The sky is soft and grey-gold, like a puma's skin or like a cobweb with morning light on it.
There is a shape inside it: with eyes that see everything she sees him, and feels his heartbeat pressed to her own, fluttering uncertainly and choking on every beat of his wings. The capricious updrafts are short-lived reliefs, pushing him up on columns of air towards the cool clouds before abandoning him to his illness and to the humid, still heat rising off the swamp below. She feels his bones creaking, and feels his ancient rheumy eyes rolling desperately in his wise old head, and feels his muscles failing with every feeble stroke. His stomach is empty and its hunger pangs manifest in the bird's weak, rattling screeches, delivered into the unsympathetic morning sky. Screams and the rattle of his feathers and his pounding, failing heartbeat: there is no other sound in the sky, in the swamp, in the world. He will not die on the branch like the squirrel; he will not die in the grass like the snake; he will not die drowning in the mire like the Kimeti.
All struggles end: this one in defeat and surrender; the beat of a wing arrested halfway through its arc by a sudden wash of acceptance. The bird hovers in flight for a few moments, in utter silence unbroken even by the beating of his heart. The peace of it folds over the bird like a mother's wings over new eggs, and the fall, when it comes, is weightless in a way that flight never was.
The sky is soft and grey-gold, and the bird tumbles through it leaving a wake like water, over and over between his wings. He falls until the trees part for him; he falls until the earth opens beneath him. His eyes are glazed and his heart is still: the bird falls forever.
