Little Redbreast {1}

Witness the days of solitude nibble away at his mind. Reality walks out of his vision and hindsight is just the dark and the whispers of the corpses. He turns over his nightmares into birdsongs that no longer mean anything to him, other than recalling emptiness in his own voice. Robin watches his youth burn to an end in the early morning. It is spicy with saffron clouds. Gold trim forms along the horizon, a line of dust, a dancer spreading her arms across the forest canopies. Bright, beckoning. The plump trees blush. The slender bodies are modest and shy at the nearing winter, revealing a little too much as their leaves drop around them, like skirts, weaving down their wooden spines.

The land mumbles into life. The trees are shimmying with the stir of birds, the leaves with the song of their waking beaks begging at the trunks. Robin is tired. He will sleep. His nest will crunch under the wind, and the crawling dawn may pick at the sticks; but he will not enter it. Hugging his wings, he will dream, and the cold will freeze him and he will not wake up. His dream will last forever. It will buy his mind.

Robin shivers into death.

Memories are so fragile. Little balls of glass that mock you like crystal eyes, bluing at the temptation to remember them. Then the betrayal. They punch into your heart, they clutch onto your neck until your throat can no longer cry and you fall back with your arms flailing until the past has stolen you once again. The pain gathers at the precipice of you soul. You tip over the cliff. And it’s the end.

In the ball of battered feathers, Robin prays for the world to spin away. He sings for the dead. A morbid requiem of lost voices cries for him, humming beneath the stars. The last of them pass away in an arch of shimmering eyes. They can’t see him anymore. And so he is free.

He sees Redbreast in the shadow of his mind; the glint of auburn drops with the tiniest sparkle of light, disappearing into the dark. As he enters it to call for him, Robin knows he will not return. Nothing can check the agony that has burdened his chest. Nothing to judge.

The world is bleak behind his eyelids. The sounds of birds slurring around him in a great voice from silence is petrifying. If they find him, he will surely live. And so he curls up his tongue and prepares to die.

Dying with the crack on his beak and the mud on his head and the dark of the night all forgotten.

Redbreast, Redbreast, come to me.

My love, my lust, go to see.

The holes of the earth drowned by rain.

The split in my chest a world for pain.

****

--I'm taking a break from all my other writer-y commitments, and am going ahead with a novella or two. I need to improve my style and build up my confidence before I move into a novel again. This is short, but it introduces the story somewhat.

--In short, I'd be keen to hear 1) whether you like it, are interested and such, and 2) if you like the style, sentence structures etc.

Thanks, everyone. Any comments at all would be fantastic.