The Hero Was Born Early


          The midwife pressed a bundle into my hands. She moved slowly as if the item might fall apart on contact. I stared dumbfounded at what she had handed to me, holding it like a sapling root ball, unsure if it would withstand a planting.

          The bundle was my baby, so small that the entire body fit in my cupped hands.

          “He probably won’t last the hour,” the midwife said, looking away as soon as my eyes met hers.

          Understanding seeped through me like fresh blood through gauze. Being born preterm near a war zone simply meant death. A military hospital would have no room, regardless of how fast I traveled there. Their own troops would have claimed all beds and supplies. Would they even consider treating the child of an enemy? Unlikely.

          “You must bring him to the temple so the gods can determine his fate,” the midwife said with a woeful shake of her head. “Not many still honor the old ways, but I remember. I remember.”

          In generations past, babies born too early faced this trial. The rarefied air of the sacred temples tested their tiny, not wholly formed lungs. Survival there meant survival anywhere. Few remembered these customs now, but the midwife was of the old generation.

          I didn’t believe in this, but my wife would. My throat constricted. “My Emthee, my wife? How—?”

          “She lost a lot of blood, but she’s stable. I’ll look after her.” 

          She spoke like someone ready to move on to a salvageable case. Before I could respond, she left, leaving me gazing at the space where she had stood seconds before. This midwife wasn’t our usual delivery nurse, as there hadn’t been time for that. My wife’s labor had come on so suddenly that it swept her into unfamiliar hands. 

          Now I stood alone, holding the silent bundle. I wanted to blame this unknown woman or anyone besides the man in the reflection of the cracked mirror.

          My legs moved before my mind could catch up, carrying me outside and into the already merciless morning sun. I trotted along the path, tears blurring my vision. The shoreline beyond warped into an uncanny, alien world. The waves crashed in a rhythmic heartbeat, mocking the frailty in my arms yet urging me forward to my destination. Six years ago, I’d arrived on these shores as a journalist seeking truth, only to find a people struggling against destruction disguised as paternal justice. The irony bit deep: I had come here to document their suffering in the hands of an unjust war, not add to it by marrying one of them and having children.

          The breeze lashed at my face, threading through my hair and stinging at my cheeks like tiny insects. I slowed down and trudged uphill along the temple trail, a twisting scar carved into the mountain, littered with the debris of a shattered world. Among the wreckage of explosions long past, fragments of an old life poked through. A polished table leg lay half-buried in the dust, still clinging to the memory of a family that once ate together. Shards of glass and dishes caught the light, their edges dulled by time. 

          The footpath ended at the temple perched on the windward side of the mountain. The small building stood with wooden beams smoothed by the wind, telling stories of resilience against the ravages of war and weather. Carved with moon phases and birds, the arched doorway was a masterpiece. Generations of reverent fingers had worn the delicately etched wing patterns smooth.
 
          A crow cawed at me from its perch next to the entrance. It sounded like judgment, though I knew it was only a bird. With a head tilt, the carrion studied the bundle and then folded its wings back with a silence that almost seemed like approval. I held its dark gaze for a moment, then stepped into the temple. 

          Inside, tall sculptures stood in silent vigil. A shaft of sunlight cut through the room. Cool air threaded in through unseen vents, soothing my sweaty skin. My steps echoed across the chamber toward the sunken altar, past dry canals that had once carried water, their gentle flow amplifying spoken prayers. Now the canals lie parched, made silent by the dams of a conquering country, my former homeland. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was seeking mercy in a place my people had helped to starve. But where else could I turn?

          The room held me in perfect stillness as if something was about to unfold. 

          Then came the kick against my ribs. 

          I barely breathed as I dragged back the cloth. My son blinked up at me through a light stream of dust motes that looked like wisps of down settling on his cheeks. Perhaps they were actually feathers and not dust, though I couldn’t figure out where they had come from. I dismissed it as a trick of the light, yet years later, it was always those drifting particles I remembered first.

            My newborn’s chest gently rose and fell with each breath on skin so thin I could see a heart beating through a minuscule chest. If grief hadn’t exhausted me, I might have laughed at the angry old man’s expression on his face. The intensity in his eyes captivated me with an ancient gaze, as if he already knew the weight of his existence. His mouth worked once, twice, and then came the cry. First, a croaky whimper transformed into a plaintive wail, tearing through the temple’s silence.

          That cry pierced my heart with a fierce protectiveness that washed away all sorrow and hesitation. I would save my son somehow.

          I sprinted with him from the temple, launching the sentinel crow skyward in my wake. Down the mountainside I flew, leaping over broken stones, the Gray Sea’s roar propelling me forward. Each step hammered a single thought into my mind: Reach the hospital. I ran until the foreign medical facility loomed ahead like a white obelisk, stark and unwelcoming, but it was my only hope. Damn the temple. Damn the war.

          The physicians in their blood-stained robes only glanced our way. “We don’t treat the enemy,” one said, turning away.

