19 Feb 2026

Only Child

fiction by Sam Thielman

I was about ten years old, I think. Maybe twelve. I was riding with my dad and mom and brothers in the back seat of our old green minivan, the one with the big dent in the side from the time dad went whipping around the corner too fast in a parking garage. This would have been a few years after that, when we were driving through Tennessee to visit my grandparents in Kentucky. And before podcasts or streaming audio, so dad had this mail-order service that rented gigantic plastic cases full of cassette tapes—sometimes a dozen or more—and we would listen to some actor read a murder mystery or one of the Jeeves novels. It was after the flood, though. So we couldn’t go too close to the trees.

I love my dad. He is maybe the worst driver in the world. Once when he was stationed in Germany he took us to a New Year’s Eve party and drank a bunch of champagne and then when it was time to head home he got on the autobahn going the wrong way. Germans are mostly really good, responsible drivers and nobody hit us. Also because Germans are mostly really good, responsible drivers, there were no traffic cops. Without mom I’m the only girl in the family.

We were driving, as I say, through Tennessee. Especially on the first part of the trip, we saw a lot of houses with fallen trees lying through them because of the flood, and there were places where we could see the nests half-built in the wreckage. The old men flapped their wings and landed on the black shingled roofs of the ruined houses, watching us as we drove by. They were naked and murmuring, preening their feathers with their false teeth and shaking their wattles in dismay as they watched us pass. A few were dragging a doe carcass toward a nest made out of slats from window shutters and chicken wire. They didn’t like to come near the road, so they left us alone.