Petitcru has some catlike tendencies. Primary among those is a tendency to hop up onto the ottoman under the living room window and gaze with trembling expectation over whatever is happening outside. Some might have seen her in her shaky, pop-eyed state and assumed she was anticipating imminent catastrophe, but Elaine has had almost a year to grow accustomed to her eccentric mannerisms.

“What’s there, baby?” she asks, stooping to look. She doesn’t have to look far. The dog’s trembling increases as the bright red bird in the snow outside pauses, hopping nearer to the apartment and fluffing itself into an impressively spherical shape.

“Aw. You gonna eat that silly little fat bird? Wanna go out there and eat it?” she asks indulgently, to the accompaniment of a thin whine. But she finds herself feeling oddly guilty as she says it, as though the bird somehow deserves better, and when it flits away she can’t help but feel that this is a show of reproach.

It’s a small encounter - one that she doesn’t think about until the following night, when she walks across the parking lot on careful steps, her feet freezing and her stockings getting ruined on the ice and snow, her heels dangling from her hand because she has already slipped and fell on her a** once this winter as a result of them and doesn’t care for a repeat. She pauses, suddenly aware of the bird - presumably the same one - standing with an alarming stillness on the edge of the sidewalk outside her door. She slows, nervous. She has, as she had told Todd, had it up to here with the Destiny City bullshit, and any sort of unusual animal behavior has her on her guard. Maybe it’s just, sick, though.

It looks at her where she hops from foot to foot on a patch of bare concrete, and there is a strange whiff of aloofness in it, a wounded dignity to its little movements. She thinks that perhaps it is awaiting an apology, and it feels like an opening to madness. Maybe it’s something about this strange ******** city - maybe there’s something in the air (she thinks fleetingly of that cinnamon reek from the week before) that simply rots the brain away. But her conscience twinges her in a way that it rarely does.

She finds herself twinged, too, by some memory, muffled in some corner of her thoughts. There is something so familiar in the bird’s face - in its expression of hurt pride, its reproachful stare that seems to condense a lifetime of sadness and disappointment into its expression.

The memory clicks and she puts both her feet down at once, suddenly heedless of the cold. She thinks of him, of his hurt little face, his tender-bellied vulnerability. So that’s it, he’d said, and she hadn’t had the words to explain how it was that he could have been the key to learning everything about herself that she would come to love, and that that is exactly why she had to leave. She’d been young and stupid enough to believe with her entire heart that the kindest thing to do would be to make him hate her. It had even in its way been a bit of a pleasure, stirring up that first ember of fear in him that she’d come to cherish in others. She told herself then, and sometimes still believed it, that feeding on his own ego was necessary for her to become who she had to be. To become the person he’d taught her to be, without meaning to.

The bird seems to wait expectantly.

“I wasn’t really going to let her eat you,” she says, feeling stupid. The bird ruffles its feathers with a sad, dark eye turned on her. “She probably couldn’t anyway. She can’t run in the snow. She’d probably s**t herself in terror.” This does not have the desired effect, and she lowers her voice to a hiss, feeling unimaginably stupid. “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t joke about feeding you to her! I shouldn’t joke about–about feeding you to her–”

She pauses, and if she had felt stupid before, it is nothing compared to how she feels now that her eyes abruptly well with tears, an indignity that she rarely suffers. It’s late; she’s tired. Sometimes her work is emotionally draining, she tells herself, feeling wretched. She lies to herself even more rarely than she cries. “I’m sorry,” she repeats.

The bird smooths its feathers, pausing in the circle of light in front of her door, and it makes a little sound incongruous with the nighttime, and flies away in apparent forgiveness.