Nutting’s story, called “The Brother and the Bird,” was published in 2010 in the anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales.

SEE IT: The Brother and the Bird plays at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 823 SE Grant St., 503-235-0635, shaking-the-tree.com. 7:30 pm Thursday–Saturday, 5 pm Sunday, through May 18. $10–$45.

That tree lives unaffected by either the presence or the absence of the bird’s nest, but the bird that built that nest needed a protective place above ground to raise its offspring.