#668 Bird Whistle- Fatima Shaik
This could be a beautiful New Orleans Love story, or this story could be a love letter to New Orleans—like most of the stories in this collection, What Went Missing and What Got Found. A recent Widower, a local neighborhood doctor, deals with life without his wife. The neighborhood is changing and he tries his best to hold onto what he remembers of the good times.
Once a day at dawn, a woman comes by his fence and whistles to the birds. She was his wife’s lifelong friend and she is mute, perhaps by choice. They would spend morning coffee together. The whistling would get louder the more days that would pass without seeing each other. Now she still comes by, and he waves out the window.
In the refrigerator are a few meals left that his wife had prepared. He has been eating them slowly, but now with only one left, he is afraid to heat it up. Because of his reputation, and a chance earlier meeting outside, three local criminals come barging in one evening, one with a bullet wound. They demand medical attention and food. One of them heats up his wife’s last dish over the Doctor’s resistance. Before the meal is consumed, the warbling of the bird whistler comes ringing through the house, scaring off the hoodlums. He brings the meal out to her, and she in turn feeds it to the birds.
I don’t know exactly how she does it, but like Anthony Doerr stories read earlier, Shaik infuses a subtle but permeating spirit in her stories, making them float in your consciousness slowing everything down and blowing a warm New Orleans breeze over everything she writes. Stunning!
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