Sparrow

By Brian Kindall

Moonbeam Children's Book Award Gold Medal winner for Pre-teen Fiction 2022.

Global Book Award Gold Medal winner for children's literature 2022.

A boy. A wish. A secret desire gone horribly wrong.

 

Timothy Sperling misses his mom and dad terri

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diving Boy Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781736106860

Brian Kindall

Brian Kindall is an author living in the mountains of Central Idaho, a world with long winters perfectly designed for holing up and writing novels. His books range in diversity from classically evergreen middle-grade novels - Blue Sky, Pearl, and Sparrow - to the ongoing adult fiction series, The Epic of Didier Rain novels, Delivering Virtue and Fortuna and the Scapegrace, to his most recent publication, Escape from Oblivia – One man’s midlife crisis gone primal. His accolades include starred reviews at BlueInk and Foreword Reviews, finalist for ForeWord Reviews literary novel of the year award (Delivering Virtue), A Seal of Excellence awarded by Awesome Indies (Delivering Virtue), and Editor’s Choice at the Historical Novel Society (Delivering Virtue). Twisted humor is a given in Brian’s work, as those long winters mentioned earlier tend to drive a writer slightly mad.

Book preview

By Brian Kindall

SPARROW © 2022 Brian Kindall

All Rights Reserved.

Cover Art and Design by Blair Kelly

ISBN: 978-1-7361068-6-0

LCCN: 2021922885

For more information visit www.briankindall.com

Other middle-grade fiction titles by Brian Kindall:

BLUE SKY

PEARL

Adult fiction titles by Brian Kindall:

SIDESHOW

DELIVERING VIRTUE

FORTUNA AND THE SCAPEGRACE

ESCAPE FROM OBLIVIA

For Jamie and Wren

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

HICCUP

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

EPILOGUE

Other titles published by Brian Kindall

Connect with Brian Kindall

CHAPTER ONE

One quiet night, in the little city of Candela, at the beginning of a winter so preposterous historians have since pooh-poohed it as merely a legend, a boy, sound asleep in his bed, heard a whispering in his ear.

Sparrow, came the voice. Sparrow, wake up.

The night was cold, the room chilly as a tomb, and there was nothing the boy wanted less than to leave his somewhat warm and reasonably comfortable bed. But only one person had ever called him Sparrow – one loving, wonderful person. Although it had been a long time, he still remembered her voice.

Again, she called to him.

Sparrow.

Her voice tugged at his lonesome heart.

Hurry, Sparrow. Wake up!

And so, full of hope, the boy forced himself awake.

But when he blinked open his eyes, his hopeful heart dropped away inside of him. His mother was not hovering over him as he had imagined. She was not, it seemed in that instant, anywhere at all.

Oh, the boy mumbled to the close, dark ceiling. It was only a dream.

Disappointment washed through him like ice water, causing him to gulp at the lump that had tightened his throat.

He lay still for a moment in the silence, until, again, clear as birdsong, his mother’s voice came to him.

Sparrow, be quick! Before it’s too late. You must go to the window and see!

The boy couldn’t be sure he wasn’t still dreaming. He thought maybe he was. His head was groggy, and he was mixed up with a sort of middle-of-the-night confusion, but the urgency in his mother’s voice caused him to act automatically. He threw back the quilts, swung his legs out of bed, and placed his stocking feet on the cool wooden floor. In the next breath, he stepped over to the window and looked out.

A maze of rooftops lay below him in the near-darkness, their chimneys smoldering. Above it all – above the slumbering, unsuspecting citizens of Candela, above the thin fog drifting ghostly in the streets – lay a sky full of stars.

Almost at once, he saw it.

There!

In a flash, a single meteor blazed a bright blue path across the sky.

Then it was gone.

As quickly as that.

The boy let his fingertips rest on the frosted glass. He knew just what he needed to do now. When he was still quite young, his mother had taught him the proper procedure for wishing upon a star. He understood that time was of the essence. A great cosmic clock was ticking, and an opportunity was already preparing to slip back into oblivion.

And yet the boy faltered.

He paused.

Not because he was unprepared. Certainly not! Hadn’t he been carrying his greatest wish around with him forever? Hadn’t he been poised for this exact moment’s arrival? Yes. He knew for sure what he wanted above all else in the world, but he couldn’t, in this moment of truth, make himself utter it to the sky.

I wish… he began. That was all he could get out. I wish…

The problem was that since the last time he had seen his mother, the boy had accidentally become practical. It had snuck up on him without warning. It wasn’t his natural way of being. Indeed, it isn’t natural for any boy. But through certain circumstances, it had happened, so that now he found himself torn between the two extremes of what he truly wanted, and what he felt he should want.

I should wish for… He could hardly make himself say it. I should wish for ‘the return of the world’s love affair with feathers.’

It wasn’t his own phrase, but, rather, that of his uncle. The boy winced at how absurd it sounded on the frosty air. That would fix our family’s muddle, but…

The boy couldn’t make himself wish for that. Much as he felt he should, he could not. Neither could he make the unlikely wish that he wanted most of all.

I wish… he said. I wish…

The words just jumbled up at his teeth.

How could he be sure that his mother was anything more than a dream?

Maybe his wish was just too impractical.

How could he know what was the right thing to do?

Maybe if you could tell me, he said hopefully, speaking to his invisible mother.

She didn’t answer. She had gone with his waking. The moment of her whispering had passed and was already a fading echo.

Oh, said the boy. He nodded to the window. I see.

The stars waited patiently in the sky.

Planet Earth held itself perfectly still.

