Ficlets

Dom was forty-one, and he’d only ever dreamed of birds.

He’d be sitting on a cliff and feeling the wind whip around him, and he’d know that all he had to do was open his wings and let the updraft throw him into the sky…

He’d be stalking on long legs along the shore at dawn, searching for bright little crabs with the urgency only felt in dreams…

He’d be a grey-cowled crow, dodging traffic to land on an antler and gaze into a dead eye…

Feathers and claws and chirps and beaks, every night of his life, and so when he saw a pigeon he would always throw some of what he was eating. When the ground frosted over, he’d hang a ball of suet-and-seed from the eaves of his house, and he never kept a cat.

So when he closed his eyes on November third and dreamed of a grey whale the size of a planet, he knew something was changing.