The small, brown desperate bird lived outside our confinement. We watched it land furtively on the white table. We stood next to your sea and you knew what it was you wished to show me. Count my meter and count my rhyme, you sang in time to the blues behind the coffee counter. Life existed there, as I’m sure it does today. People with faces distinct from every and any other, infinite variety and so human, and you wept with joy. The bird knew this of you and grew less worried. We ate the sandwich which gave us life and our bird found an affirming nugget. It ran from the others and launched into a brilliant flutter from one ledge to the other, we by your sea knew it. The bird’s friends were acquisitive – holding on were they to the only element they knew – but our new friend successfully defended. It jounced with nervous wings to the edge of the concrete ledge, high off the sloping ground, easing to your sea. It turned its back to us and settled its accounts, a quick inventory entered into a tiny brain, acknowledging by nibbles. The morsel should, barring that freakish accident of fate and luck, give it life for another day, easy. You turned your face to the sun, satisfied before your own launching off the ledge that you’d seen it, that something. It was hot in our world, on those heated days of our best moments. The little bird bounded from what we’d imagined was our box; it leapt and held its wings tight to body, not for flight, and fell like a rock into the lost abyss...
