The Aviary

There was an aviary under the part of the woods where the trees were most like a ceiling, painted Michealangelo-dappled green and sunlight, the floor like a night sky, full of little suns. She found it while exploring, saw it was empty, but years before it was full of yellow birds, set free one by one occasionally. The grounds would buzz with their high-pitched conversation a hundred yards in every direction. One hundred years in the future a young girl’s bedroom would stand over that big white cage, and she would crawl out of the window one night and cross the road to call her lover down, and he would be angry and keep his window closed against her cries; the beating of her wings.

“Why don’t you keep anything in there?” She asked him, and he looked up from his newspaper and told her he didn’t have the energy anymore, pulled it back up to his face. The headline was about a genocide in some far-off country, thousands of small faceless people dead. She took herself upstairs to the very top of the house, where the glass roof made it daylight and created a rainforest, where the white light of the skyless clouds brought out reds and blues and violets and oranges – and then, she saw, pinned by their feet to the twisted boughs of the great vine-plants criss-crossed above her, near a thousand yellow birds, their chattering deafening in its silence.