Bird

So it has been quite a while.

Mainly because I'm writing my novel at the same as I'm editing another one. But I'm still doing writing warm ups so I thought I'd post one of those today. I started with a noun - after reading Simmone Howell's post on Ray Bradbury (thanks Simmone and Ray Bradbury) - and then I wrote.


BirdThere are birds outside my window. They have the tone of crickets. Like maybe they're imitating them, taunting them with a constant imitation of their high pitch squeak. This is who you are. Hear what you will never be.              But the crickets know better.             They're sleeping now and when they wake it will be night. In that night they will sing their song, nothing like the birds' imitations because it's natural. Because it's woven around the things it should be. People walking home from work, shirts yellow around the cuff and collar, stockings sagging in the wishbone of their legs, sighing shoes on the sidewalks.            'The end is what the day is all about,' one of these men says, walking as though there is a blister on his heel. 'This light. The thought that something is about to happen.'             The crickets know about darkness. That when people are dreaming and dying and loving and wanting and hurting and cooking steaks and letting the light from the television marble their faces, that they need a song. If there's no song in the darkness then there's only darkness. That's what the crickets know that the birds, with all their daylight mocking, don't.