Online Journal - The Big Brick Review: Building on the narrative of our lives...brick by brick.

The Big Brick Review 2025 Essay Contest: Honorable Mention ($50)

Building on the narrative of our lives...one brick at a time.

Orphan

by Meredith Doyle

WE DROVE NORTH, skirting Lake Ontario, having marked several potential wedding venues along the route that sat within our modest budget. Our first stop led us to a lonely town – little more than a dusty main street with a vacant café and a deserted secondhand clothing store, the window mannequins left exposed, facing one another in frozen discourse, their inferred anatomy reflecting the stop lights’ incessant reel. We were led to a park – a curated green space cupping Lake Ontario – and walked past a dark theater, a brick playhouse brimming with stacked plastic tables and folding chairs. Posters advertising The King and I were affixed with packing tape to the entry doors, drained of their color. As we passed the building, following a ribbon of asphalt leading down to a short pier, you spotted something hopping in the untended grass.

I was struck by the stark beauty of a little merganser chick, rushing headlong toward the inhospitable shore with her rusty cap and muddled zebra stripes. Knowing my fondness for birds, you thought I would be delighted, but I couldn’t help noticing that she was utterly alone. Often fledglings are not as vulnerable as they appear, with a parent concealed nearby, but her plaintive cheeps were desperate and mournful. Waterfowl dotted the bay but, from this vantage, they were little more than a cluster of bobbing dots, raisins interrupting the horizon. Perhaps her mother and parade of siblings, perhaps a congregation of mallards skimming the bath.

She threw herself into the swell, a churn of grey and algae bloom, and surged forth, over and over, trying to circumvent the violence of the waves. I took your hand and pulled you back toward the car, unwilling to see this through to its conclusion, to spare your tender heart.

There is a picture underneath our living room television. I have looked at this photo every day for two years and am only now seeing its creator. It is your mother watching her husband and her young son, cross-legged in the overgrown ryegrass and reeds, a little boy clutching a sucker in a fleshy fist while he marvels at the plucked yellow foxtail his dad offers the breeze. This space would become a pool, a pool that would house the whole neighborhood, that would welcome the in-home daycare kids, the ones who became lifelong friends. This pool would hold the water that your father would watch meticulously, adjusting the levels with the precision of a chemist. I watched that water sour when your mom got sick. I watched it freeze and fracture and blacken in the August bog. I watched the last geese spy it from the gale and pause in its murk before their southward climb. I watched that pool buckle, slowly and then all at once, flooding your childhood backyard. I watched the grass reclaim it.

We married in July. You were so worried you would sweat through your suit, but it was mercifully cool for high summer and everyone said your mother had orchestrated the perfect weather from above. People like to say those things. Your dad was there of course – velvet tie and emerald pocket square, giving peace signs to the camera and wearing his sunglasses all night like the rockstar he once was. We printed out one of the professional photos of him and put it on our fridge. I remember him stopping over one afternoon and just standing there staring at it, shaking his head. “Who is that old man?” he asked me, with such resignation I could have almost believed he didn’t know. A few months later, he was gone. You were so surprised; you never saw the cracks.

A few weeks ago, you told me you remembered seeing “that tiny bird” reunite with her family. I will leave you with that false memory. It will not be the first time.

Meredith Doyle is a writer and registered nurse from Rochester, NY, who seems to always find her way back here again. This is the first time she has ever submitted a piece anywhere and hopes her debilitating fear of rejection and crippling self doubt will not make it her last.

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