Thanks! Any thoughts are, of course, very welcome indeed.
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A spectre in the sun’s glow. It shivers. A grey, unrelenting perversion upon the forest’s canopies. Birds begin to sing. Soft, treacle-glazed lullabies drift in their tunes; a chorus of voices lift the light in the sky. But still he sits in the shadow. Colours flourish under the golden sun but Robin’s breast is still dull. It does not glow. The world is moving on without him.
A choir of robins is scattered out there, somewhere. And he cannot see them. He shifts about in the dark. Robin is hidden. He wants to stretch out his wings, and his throat trembles with the urge to sing. But his beak will not open and the dark has bound him in. There is no room.
Notes flounder through the fields of spring and bubbles rise to the sky—
a flash of red—
the orange flails—
Little Redbreast floats ahead and stares at him. Two stars painted with black gloss watch him and the beak that does not sing protrudes ever so gently from the feathers. And then it is gone.
The sun is an eye. A big orange eye. It’s coming to get him. He knows this because the sun is an eye. The eye is staring. The sun is coming. Because the sun glowers. Scowling—scowling at its food. Hunger. Starvation. It’s coming.
‘Come here, little Robin,’ it says.
Robin screams and his tongue stammers into life. His heart squeals and the midday snatches him out of the shadow. The sun is watching. There are no clouds. Noises all around him. Monsters with wings fill the day with chants, ritualistic commands drilling into his skull. Pounding, pounding, the world shimmies in his eyes. More, more, chiselling in.
Cracking. His skull. Cracked.
Dizzy, dizzy, whining the skyline. Nests podded. Whistling at him. And then the spring awakens and the skin of green peels away and the red burns and there is no peace. Pounding, pounding, dressing the grass in fire.
His wings they reach first. Blowing such a blast upon his feathers that they tear from his skin and burst asunder and drizzle down upon the flame and they see him, so many eyes, so many birds, so many worms and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—
Robin rocks in the hole. Back, back and forth.
He cannot go outside. The shadows mumble to him, cradling Robin as a mother in the alleys of nature. Hugging. The mother says nothing. The trees creak against the still air. He must eat. He must eat.
He sits in his prison cell, gazing in solemn awe upon the world but also with fear. The fear chews his mind. The cows in the fields eat something. Always. Robins. The cows always eat robins.
He waits upon sunset and then some more as the last of the winter shadows tarry before the moonlight, and from then on, the trees are blind and cannot stop him. The birds do not see him. Owls chime upon their instruments, and great opals stare blankly but Robin slips through the winds and his old nest is there, waiting in bitter neglect. Empty, warm, homely yet. It leans between the boughs and its roof points a little. But then there is shivering reflection—
remorse upon the skies—
the moon shines. It has found him. Hooting, hooting. Chirpy-chirp-dy-chirp. Robin lets out a gasp and bolts into the recess. Leaves arouse his feathers, and tiny twigs blot out the light. His sight fades. Robin praying upon the incense of the dead. Old beings suspended all around. Bark, crisp, fungi—friends long disdained to black and shadow, forever. Robin blinks. His eyes shut. Their sight is his. But he thinks, and his mind wonders. The world is shivering before him, out to grab him, to snatch him up and gobble him down. This is what he will see when he dies.
He doesn’t want to die. Doesn’t want to be free of pain and not know it.
Something suddenly crunches beneath his legs. Then the knife—Robin flickers his leg up and crouches in a mildewed darkness, trembling. He cannot elude the shadow. Its stomach mourns. Robin is all it gets. A crumpled bird at the hand of midnight, frail to the light and hopeless before the moon. The shadows spare him.
A stabbing hex—leaves, sticks, they are frail and it cannot be them. A thin blade, cut as a knife. He grows drowsy and he can do little more. His eyes drop but he cannot calm. A foreign gale blows down a voice, a whisper that is carried around his nest and then drops. Inside rests there just a silence. And then another crack. A clink. A trail of missed heartbeats in Robin.
A squeak after that. A brush of feathers. And then it cries but Robin cannot leave and then the silence comes again and his beak bites together. Something there.
His ribs hurt. They embrace his heart, but they cut in and his blood throbs. Throbbing, throbbing into his chest. Blood dripping. Dripping against the sewers of his guts.
That crunching is still there. He dare not move. He dare not leave. More waiting, waiting, waiting for the dark to go. But the sun; the other eye, risen as the nocturnal one sleeps. Always watching. Clouds. Pray for clouds. Pray for winter. A frozen nightmare. Snow should crumble. The chips in a cold sky, blotting out the sun so that it does not shine between the falls, killing the birds. Kill the robins. Kill their joy as Robin watches from a throne in the treetops, his head pillowed in the dark and his legs cut. And his beak hushed. Ears splintered and blocked so that the songs of birds are suspended in midflight, and no one is left to hear them, and he is unheard and unborn in thought even to himself. But not die. Never die. Then he won’t see his dream come true.
Because this is his dream. He dreams of nightmares in which he does not fear. He is dreaming but he can’t be sure; if he desires blindness with regards this mortal precipice then it is already real, because no light can swindle into his cage and so it is fulfilled.
Death appears to be merely an unlucky consequence.
Robin thwarts daybreak. He rests against the side of the nest and he waits, ever so patiently, as the sky is painted blue and yellow. Pillowed in a cushion of frost his hunger is now partial to a numbing ache. He has chosen between the blinding black and the blinding white. The moon is evil. It twists into the void of night, ahead of the stars, its one-eyed slaves, the nocturnal sentinel as the sun sleeps innocently. The chilled sphere pushing aside the heart of orange.
As the light peeks into his nest, a drizzle shines upon the base. A Christmas shimmy passes down in the bright treacle; it embosses the weapon in gold. Night’s weapon. It is blue. A gift. Cracked in half. But the egg is just the wrapping. The broken glass upon the floor, all kneeling up like some arrangement of shattered corpses. Robin has cracked the sun’s diamond in half.
But then the diamond becomes peasant; to the majestic blue and the incarnate globe of some old, ancient kingdom, comes the unwrapped gift alone and frozen. It stares at him with wide eyes. It is silent now.
The little robin trembles, but muted as a stillborn. Robin does not quiver. For once, he is the master; the bird before him is nothing but a mystery. And Robin is steady. He removes his feet from the twigs and he turns to the world like a martyr come to bow before the end. He looks across the plains and then, unafraid, they join the birdsong.
