Excerpt from The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I can't believe how much I disagree with this theory of my father's. It's actually a bit jarring, disagreeing with him this much. I don't think I've ever felt so certain he was wrong. 

But I also know the ways his brain filled in the blanks of logic with feeling and desire, the ways his sense of what was fact and what was fiction would blur and overlap, intersect. I fear because I know this is a trait that he has passed to me, this way of privileging feeling over reason.

"You know better than he did," she says, "that things have a beginning." And I do know, because it was radio astronomy that led us to the theory of the Big Bang. "But I've said enough."

"No—I'm listening. I'm trying to listen. I know you aren't trying to convince me, I know that. I just want to hear what he thought. He never spoke about this."

She kicks one shoe on the sole of the other and vice versa, runs her hand over her shaved head. "Wish your grandfathers were here," she says. I don't say anything then.

"I can see that all this unsettles you," she says, and it does. It actually shakes the core of me, feels the way you feel when you've read a horror story and it haunts you and in order to calm your mind you tell yourself it's fake, only to learn later it's actually based on a story that's true. "He made you a tape once, on your tenth birthday. Explained all of this to you. I think it was on one of the bird tapes. 

Wish we knew where that tape went."

She fingers the notch on the top of her ear, shakes her head.

She drops her cigarette and crushes it, leans down and picks the 

butt up. "He believed there was an order out there, and everyone— you and I and he—we were all falling into it. If he were here now, he would say that our whole life is a kind of order we're falling into slowly, one day at a time," she says, and puts the spent butt in her handkerchief and shoves it in her pocket. 

"It's important to know," she says, and she looks me in the eye, pauses. "What I want you to know is that some truths are uncomfortable. But he preferred to know them, rather than bury his head in the sand."

"But Luce," I say then, "are we talking about our truths? Or just his?" 

She looks up at the sky, then down at her feet. She looks at the cemetery around her. "There is more than one reality," she says, and I can't help thinking she sounds like Sulien. "Each of us has to find our own and then work through how that reality fits in with others' realities—shared and independent. Part of all of this," she says, absently waving her hand perhaps to signify life or perhaps to indicate death, "part of all this is finding your route, one that leads you safely through both your own reality and the realities you share. If you're lucky, you find that route, difficult as it may be. Sometimes it happens relatively early. Sometimes it takes one's whole life. For others, though…" She pauses for a moment. "Sometimes others don't find it at all."

I feel the blood pulsing in my veins. What she is saying reminds me that time moves at a different rate for humans than for birds. 

I feel my face flush. I feel my heart hurt.

I nod to her and she nods back. "Since we're here?" she says, and we walk over to my father's memorial. It's a bench we made him, with his name on it, and the years he spent on the crust of the Earth. Then we walk the perimeter of our town, quietly. We are reflecting. I am thinking that Luce is thinking her twin brother thought this was all a construction, an illusion. I wonder for a moment what that does to the idea of plot, to the idea of cause-and-effect.

For me, I am thinking about my father and the way that he lives 

on, shadow-like, in Luce's face. In the way she walks, in the shape of her fingernail beds. In her voice and in the cowlick above her left eye. My father was composed of these same parts, but separately, and I watch Luce age and I wonder what it would be like for my father. What their friendship would have been like, in what unique ways their siblinghood would have taken shape in these later years. I want to believe that Luce is what is left of my father, but I know better than that. Luce is her own man, and my father is gone. Luce could have left me, and she didn't.

Excerpted from The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager. Copyright © 2024 by Lindsey Drager. Excerpted by permission of Dzanc Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.