Art by Michael Zawacki, story by Nimue Brown

The storms often bring something strange. Giant sea monsters wash up on our beaches, dead and dying, to become food for the crows. Small, broken things litter the high tide mark, tiny glimpses into other worlds tangled through strands of seaweed. In the violence of nature there is bounty for the scavengers, human and other.

I have never seen her like before. I watched her twisting out of the sky, fighting the rage of a late afternoon that meant to slaughter what it could. Beauty comes this way so seldom, and I do not know how many times I have seen some lovely thing die here, cast onto these hard shores.

She fought the wind, this bird, even as she came careening down from the clouds. I could see her struggle, a wild fight for life that refused despair or defeat. My heart ached for her desperate plight. I did not want to watch her die, and yet I could not bring myself to look away.

As she came closer I realised how big she was, the span of her wings far wider than my open arms. She passed over me, beyond my reach, every feather visible to me. There was a lustre in her, a brightness that even this foul weather could not dampen.

While the wind toyed with her, she slowed her fall, and came down onto the clifftop, stumbling but not wounded. Her landing disturbed a horde of screaming geese, and I was half afraid they might take their ire out on me, but they calmed under the gaze of the newly arrived bird – a thing I would not have thought possible had I not seen it myself.

Then she sang. An inhuman voice, with something of the flute in it and something of the shore on a gentle day. I swear the waves softened at the sound of it, and the wind dropped away. Even the ferocious stormclouds above us seemed less menacing somehow. She sang, and I remembered moments of sweetness from the past, and times when I had almost been happy. I wept for lost companions and for my own loneliness, and I was not ashamed of the weeping.

When at last she left me, I felt strangely peaceful. The heavy clouds thinned above me, and the sea tossed with far less anger than before. Her flight was as lovely as her song, full of the delicacy of her wondrous feathers, and for a while she filled the sky.

Only as she left did I understand that she had chosen to come to this inhospitable place. She had not been falling out of control as I first believed. She had journeyed here to share a little of herself, and had then travelled on to some other place, or time or soul where her song was needed. I felt honoured, humbled by this idea. I do not know why she chose me, for I see nothing in myself that could be worthy of her. There is only one response I can therefore make, which is to become something more, something filled with those feathers and haunted by that song.

You can find out more about Mike’s art here – https://www.zawackiart.com/ His work is amazing and I heartily recommend checking him out.