Well, said the boy, finally. Well, I guess I wish that…

He nearly gained courage enough to say what he wanted. He tensed his muscles and squared his thin frame to the window, but right at the moment of offering it up, he trembled.

And then, shoulders slumping, he sighed.

I guess I just wish that it would snow.

The stars, if they heard his feeble request, made no indication that the boy could discern from their business-as-usual twinkling.

The world, which had been holding its position – waiting, idling – began, again, with an imperceptible jolt, to spin slowly on its course.

Kid’s stuff, said the boy, and he tried to laugh, but couldn’t.

He shrugged at the window, and then turned and went back to bed. Pulling the blankets over his head, he forced himself to forget his dream, his mother, feathers, and everything else in the whole wide world. It was just too much bother.

He muttered to his pillow. It’s too hopeless to hope.

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But you can be sure the sky had heard.

Those ever-listening stars.

So, as the little city of Candela slept on through the night, and as Sparrow slipped back into his own restless sleep, all the universe set itself to the task of making the boy’s dubious wish come true.

CHAPTER TWO

Of course, the boy had a real name – one written in a big official book in the church across town – and that name was Timothy Sperling.

Although, maybe Sparrow suited him best.

To begin with, he was slight, as if held together with bird bones.

True, he had arms instead of wings, and he couldn’t fly, or even jump very far, but his eyes were shining and black, bringing to mind the eyes of a sparrow, or a finch, and his dust-brown hair stuck out at all angles, much like the ruffled plumage of a wind-blown bird.

But maybe the thing that made Tim seem most like a bird was his ability to sing. It was as if he had been born with the throat of an angel, or a lark. The music he made was not strictly that of a boy imitating a bird but came from that place hidden inside all the creatures of the world, both animal and human alike. It was the lullaby of foreverness. It was the sigh of the earth as it met with the laughter of the sun and stars. It was, unfortunately, a music that people have somehow, through the process of getting themselves civilized, let slip too far down into their souls to ever call it forth without considerable effort. Few even hear it above life’s daily din.

Tim made those sounds naturally. They came out of him as easily as breath, both when he was sad, and, less often these days, when he was happy.

The birds taught him how to do it.

His feathered friends.

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The next dawn, after the night of his dream and the shooting star and the squandered wish, Timothy Sperling lay buried in his nest of quilts.

The air was silent – almost.

Something had changed.

He heard tapping on the window. That was not unusual.

Then he heard a single, muffled Cheep! followed by a Chirp!

That was normal, too. It was the way Tim woke up every day.

And yet, mixed in between that cheep and chirp and that soft tapping was another sound Tim didn’t recognize. He listened harder, trying to understand.

It was the smallest noise, barely there at all, just one notch above silence itself.

It’s like, he told himself, tiny pieces of glass breaking.

It’s like…, he mumbled. What?

Tim couldn’t be sure. It was unfamiliar, and unsettling besides. That sound carried a certain feeling he couldn’t quite place. Was it marvelous, or dreadful?

It seems, he whispered sleepily, like both marvelous and dreadful at the same time.

Either way, he soon decided he wasn’t going to figure it out with his head under the covers, and so with a yawn and a stretch, he pried himself from his bed.

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Now, the theory behind the heating system of the tallest building in Candela was that the warmth of the fire burning in the grand fireplace on the ground floor – those enormous rooms occupied by Tim’s uncle – would rise, as heat does, and spread to all the other rooms above. Maybe that worked for the second floor, and even the high-ceilinged warehouse rooms on the third and fourth and so on, for a ways, but by the time that warmth had traveled all the way up to the attic where Tim had his own room, it had become nothing more than a memory to the smoke passing through the chimney beside his bed. The small room, that is to say, stayed very cold, barely warmer than the open air on the other side of the window.

So the first thing Tim did every morning when he got out of bed was shiver. And then this morning, more violently, he shivered again.

Hopping on one foot to the other, he crossed to the window.

And that, as you probably guessed, is when he saw it; that was when Tim understood the source of that mysterious sound.

Oh! he gasped. Oh!

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For the longest time the boy just stood there, wrapped in his own arms, his dark eyes wide and glistening with the dim light glowing through the glass. Then he bent slowly forward, squinting into the air above the city.

Oh!

There, like downy feathers dropping from the clouds, a zillion snowflakes drifted onto the rooftops of Candela. They landed in the streets and alleys. They capped the lampposts and fringed the signs over shop doors. Piling one on top of another, those snowflakes had already begun their slow and patient business of turning everything completely and unconditionally white.

Oh, said Tim, one more time, and he might have repeated it a dozen times more had he not been interrupted from his daze by a now very impatient tapping on the window.

He threw the latch, swinging the window open to the morning.

A flurry of sparrows and snowflakes poured into the room.

The tiny birds perched on the boy’s shoulders and on top of his head; the snowflakes dashed against his chest, and then dropped to the floor around his feet.

Hello, laughed Tim. Good morning.

Oddly, Tim felt he was greeting the snowflakes as well as the birds. Somehow, they seemed friendly too.

The sparrows shook themselves, drying their wings. They fluttered around the room.

Tim held his arm out the window, letting the snowflakes fall into his palm. He turned his hand in the air. He couldn’t help but smile. Except for pictures in books, he had never seen snow before.

Chirp! called the birds. Chirp! Chirp! Chirp!

Okay, okay, said the boy. Hold your horses.

He pulled a sack from under the shelf and poured a mound of seeds into a bowl. He then placed the bowl on the windowsill where the birds surrounded it, pecking at their breakfast.

To anyone else those drab little creatures might have all looked alike. One ragged street sparrow is, after all, pretty much the same