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

warblers
kingbirds
troupials
orioles
thrushes
vireos
sanderlings
cuckoos
flycatchers
and other tanagers

that have plummeted 110 stories to the pavement of Fulton Street.

By that time, the doorman in charge of the main entry to the skyscraper will have finished his shift and will be stepping outside to find the fallen birds, confirming the fear that plagues him each spring and fall. As on recent mornings, he will be troubled by the bodies that carpet the street with their recently deflated chests, with the vital mist of their breath still dissolving in the dawn. He feels a stab of rage as he observes on the asphalt the silence of wings that once lived to defend the air. He is afflicted by all those aborted journeys, by the painful peace of inert flesh that once was millimetric pulses distilled into dance.

He knows, because he was raised by a grandmother who taught him to find in that north the flocks she saw as a girl in Tennessee, that birds are majesty and good omen. To honor them, and to soften his grief, he has been giving them funerals. As he does whenever he finds such a massacre on the pavement, he will scoop as many little bodies as his large hands allow into his backpack and carry them the hour and a half it takes to reach his apartment in the Bronx by subway. He and his daughter will bury them in the corner of a nearby park, under the shade of a cedar far from the path, near other graves they dug in the spring and the autumn before. The little girl will make a cross of sticks for each one and will sing a song she made up, during the last burial season, to say goodbye. She has begun to intuit that, even in death, these bodies that lived to defy gravity are company to her. That autumn, she will begin to understand what her father has told her: that eyes, hearts, muscles, and feathers will one day mix with cosmic dust to become foliage and berries and roots. That everything the city tries to pave over, those layers of dirt and clay that appear beneath the cement when the electrical company's machines punch holes in the street, is star and tumult, tendon and blood and flight. The trace of countless movements. And she will feel a bit less like a little girl, a bit more lost and less inclined to believe that the world is made of games and sweets.

An ornithologist who studies the migration of endangered birds will notice on his computer screen that morning a strange detour in the journey begun a week prior in Vermont by a cerulean warbler he has been tracking for two years. The tiny sensor—complete with geolocator, accelerometer, magnetometer, and thermometer, which he attached to the soft blue of the bird's back in order to discern the exact path of its journeys to and from South America—will report a series of unusual movements near the southern tip of Manhattan, then a slow return north. The device, which must have survived the impact that extinguished the bird's intentions, will be transmitting its signal from a park in the Bronx. The scientist will arrive a few days later and, searching for his treasured warbler, will stumble upon the small crosses in little mounds of dirt that mark the improvised cemetery. Unearthing several birds, he will dig until he finds the geolocator still clinging to the blue-winged body and limp neck into which worms have begun to bore. He will notice the glimmer lingering on the regal white breast of the animal he believes to be his. He will never know who buried her there, or why, and it will be hard for him to accept that the small bird he chose to accompany from a distance in her travels from north to south to north to south to north along the continent could now be a corpse mourned by others. That someone else could claim her, someone who knows nothing of routes, hormones, conservation status, or extinction risk. Someone who has no idea how hard the creature was to catch and tag. He momentarily considers staying at the warbler's tomb to interrogate the undertaker when he returns. But he will decide against fighting over bones. He will take the decomposing bird, sensor still attached, with him in a sterile bag along with two other warblers he finds buried nearby, though not before returning the rest of the flock to their eternal beds.

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.