          “Then perhaps you’ll treat the son of the Sayri family,” I said, my voice trembling but fierce. My carefully constructed anonymity peeled away like an old skin. War journalists worked better when they were of the ordinary people, not the sons of prominent families. “Shall I tell the world how the son with Sayri blood died in your hands?”

          The physician froze, his gaze returning to the bundle in my arms. For a moment, the room held its breath. Then he nodded curtly. “Bring him in.”

          For weeks, my son’s life balanced between breathing and silence. When the physicians called his survival luck and I called it determination, my wife simply said the temple had claimed him as its own. She named him Pisqu, meaning “little bird,” asserting the name would bring him lifelong protection. She would whisper to him in her native tongue as she nursed him, ancient songs about crows that outsmarted hunters and stories of the small and clever triumphing over the mighty. 

          Pisqu not only lived but thrived. In those early years, I watched for signs of where his prematurity might have left lasting and disabling marks. Then came the afternoon when he was six years old and showed that I’d been worrying about the wrong things. From our kitchen window, I could see the old, broken stone wall where the children played and climbed. The bigger boys had claimed it again, shoving away anyone smaller who tried to climb. Pisqu, even slighter than the smallest children his age, hung back, watching. I almost called him over, for surely, he’d want to wait for his big brothers’ protection from bullies before playing at the base of the wall. 

          But he walked straight toward the leader, a boy twice his size. I rose from the kitchen table and walked toward the window, ready to intervene. Yet I didn’t call out. 

          “That’s some climb you made earlier. You almost made it to the top,” Pisqu, my little bird, said in a voice bright with admiration. “How’d you get so close to conquering it?”

          The bully puffed up, eager to show his technique. As he talked and gestured, Pisqu nodded intently, asking questions that made the boy feel important. “Really? And then you go left? I never would have thought of that.”

          While listening, I noticed Pisqu’s eyes weren’t on the boy’s face but on the other side, noting handholds the bullies had ignored. 

          “Could you show me that move again?” Pisqu asked. “I’m probably not strong enough to do it, but...”

          The moment the bully turned to climb, Pisqu slipped around to the shadowed side of the wall. His small fingers found crevices as if guided by an instinct older than instruction. His light frame made no sound against the stone. By the time the older boy reached the halfway point on his side, Pisqu was already sitting cross-legged on the highest point, grinning down at everyone.
The bullies stared up, more amazed than angry. “How did you—?”

          Pisqu shrugged, but his eyes found mine for just a moment. Standing on our warped porch, I saw in that glance something that made my chest tighten: he knew exactly what he’d done. 

          Three years of watching moments like these should have readied me for what was coming. But good fortune crumbles like bombed walls. When Pisqu was nine, they came for me with accusations of treason. A cell became my world. The seasons blurred together, marked only by the changing angle of light through my cell’s high window. Nine years old. Ten. Eleven. Each year stealing away my chance to watch my son grow into a man. In my darkest moments, I found comfort knowing my wife would be there, teaching him not just to survive but to thrive in adversity. 

          Each season brought only whispered rumors from the outside. At first, just stories of supply convoys that somehow lost their way, ending up in hungry villages instead of military outposts. Then came tales of a youthful figure who moved through checkpoints like mist, too small and quick to catch. Where the military built walls, this man slipped through their shadows. Where armies marched, he moved among the people. This rebel was quick, clever, and impossible to capture. It wasn’t until the day of my rescue that I learned the truth about who he was.

          Ten years. After a decade of imprisonment, my cell door opened. A slight figure stood there, with my wife’s wavy black hair and a bright smile. I saw her in every feature of his face, every calculated movement. She had forged our fragile baby into steel, tempering him with the same quiet determination that had first drawn me to her. Despite the arsenal strapped to his lithe frame, he radiated the same cherubic charm I remembered. And his eyes. I saw the same eyes that had once stared up at me through temple sunbeams, now holding the sharp intelligence of a young but seasoned commander.

          “There you are, Father,” Pisqu said, his voice light, as if we’d been playing hide-and-seek in the dunes. “May we assist you in leaving this prison at once?”

          I stared at him, my breath catching. Nothing had prepared me for the reality of seeing my little bird transformed into this legendary figure. The newborn I’d cradled in the temple, the child who had fought for every breath, now stood before me as the rebel who had fought for his entire people. In his gaze, I saw not just my son but the hope I had carried all those years ago.

          When Pisqu reached out his hand for me, I thought I saw the feathers drifting toward him again. Maybe it was only dust in the light. Maybe not. But his touch was real and enough.




Orleans Saltos' writing has appeared in The Write Launch, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, New Feathers Anthology, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Blue Earth Review. Saltos was born in New Orleans to Ecuadorian immigrant parents and now lives in Berkeley, California, where she writes fiction and nonfiction exploring belonging and resilience. More information can be found at https://orleanssaltos.com.