A bird is wearing the jewelry of flies. It’s hardly a bird yet, just a thing made of some light and the flesh of grubs and worms the bluetit parents brought to its tiny gape in the honeysuckle nest. Emerald green flies spin around it then fasten their pins into its body, sucking up the juice of almost being, of becoming.
The story of how this nestling came to splat on the path so far from the nest is written in the stain around it, glistening in the first June morning. There will be many more dead squabs before the month is out.
Within a stone’s throw of garden trees and shrubs there are hidden nests of bluetit, sparrow, goldfinch, blackbird, robin, wren and blackcap. Each clutch of eggs has hatched and the parent birds are ramming as much food into the chicks as they can find. But others seek out the nests: other birds and cats, helping themselves to the helpless.
Away from the shadows there are flowers everywhere and bees pinballing through spaces between them. It’s quiet weather: warm, thick with haze, like a headache.
The wild garlic flowers turn to seed and their leaves yellow, the stink is stronger on the banks. This smell is what memories hold long after the plants have returned to their bulbs.
The tree canopy above has closed over the stink and sealed in the shadows and the calls of birds ring through the green. Down in the shadow of sallow and thorn, a grass snake searches for an opportunity to slither into. The snake finds a flow across moist earth towards the ditch and all of it is a continuous movement, a divining rod moving to a rhythm that does not trouble the shadows. Only its eye betrays its snakeness, and if there was any pity in it this world would fall to pieces.
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