When the late bird sings
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“Oh, no, you mustn’t.”īut Catja’s already scaling the garden wall into somnolent rose and lilac. On the far side, orchards moan with fruit, their musk swelling the breeze. Inevitable, perhaps, as the winter itself.Ĭragged grey stone cuts through the trees with a nursemaid’s primness, aproned with moss and untroubled by snow. Beneath her tattered coat, Catja shivers, and she’s about to ask the white bird if they can go home-but then, she stops. The sunlight richens with the failing of day, melting buttery gold down the snowbanks. Before she’s realized, she has a berry pressed to her lips. And then-wonder of wonders-a branch of hawthorn berries, sugared with snow and gleaming like blood. Between humped roots, she finds a squirrel’s forgotten cache: a few acorns, empty chestnut casings. Sloes show like bruises under a snowbank’s pallid cheek she secrets them into a leather pouch. The sun bites, and in such weather, tears freeze quickly.Ĭatja peers through the thickets. She dares not gaze skyward for long, keeping her eyes on her boots. The hard blue sky domes overhead columns of birch and beech bend with the dying year’s melancholy. The white bird flits ahead, one more pale flash against the snow-blind expanses and snowbound branches.Ĭatja enters the glittering forest as she would a cathedral. The trees gape, toothed with icicles, famished in themselves. “Without work, you cannot eat,” the white bird whispers. She clutches the bedpost, black spots blossoming across the floorboards. “Lace up your boots,” the white bird pleads. Though Catja and the white bird wake before dawn, they do not leave until nearly midday, for she complains of weakness. In stillness so deep, snowfall kisses the windowpanes. “Save that for later.” His voice pricks needle-sharp and needle-bright.Īs she hesitates, he nuzzles her cheek, his feathers soft as dream.
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She hunts the oats one by one, holding each upon her tongue. “It’s all right.”Ĭatja brings a spoon to her lips she suckles clouded water, tentatively welcoming its weight and warmth. His dark eyes never blink, shining like apple seeds flung against the snow. A clever fellow he is, with plumage so bright it hurts and a hooked little beak. She stirs a pot set amongst the ashes, a rusted iron belly filled with meltwater and oats and a segment of apple smoked long ago in the far-dead autumn.Īt her shoulder perches a white bird. In a land wiped clean, only the essential remains.Ĭatja crouches at a stuttering hearth.
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#When the late bird sings skin
Sharp lines cut under skin bare branches crack against the sky snow drives on snow. Content warning: eating disorders + related themes