she moved deliberately and slowly, taking as long as possible over small motions; activity of any kind helped when she felt “bad.” These spells she remembered as from childhood, although Aunt Morgen believed that until the time of her mother’s death Elizabeth had only had temper tantrums, and remarked wisely that Elizabeth’s migraine was a “reaction of some kind.” In any case, the “bad” times had come with increasing frequency of late,

“Are you well, Elizabeth?” Mrs. Arrow asked, peering. “Do you feel all right?” “I have a headache,” Elizabeth said. “Again?” Aunt Morgen asked. “It will go away,” Elizabeth said, sitting still.

Me

(you are patient, sir? Then you and I are left behind, inhabitants of a slower and more leisurely time, when we were not restless with an author for his painstaking efforts to entertain us, and demanded paragraphs of rich and rewarding meditation, and loved our books for the leather and the weight; we are forgotten, sir, you and I, and must take our quiet contemplation in secret, as some take opium and some count their gold)—I

Her time was growing shorter; she felt the minutes pulling at her, and when she looked out of the taxi window at the lights outside she felt them surge sickeningly against her, and had to hold tight to keep her eyes from blurring and she wanted acutely not to breathe.

and she remembered, with a kind of sadness, that she had never before come to look at this picture, although she had passed by it many times. Here at last, she thought, is a choice entirely my own.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I suppose I am really talking? I’m not just moving my mouth and waving my arms and not making any noise? You do hear me? Because it is beginning to look to me like you don’t care in the least whether I talk or not, or whether the doc sees you or not, or whether we go out or stay in or whether we eat or don’t eat or whether I live or don’t live or whether I’m happy or not; I keep feeling that when I work to make something special for your dinner that you used to like once and then forget to tell you what it is you don’t even know what you’re eating.”

was thinking what it must feel like to be a prisoner going to die; you stand there looking at the sun and the sky and the grass and the trees, and because it’s the last time you’re going to see them they’re wonderful, full of colors you never noticed before, and bright and beautiful and terribly hard to leave behind. And then, suppose you’re reprieved, and you get up the next morning and you’re not dead; could you look again at the sun and the trees and the sky and think they’re the same old sun and sky and trees, nothing special at all, just the same old things you’ve seen every day? Not changed at all, just because you don’t have to give them up?”

She laughed, too, holding both their arms. “I’m happy,” she said, just as she had that afternoon. “I know who I am,” she said, and walked on with them, arm in arm, and laughing.