bird stays put

Enjoying her moderately-warm perch too much to find another, red-breasted robin #18 didn't even bother to move on this fall's first freezing morning, even though the valley's resident man-child continued to come and go directly beneath her. Dropping her excrement all over his bolted-together old car tires, and violating her flock's rule requiring avian beasts to stay at least two dozen feet away from humans at all times, #18 thought to herself: 'Fuck it – it's too fucking cold to fly away, and this douche-bag doesn't seem like a threat, so I'm staying.'

Wondering if the bird had perhaps frozen to death, the man-child – a lowly whorphan of modest means – concluded that, since she was still balancing on that length of old electrical conduit and had not yet fallen to the ground, she must be alive. He proceeded to split a wheelbarrow full of wood and waited until the robin had flown away in order to return his shit-stained tool to the exact spot whence he had initially retrieved it. While watching from a nearby vantage point – this one caressed by the first warm rays of the rising sun – mademoiselle Eighteen rhythmically uncurled one foot after the other in an attempt to force warm blood into her exposed extremities; her wings she kept tucked tightly against her body, however, using them to insulate her torso against the frigid morning air.

#18 continued to run into the resident whorphan for the rest of the day, fleeing before him a few times as he was performing the season's last mowing with his new muscle-powered push-mower and, later, hopping out of the way as he turned swiftly onto the property's gravel lane and came crunching down it toward the house, on his velocipede. Out of concern for the birds' dwindling supply of little red berries, the man-child decided to stop waffling already and finally bought them a big bag of bird seed.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)