The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

The words fell out of his mouth like rocks. But she picked them up anyway, one at a time, and she told him that he was beautiful too,

Nothing but the two of them, while in the vaulted dark above their sky, in her ship of cloth and metal, Nia opened the boy’s travel bag and found among the folded clothes and wrapped pastries a long-forgotten object—unable to breathe as she held the flute in her trembling hands, and felt in its cracks the decades.

And in these moments, she would catch a glimpse of his past. A history of silence that existed long before the trauma of the wreckage. A learned pain.