Chimney Swift
by Matt Barrett
When the third chickadee lay dead in my neighbor’s yard, Mr. Jenkins tucked a steak knife in his pocket, greeted a cat in our cul-de-sac, and stabbed it in its belly. After that, he was known as the cat killer. People steered clear of him. Supposedly he’d done it while Mrs. G rolled a trash bin to the end of her driveway. My father said Mr. Jenkins opened the lid and dumped the cat’s body inside, even as Mrs. G held the handle.
The next time Mr. Jenkins found a dead bird in his yard, he placed traps on his back porch with bits of food and water to lure the cats inside. The ones he caught howled all through the night. We figured that was a warning to those who let their cats roam free. Like he was saying, You can let them out, but I’m the warden now.
One day he found an injured chimney swift on the curb outside his home. I ran over to see it for myself. Its broken wing had a speck of blood where the bone jutted from its shoulder. Mr. Jenkins tried to soothe it, his hand on the bird’s back. Its chest swelled, its eyes darted. From up close, its eyes were not just black.
Was there hope, I wanted to know.
Hope?
Mr. Jenkins didn’t seem to understand the word. “Hope?” he asked, turning it over on his tongue. “Hope?” Like a bug had flown in his mouth and he wanted to spit it out.
He laid the bird in a shoebox and placed it in the shade. It was best if the box stayed dark, he said. So the bird might feel at peace.
I didn’t like the sound of that—at peace. Peace was what we said to comfort ourselves when our Border Collie died. Or when my grandfather, sick in the hospital, held my hand and said he’d found his peace.
His peace. Well, I hoped to God I’d never find mine.
“You know where chimney swifts go in the winter?” Mr. Jenkins asked. I didn’t. “The Amazon,” he said. “Ecuador, Peru, Brazil. They fly down there and come back here. For what?”
I pulled the cloth aside just enough to see its face. Its head kind of looked like a racoon—dark feathers rounding the eyes, a little white along its chin.
Mr. Jenkins knelt beside me to look inside. “Some kid like you was probably down there watching it fly.”
I could picture him, too. Some kid like me in Peru and some kid like me in Brazil, watching this same chimney swift dart through the sky, scooping up insects.
I told my mother about the boy in Peru, who’d wait in his yard for the chimney swifts to return. I hadn’t thought of it like that until I said it aloud: the birds returning to him. That there was no leaving really, just a settling in. An at home there and an at home here.
The world’s a small place, but the wings of a bird are smaller. The speck of blood where its bone split, a single red dot on its feathers—probably less blood than a finger prick. And still it flew all this way, with just these little drops inside, with just these little bones.
In the shade of Mr. Jenkins’ yard, I sat and waited with the quiet understanding I could not sit and wait forever.
Matt Barrett’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, The Forge, Pithead Chapel, the minnesota review, River Teeth, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro and teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College. He tweets @MBarrettWriter.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Chimney Swift”? The original version, which I wrote a little over a year ago, was about twice as long as this—the narrator’s brother was a central figure in the piece and took up a little too much space on the page. When I stepped away from this story for several months, I realized he took the focus away from what really mattered: these beautiful little birds that travel each year from places like my home all the way down to the Amazon. Once I removed the brother, the rest of the story fell into place. It was more focused and exciting to read, and while the brother may live on in future pieces I write, his greatest contribution was stepping aside for the real story to unfold.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD