Migration

    The bird flew fairly low in the sky. Its song was weak and muffled in the cold, grey tree. It looked thin, haggard, and lost, as if it had taken a greyhound bus to a different town than expected; as if its instincts were somewhat off-kilter and its fate therefore out of balance.
    The bird was red with bright, black shining eyes. Each eye seemed enveloped in a tear; tears that never fell from the eye. The bird looked haggard, weak, and cold chanting softly to the burning wind, hanging on to the branch with little claws that gripped with its last strength.
    "Poor cardinal..." I thought, as I observed it from the foot of the tree. It peered at me from the depth of its avian soul. It seemed to ask me to retrieve it and store it in an empty shoe box to the warmth of my room, or basement. In my own eyes I answered that I had no box to place it in, and no food to feed it, and that my roommates might or might not enjoy the sight of a cardinal. Perhaps if you had been a chickadee… I told it with my eyes.
    I remembered my errand and walked away from the sad sight of the lost cardinal. I left it to its fate in that cold, grey winter afternoon. By the evening I had forgotten about it. We had Cornish hens for dinner, which I ate down to the bone without question nor regret. The taste did nothing to allude the memory of the forgotten bird...
    The following week, I walked the same route of the previous week. I ran the same errand from before which carried me next to the selfsame tree. The branch on which the cardinal once stood was now empty, but the day remained cold and the wind strong and merciless.
    I looked around on the ground to see if I could find its fragile little body. I found nothing but the wet grass where it would had fallen had it fallen. I continued the errand, keeping the bird in mind. To my surprise, a small cardinal lay a few yards from the tree, along the trail. It had no feathers. Ants had supped off its tender skin and beady eyes. The bones appeared dusty and trampled.

The sight inspired but a single thought: "Wherever it migrated this time, even if lost, would have much better weather..."