Fiction
Watching
by Jolene McIlwain
The eagle won’t let the sunlight hit it in such a way I can capture its tail wings, those evasive black tips on all that white. Never.
High above the trees it soars. Most times its pure white parts blend with sky, a magic trick, its bald white head all gone but for a bit of yellow. And when it flies low to the riverbank hunting, oh, I lose those lovely browns. Rarely does it come in, expose itself, mid-flora, rarely does it hover over the mid-river where I might shoot the ideal—the water mirroring skylight.
It has to remain unseen, unknown, unshot. But I know it’s there. My lens has caught it, shifting, grainy, halfway through the frame. Underexposed. Overexposed. I’ve captured so many things these ways.
I scan for feathers on both sides of the river. I have fifteen. They’re hidden in the closet with my cameras, lenses, old, mottled slides, canisters of undeveloped film, slippery negatives, with all my other finds. Evidence that many unseen things exist.
Each morning, scouting for the raptor, I glimpse the same man arrive across the river at her place twenty minutes after her husband leaves, sometimes twenty-five, twenty-three. Of course, I’d say I’m searching for a slip of muted color, a cut of flight through the fog, but I can’t keep myself from swinging the lens midway between the water’s edge and treetops, straight from my cabin to hers. He almost kissed her outside her door this morning. Again. Inside they’ve made love and they’ve fucked. I’ve zoomed into the blush of it afterward and even three times during it all when she’d forgotten to slide her heavy blinds shut.
They’ve been careless with their wrong, what they’ve gutted there and left exposed, and there will be consequences for what they’ve preyed upon in each other, for that sickened nest they’ve made. If caught, there won’t be flight. She’ll never leave her husband. All that money. But like a lead-infested eagle who’s been eating buckshot from the field-dressings of a kill, she’ll go slack, become guilt-paralyzed. It won’t end well.
I’ve not just watched. I’ve caught them in my frame, captured all they do. I’ve saved it in the closet, too, with those fifteen feathers.

Jolene McIlwain is the author of Sidle Creek, an NPR and Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Her work appears in such publications as Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, LITRO, Heavy Feather Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Jolene is a Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee and her work has been included in the Best Small Fictions anthologies. She’s taught literary theory and analysis at Chatham and Duquesne Universities and currently helps her son facilitate a HipCamp eco-campsite, MuddyMyst, in Western Pennsylvania.