The bird cries, no matter what. The bird cries against human indignation.

A mother washes her children’s clothes in the lazy dawnlight of Sunday, preparing for their day of rest, pressing wrinkles from cotton tirelessly. Outside her window, a sparrow calls, a call for territory and sex, these violences contained within a body so small and a vessel so sweet, that there cannot be a threat dormant within it.

Two friends walk home in the growing twilight of a Monday evening ran down to the limits of curfew by a long study session and even longer tennis practice. She drags her feet across the tarmac, hiding in the edges around the boundary present by the amber-glow streetlight pool. He catches her against the chainlink fence of the courts, fingers intwining with metal against flesh like machinery. It stutters and grinds with no one to press the emergency stop, save for the chainsaw-melody crow-song. He perches upon the streetlight like some darkened guardian of the sanctuary-light.

A girl curls in on herself, shielding eyes from the blinding daylight of Tuesday, made scarce under duvet-cover and the grouchy-teenage hand wave of mother from bedroom door. She has watched the shadows travel across her ceiling in this daisy yellow purgatory. Black expanses stretching and compacting and lengthening again, the creep of four to five in the afternoon crawls closer. Her mother will soon be home, and discover she is not sick at all, at least not bodily.

A robin lands upon the sill, his red breast stained red.

She does not stay awake long enough to hear him sing.

There is no bird.

The humans do not see it.

They do not hear its cries.

They do not hear its thumps

as it dashes itself against the fence wood.

Its small body fragile yet unbreaking.

The pain is a constant dull

but it is preferable to the numbness,

To the nothingness.

It is better to feel something than to feel nothing at all;

than to exist yet not exist.

Breathe through tiny lungs yet not be seen

by the humans on streets.