The room’s window opened into
a sloping garden with a clothesline and a
bird bath. The lawn
inclined uphill. Wrens visited the garden
on both mornings, swept effortlessly through the greens
as if their bodies knew
no gravity. They were as small as
mice. I would have locked them in my memory as
winged shrews, had one not settled on the garden fence
and offered me a chance to look, to really
look. It only moved once our eyes had
met. I have kept it
ever since.
When my head slept on the mountain
Annika Nerf is a fiction and nature writer, and a pocket-sized poet. She has written an antiwar novel on transgenerational trauma for her PhD from the State University of New York at Albany. She is the 2026 writer-in-residence for the Swiss Society for the European Convention on Human Rights.