About this story
Married at nineteen in your mother's gray, you write the garrison town in a stable loft at six in the morning and hide two hundred pages in a deed box your husband opens. Thirty-six chapters carry that hidden manuscript to a house off the Euston Road under your maiden name, and to the song's thirteenth line.
How it opens
Sunshine woke colors before you understood names, and colors taught you to demand explanations.
Jane NettlesThose spots were always on the thrush's egg, Beth; you only noticed them now.
You remembered the shell as blue first and brown-spotted later, which made memory feel authoritative.
Spots just came, and saying always does not put them there sooner.
Choose
I may be wrong, but I still remember seeing plain blue.
Show me another egg tomorrow, and I will look longer.
Perhaps the spots hid until they trusted me.