Life of The Crimson Sparrow

A very short story, co-written by Gudrun Sabrina Hirt, Atzi Muramatsu, Aimee Michel-Fife and Jamie Iremonger

Brown sparrow lived all happy.

Then a chainsaw came and cut the tree down.

Sparrow hitting humans, flying into them and became crimson bleeding.  He was unhappy, had lost his family.  He thought this was the only way he’d get attention.  He actually had been a human before, a homeless man living in a bush.  Then the bush was cut down.  He became a sparrow, by magic since he lost his mind.  Being a sparrow he found a mate, lived in a nest in a very tall tree.  Little did he know, having the mind of a sparrow, that the tree was marked with a red flag.  The red flag meant it was going to be cut down.  The forest wasn’t going to be clear cut, just cut by selection to dedensify a forest.  Way back in the past, he had been a young man living in a house.  The house burned down and his whole family died, including the garden shed, the fence going all around the perimeter of the woods, and the outhouse.

When he hit a man on the road, as a sparrow, the man was knocked down flat on his back.  “It’s the Crimson Sparrow!”

The crimson sparrow flew away quickly.  He sought refuge in his tree, feeling bad, dropping his wings around his shoulders low and tight.  He didn’t want to hit humans anymore.  So he buried his wings in the mud.  He had to perch on the lowest branch he could get to do this.  It poured rain.  Meanwhile, the man he had attacked began to open his eyes and see the clouds were grey. He stared at the rain falling down into his eyes, unable to get up. 

When he began to look around him, he saw he was lying in a pool of muddy water.  His chest was crimson because it was bleeding.  He didn’t want it to start staining the pool of water so he got up, a bit slowly.  He was weak from the growing pain.  He was alright later because he bandaged it up at home.  He didn’t even call the doctor.  There was no need, he told his wife who was worried more about the diseases wild birds could spread than whether he needed stitches or not.

The crimson sparrow sunk his wings deeper in the mud.  He had to stand on the ground, which was all muddy and cold.  He didn’t want to ever fly again.  He fell asleep, drunk on his tears which tasted of sorrow and mud.

The next morning he was shocked to be on the ground and his instinct was to flap his wings immediately and fly, fly to a higher place, but his wings were stuck in the mud and the mud had dried up by the early morning sky.  The sparrow should have woken up!  But he didn’t, he had been drunk – from his tears.  Birds can’t drink their tears, or they shouldn’t.