30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 5, The Windsparrow

There was once a girl who lived near a large forest. She loved to watch the animals, and the birds. She would often read in the fields around her home, and there she met a bird. It was not just any bird - it was blue and sometimes gray. It was sleek and beautiful and had the bluest greenest eyes. She was immediately delighted. It would land on the pages of her book and twitter at her, hopping and dancing gently. She would laugh and twitter back. It was soon a daily companion.

She would go to the pond, it would go to the pond. She would take a hike up the Big Hill, and it would twitter along beside her. She learned to love it - it was a very good friend. She became quite used to its company, and she saw it every day. Until, one day, it became quiet. It would not twitter, and though it came to find her, it would not chirp or sing. She twittered at it, she sang to it, but it would do nothing, and then it began to visit her but quickly leave. She would run after it, calling for it, but it would not come back and she could not find it. Sometimes it would return for a few minutes, after she called it, but then fly off again. Young and not understanding, the young girl began to cry, and to wonder what could be wrong. But she could not find it. Some nights she would be in bed, and she would hear it scratching at the window, but it would not come in.

Storms began to come to her little town. Strange storms - as if the wind were caught, or complete quiet, with no wind at all. The weather was muggy and warm or absolutely icy cold, and crops began to suffer. She heard the women talking, and the men she saw mourning in the fields over their lost potatoes. She cried double - once for her bird and again for her village. And the winds were great and fierce and angry. No small breezes to lessen their madness, just the rage of wind that knocked down trees and tore apart houses that were well-built, frightened small children and roared down lanes like great beasts.

One night, she heard him plinking on the outside of the glass, and she went to the moonlit windowsill. She opened the window, and gazed at him sadly. His feathers were silver in the moonlight, but he looked drawn and scruffy. "I cannot go with you tonight, my little friend," she told him. "I must stay in the house," but he whistled at her, and flew some few feet away, and then came back, chirping loudly. "I'm sorry," she said, frustrated, and tears coming to her eyes. "I cannot go. I will lose you in the woods in this dark, and then I will not find my way home again myself!" But he chirped stubbornly and hopped up and down. She closed the window, but he continued to plink at it.

Finally, in desparation, she crept out of the house, holding her quilt around her. "Alright, my little friend. Now where are we going?" He swooped around her, landed on her shoulder, and began to flap his wings. Now that would simply never work. She laughed. "You cannot lift me!" she exclaimed. "Fly ahead, but slow!" He went ahead of her, flying slowly, circling back. She followed the silver light of his feathers until they were deep in the woods. And then he flitted off. She didn't know where he had gone. He had left her. She was terrified - no sparkle of wings. She called quietly, but did not know how to go on. She was deep in the woods, just as she had thought. Had he lost her too? Where was he?

A great wind began to come up, and in the dark woods the trees creaked. She heard all sorts of noises, but there was no sparrow. The wind roared through the woods, until it seemed the whole forest was shaking around her. She huddled in the roots of a big tree, her blanket wrapped around her like armor, shaking and silent with fear. Finally, dawn began to break. She saw the lightening of the sky between the dark, brooding branches, and she heard the first chirps of the normal birds. But not her sparrow. She was angry. Very angry. How could her friend leave her? He was a dangerous thing, a witches familiar! He was very bad! But when the dawn broke completely, and the sun began to light the branches of the trees down to the very ground, she saw around her the broken silver of wings. There were birds scattered on the ground, all of them dead. There was no explanation. They were like her bird, but not her bird. And she found, after rising, that there, under her was a deep hole going into the ground - and at the back of the hole, quite underneath her the whole night, there was a beast. It was no bigger than her arm, but it had big wings and a cruel beak. It was dark, like the night, and it seemed it, too, was quite dead.

She wasn't sure, but it looked as if with her blocking of the hole the beast had died in simple suffocation, and for a moment she felt a pang of remorse. Until she saw the great beak-gashes on the silver birds around her. And only one voice she listened for, but she knew she would not hear it in the uproar of the forest morning. The voice of her silver bird. She did not hear it, but after a moment, she did feel slight flutterings within her comforter, and opening it up, out flew the blue and silver sparrow, alive and warm. She put out her hands to cup it, but with a cry, it flew straight into the sun, and whistled merrily. Other birds joined it, and they flew in ever-circling arcs upward, free, faster and faster, until it seemed they were simply blurs, and then, down around her, the little girl felt the light warm feathery breeze of summer, as she used to feel it before... well before her little bird had become so sad.