The Last Orange Grove

My grandfather, Emil, was my anchor in a world that felt constantly adrift. He never called me by my given name, Marisol, but always ‘Naranja,’ because of my fiery copper hair, a color he swore matched the sunsets over his beloved orange grove. When he passed from a sudden heart attack, my world tilted. I was nine, and the silence where his voice used to be was a physical weight.

Years later, at fourteen, I found myself in his old, weathered gardening shed, sorting through boxes of his things. Among the rusted tools and seed packets, I found a small, hand-carved wooden bird, a robin, with paint chipped from years of handling. He had made it for me just before he died, a promise of spring, he’d said. I clutched it, wishing with every fiber of my being that I could hear his laughter one more time, that I could sit on the porch with him and watch the fireflies blink in the dusk.

That night, I placed the robin on my bedside table and fell asleep to the distant hum of crickets. I dreamed of the grove, but it was wrong. The trees were bare, their branches like gnarled fingers reaching for a gray sky. The ground was cracked and dry, and a thin, sour mist curled between the trunks. I heard a sound, a dry, rasping rattle, and I turned to see the robin, but it was not the same. Its paint was dull, its wooden eye seemed to follow me, and its beak opened and closed, emitting a sound like sand scraping over stone.

‘Marisol,’ it said, but it was not my grandfather’s warm voice. It was thin, reedy, and wrong. ‘Why did you leave me here?’ I tried to run, but my feet were rooted to the parched earth. The robin hopped closer, its head cocked unnaturally. ‘You have my song,’ it whispered. ‘Give it back.’

I woke with a scream lodged in my throat. The robin sat on my nightstand, exactly as I had left it, but I could have sworn its head was tilted a fraction to the side. I ignored it, telling myself it was a nightmare from grief and too much cheese before bed. But the next night, the dream returned, more vivid. The grove was darker, and the robin was perched on a withered branch that bent toward me like a beckoning finger. ‘You took my song,’ it croaked. ‘You took my spring.’ Its wooden eye glinted with a malevolent light. ‘I will take yours.’

When I woke, I found a single orange on my windowsill, but it was shriveled and black, oozing a sticky, foul-smelling liquid. I threw it into the yard, but the next morning, there were more, scattered like seeds across my bedroom floor. The house began to feel oppressive, the air thick and sweet with decay. My mother grew pale and weak, complaining of a constant chill. My father found dead sparrows on the porch, their tiny bodies stiff and brittle. I knew, with a cold certainty, that this was my fault. My desperate wish had summoned something, but not my grandfather.

One evening, I gathered the courage to confront the robin. I held it in my trembling hands and whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to hear him again.’ The wooden head turned, slowly, to face me. Its eye was no longer dull; it glowed with a tiny, ember-like light. ‘You cannot bring back the dead,’ it said, its voice now a chorus of dry leaves. ‘But you can join them.’ The room grew cold, and I felt a tugging at my chest, as if something were pulling me inside the tiny wooden body. The last thing I saw was my reflection in the robin’s eye, and I was not me anymore; I was a withered, gray creature, trapped in a wooden shell.

The next morning, my mother found the robin on the floor, its little head cracked in two. She wept, but not for me; she thought I had run away in the night. As she picked up the pieces, she noticed a small, fresh orange on her bed, perfectly ripe and glowing with an impossible warmth. She bit into it, and it tasted like summer, like a memory of happiness. She never knew that the juice was tinted with the faintest hint of red, or that a tiny, wooden bird in a nearby gutter was watching her with a glint of something like satisfaction.