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

When the bereaved scientist freezes the cerulean warbler's cadaver in his laboratory, he will pluck a few of her white and blue feathers to keep in a glass box on his nightstand. He will have no way of knowing, as he analyzes the sensor's data from those days, that for a few hours a scarlet tanager flew close to his bird, brushing against her feathers, perhaps. That the blackwing passed beside the bluewing warbler and the two were joined in a longing for south and in songs of confusion and fury before one of them died.

Fervent, the tanager manages to save himself from that darkness. He circles the incandescent building, completely in its thrall. Perhaps he longs for the infallible signals from his flesh that in other autumns led him south, avoiding this trap. As dawn thins the tower's electric glow, the maelstrom of birds that have withstood this ordeal of flight dissipates, as if the survivors had discovered the door of a cage they had been searching for hours to find. The tanager too exits this captivity to face its effects. Perhaps he is distressed by the twitching of his muscles. Maybe thirst cracks his tongue and exhaustion cramps his tail. Trying not to crash to the ground, he pauses on the sill of a nearby window. He seems to waver. He has saved himself from crumbling onto a Manhattan sidewalk carpeted with chicken bones and melted gum, roiling with hurried, bunioned feet. But this is probably not how he sees his salvation. Perhaps he does not recognize himself in the scraggy and disheveled yellow, reddish, and black feathers he sees reflected in the glass. He rests there for a moment, stunned, as if waiting for his heart to slow a little and for the numbness to abate. The metal below his feet sparkles in the morning light. Finally, he can close his eyes.

Something may have withered in him during this detour, but it is not his devotion to foliage. Battling fatigue, he flies toward a few trees that present themselves atop a lower building. On this hotel rooftop adorned with decorative plants and chairs for sunbathing, a security camera films him as he lands on a hedge and drinks water from a small fountain. It will not capture his movements in the bushes when he breakfasts on a beetle and two moths, nor when the veil of his eyelids drops. The video recording of the bird will live in a database that houses files from hundreds of cameras owned by the security company. It will be deleted one year later without ever being viewed.

In his previous journeys, the tanager had always been able to cover a tremendous distance on the first night. Now, however, having just emerged from the chaos, the vigor of his wings seems disconnected from his flesh. Perhaps standing on a branch on that terrace for a while will bring them back into harmony. It will be weeks before he reaches his cloud forest. Who knows how much the lost night concerns him. Or how he is pierced by the passage of time, which for him might be a tangle of altitude and stars we will never understand. Or something else entirely.

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.