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A Sentinel Bird

Sometimes I write little things.  I'm going to put them here sometimes.
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A sentinel bird, black with long, motionless wings, rocking in flight.  Alone at first and then others joined it to make a vertical flotilla.  The sky a phthalocyanine sea for cloud islands, cloud continents.  Storms coming seen far away.   The birds circling off those heaped shores watched for death like they knew. 

Mim thought about knowing.  Minds couldn't be trusted to describe the world.  They left things out.  The circling birds perceived something Mim couldn't.  What was it like when the wind caressed your remiges or to smell a dead fox from high enough in the air that you looked like nothing but a crooked line?

Mim only knew what she needed, only wondered about things that interested her.  She could grow up to be a bird studier and she could learn about what birds knew and maybe even how to describe a bird's whole life start to finish with no guessing.  But she would never be a bird.  Her mind served only the kind of animal she was.  That's where it came from, those apes from before, same with the birds and whatever they used to be.  She didn't have to fly to look for dead foxes.  Birds didn't have to read Keats on the deck wondering how cars worked.  And then there were animals that didn't even have brains.  Mim began to think that knowing wasn't everything.  That perception was limited for usefulness.  She watched the birds and the cloud countries and she started to feel small. She held that feeling because she wanted to shrink.  Big people weren't necessary. Small seemed the most real.

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