Excerpt from Only a Little While Here by María Ospina, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Only a Little While Here

He has no desire for skyscrapers; what he wants is forest. But he must be exhausted, and this time, despite the wisdom of his fibers, he does not seem to know how to find it. Nor do the others. Bewitched by the light, they swirl around the sharp tip of a building that attracts and ignores them, that flaunts its electric victory, its hunger for steel and glass, for cables and ownership, and shoots them through with its glow. The meteorological radar captures them that night in their trance, though not entirely. Thousands of restless bodies amass in the form of a vast green stain that clouds the experts' screens. Later, a distressed scientist will analyze the image and report the disaster. But the radar is not able to reveal the thrust of those, the feathers in frantic movement, the fury of wings and tail feathers flashing in the glow of that deceptive high-rise. Yellow, gray, and spotted birds; brown, red, and greenish-black ones; white, orange, and blue. Disoriented wings and weary bodies that before this trap were all purpose and thirst for their destination.

If someone were to open a window that September night, up there in the Manhattan sky (but who would do that in a climate-controlled office building where windows are for having your back to?), or if one of those ornithologists who some times climb to the top of the building were there to record the song of those lost birds, over the sounds of traffic she would pick up their uncommon cries, their entreaties. She would notice the clamor of their panic, their desperation to learn from others trapped in the same bright spiral why their compass is stuck, why they can't keep moving south. Where is that path charted by the stars and recalled by their sinews since before they made their first journey? Where is the route followed resolutely for thousands of years by those of their kind? If someone were to listen carefully to that dissonant clamor, she would venture that they are asking all this.

The scarlet tanager has been part of this circular flock for only the few hours since, transformed into a nocturnal long-distance flier, he left his Connecticut forest and lost track of the stars as they vanished from the sky. Now he flies like the rest toward the garish lights of the tower that call to him, seeking to draw him off course. The tanager's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother (like so many mothers here) passed through what was by then already called New York on her way south, without glass and filaments to hold her in thrall. And, of course, on her way back north. For thousands of years, his ancestors had survived predators and storms. For centuries, they watched humans shuffle around beneath them as they charted their course, bridging tree and star. Only to have it all come crashing down now.

Lost in the vortex, the tanager flies robotically—perplexed, maybe, by his own impulse—among the cluster of cramping fans goading him on. Perhaps it is the company of hundreds of other large and small birds shrieking and flapping the same detour, or perhaps it is the current of air they create with each beat of their wings forced to worship electrical light that urges him on in this orbit that equalizes them all, that melts the differences between them.

In the images transmitted by the camera installed at the top of the highrise to offer panoramic views of New York to any curious individual online, someone might discern the rapid movement of those small bodies that interrupt the Financial District's skyline. She might mistake them for insects and conclude, as people often do, that this is all routine. No one would know with any certainty that the furious body of the scarlet tanager is one of the thousands of splotches on the venerated panorama of steel, cement, and sky. Or that all around him exhausted birds are collapsing after hours spent flying in a spiral. When morning finally dilutes the electrical glow, two volunteers from the Bird Alliance catalog the corpses of

Excerpted from Only a Little While Here by María Ospina. Copyright © 2026 by María Ospina. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.