Congratulations, Bart. Thank you for sending this powerful piece to our Short-Shorts Contest. And again, we thank all contestants, judges, and readers of this 2nd MinnPost event. We'll be back in the fall with more short-shorts and a contest of 200 words. Why not practice writing some shorts this summer. Until September ...

Our cockatiel is eating the piano, nip by nip. One day we'll come home to just a twisted jawbone of keys and sprung bouquet of wires, the indigestible bits. Or maybe she will swallow the piano whole, and a feathered baby grand will hover near the ceiling, moving on small wings between the living room and dining room. We'll grow accustomed to it, even stop talking about it at dinner parties, until finally the cockatiel becomes herself again, and life returns to normal.

It's spring. My wife and I are in the yard, raking the leaves we should have raked last fall. The cockatiel is inside, shedding feathers. A painter working on the attic rooms is wearing a wife-beater T-shirt like those our son wore. Thinking her master has returned, the cockatiel lands on his shoulder and starts to sing. He tips a can of paint, which bleeds across the floor.

That same spring a neighborhood girl comes running over to tell me she has seen our son.

But it's a false alarm. He's still dead.

We take the cockatiel in for a check up. The vet says she is healthy and should outlive us all. He says that her chewing is just nesting behavior. He thinks she is adjusting well. We start covering the piano with blankets when the cockatiel is out of her cage.

One night, I decide to sleep in the attic, where our son slept. I wake in the dark to the scream of the wind in the window frame. It has already loosened an aluminum soffit panel. I hear it banging against the siding, outside the room where the cockatiel sleeps. She starts squawking. I hate the wind and want to kill the cockatiel.

Just yesterday she discovered our Southwestern pottery collection and a favorite oil painting depicting the half-mortal, half-spirit Nanabozho as a child, with rabbit ears and legs, sleeping in the arms of his grandmother, Nokomis. We cover the painting and the pottery when the bird is out.

The wind keeps blowing. I want it to shatter the attic window and roar through the studs. I want it to empty me: organs and muscle and tendon and bone, lies and half-lies, loves and half-loves, failures to know, failures to help, guilt, fear, regrets — all torn away like sheets from a line, until I know what's really left to trust.

Bart Galle is a medical educator and visual artist who lives with his wife in the Midway area of St. Paul. He was a 2008-2009 Loft Mentor Series Winner in Poetry and the winner of the 2008 Passager Poetry Contest for writers over 50 and the Fall 2009 Hollingsworth Prize from White Pelican Review for outstanding poem. He was awarded a 2010 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant in poetry. His poetry chapbook, Everything Is True at Once, will be published in 2010 by Passager Books. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals.