Sydney Hegele is the author of Bird Suit (Invisible Publishing, 2024) and The Pump (Invisible Publishing, 2021), winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction, and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essay collection Bad Kids is forthcoming with Invisible in fall 2025. They live with their husband and French Bulldog in Toronto.

An excerpt from the opening chapter of the novel Bird Suit by Sydney Hegele, published with Invisible Publishing in May 2024. Copyright: Invisible Publishing, 2024.

The Port Peter peaches lure tourists, city folk from the southern side of Lake Ligeia. The Red Haven semi-freestones are fist big and full of nectar, with lightly fuzzed skin over firm, yellow flesh. Every season, tourists learn the Red Havens will not give up their pits until fully ripe.

Supermarkets and convenience stores set up fold-out tables on the sidewalks outside their shops. The peaches are six dollars a basket, then five, then four. Food trucks sell funnel cake covered in peaches and ice cream—extra peaches are free. There are too many, and they will only be perfect to eat for a couple of weeks or so. The tourists eat the peaches until they puke on the ten-cents-a-ride carousel in the middle of town. They chase the peaches with cheap lager at the Hanged Man pub. They stumble along the boardwalk at night until they reach the beach, and they wade around in Lake Ligeia’s dark green water, trying to wash off the sticky sweetness.

What makes a Port Peter peach so perfect? The conditions in which they are grown are not any different from those in the other small towns that surround Lake Ligeia. Peaches prefer freezing winters and sweltering summers. Several cool summers in a row wreck years of grapes in Ivey and plums in Hewitt. But the Port Peter peaches never shrink. They never ripen too early or too late.

The boardwalk is lined with ice cream stands and custom T-shirt shops and knock-off fortune tellers and real fortune tellers. Every shop is open until three in the morning. The tourists buy lighthouse shot glasses and floppy hats that say Practise What You Peach and paper bags of crispy French fries soaked in oil. Every room in the Super 8 hotel is booked. The tourists ignore burnt butts on the boardwalk and coffee cups half-buried in the sand and the metal sign that used to read NOT SAFE FOR SWIMMING, but now just reads NO SAFE. They gorge on sweet peaches while the town is hot and humming with life.

Most of the tourists are boy-men who wear I LOVE CANADA T-shirts that go down to their knees with basketball shorts, even though they don’t play basketball. On the poorly lit boardwalk at night, the boy-men could be sixteen or thirty-six years old—it’s hard to tell. They spend their nights splitting birthday cake vodka with local girls, making promises they can’t keep. I’ll bring you back with me, they say.

September sneaks up on the tourists. They never expect it, even though it arrives every year. The peaches are suddenly too soft. The juice is tinged sour. When their fingers can squish through the bruised flesh of the fruit without much effort, they know it is time to return home.

In September, the boardwalk shops close when the sun sets. The food trucks close and drive back to the city. It is too cold for ice cream. Too cold to swim. The tourists leave as quickly as they arrive, and suddenly, the town’s population drops to one thousand people.

The real Port Peter is a tourism town in hibernation. The souvenir shops and restaurants and bars and boutiques lay off most of their staff. Seasonal contracts end. Townies in thin windbreakers buy coffees with dimes and stand in line outside the unemployment office. They arrive and leave empty-handed, day after day; there are no new jobs to give out, but they continue to show up anyway. To get up early and have a hot drink with their neighbours is their job, in a way, and they think of it with an odd kind of fondness.

Winter in Port Peter is wet-cold. Morning rain soaks the pines, and by nightfall the branches are covered in ice, sharp spikes ready to snap and fall. Lake Ligeia freezes over, and fearless kids walk out onto the ice and play soccer baseball. Leftover snowballs harden into dirt-laden chunks on roadsides, hard enough to hurt if thrown. And they are thrown. And they do hurt.

When the housing market crashes in ’08, the people of Port Peter use their squirrel funds of summer money to pay for mortgages and rent and groceries and gas. They have noth- ing left to spend on tourist beer and tourist food and tourist artisan goods that would help local businesses. Summer and winter become a dramatic boom and bust. Residents make most of their meals out of the Red Haven peaches that they canned in the summer: peach butter and peach crisp and peach pie and peach salad and peach cobbler and peach jam on bright white packaged bread that never moulds. The Port Peter food bank runs out of an abandoned building on Elizabeth Street that used to be Barbershop and Billiards. Dust- covered hairdresser chairs and broken pool cues and damp cardboard boxes filled with office supplies litter the floor like in an FBI raid. Loose wires hang from the ceiling. Half the fluorescent lights stopped working years back, but the other half flicker rapidly. Cans of sweet peaches stacked high.

Most people in Port Peter have had gout at some point in their lives. The purines in the peaches increase their blood’s uric acid levels. When they have flare-ups, the urgent care doctor in town puts them back on prednisone—a corticosteroid to help the inflammation. The prednisone makes their faces bloat like hamsters with cheeks full of seed.

Nine months after tourist season, the Port Peter girls give birth in bar bathrooms and school smoking pits and on ripped floral couches in their fathers’ apartments.

Every girl in Port Peter knows what follows. Port Peter only has one urgent care clinic, run out of a Roman Catholic Church parish hall. Patients are made to hold baby shoes and hear heartbeats. They can go to the city for an abortion, but there is only one Greyhound bus that goes through Port Peter each day, and it leaves at noon when most of the girls are at work.

The girls go to the cliffside lookout off County Road Five, where there is a white plastic laundry basket with a pink fit- ted sheet inside. This is where the Port Peter girls leave their babies for the Birds.

The women of the town tell one another about the Birds in secret, like sending carrier pigeons across enemy lines. When a Port Peter girl gets pregnant by a tourist boy, a woman in her life gives her all the information she needs to know. Older sisters. Cousins. Female teachers. Babysitters. Great-aunts. This ensures that children are not stuck raising children.

People cannot say with any certainty that the creatures are more bird than girl or more girl than bird. The local folklore has evolved over the decades. The oldest stories talk of feathered sirens emerging from Lake Ligeia in white lace dresses, dripping water and tangled in their own dark hair. Every generation adds new details. Black teeth. Silver lockets with the eyes of men inside. Scales. Gills. Fur. Hooves. Eventually, the creatures are just called Birds. Ruthless, beautiful Birds—hungry for the blood of sacrifice.

The mothers of the girls pack their daughters into pick- ups and drive them to the cliffside lookout. They sit in their trucks with their hazards on while the girls walk to the look-out in flip-flops and May sundresses.

The girls stop when they find the white plastic laundry basket with a pink fitted sheet. They kiss the babies’ sweaty foreheads and leave them squirming in the dark. When the girls go back the next morning, the basket is almost always empty.