Cuban Birds by Vanessa Garcia

“I didn’t know it yet, but it was the past that fed this story into the delicate morsel it became, a past that existed before I was born. The undercurrent of what was happening with our little birds was much darker than I’d imagined, full of a desperate need to repair gulfs. It was about being a Cuban exile. About my grandmother’s mother, whom she’d left behind in Cuba.”  This story was originally written and published by Vanessa Garcia in Winter, 2017.