The Lucky Ones

[Steve Wayne]

A bird flew onto a skeletal limb on a black tree.

It carried a soiled pink ribbon in its bill and it wove the ribbon into its nest.

The nest was of faded yarn and discarded bread ties and dirty surgical gauze. 

The bird flew away from the tree again, into the smoke of the sky, above the lifeless cinder below.

There were no browns or reds or yellows of this autumn, but only naked myrtle and fir, protective barbs above the dead earth.

A boy with a slingshot hid alone in a charred Ford and shot the bird with a stone through a broken windshield and it fell into the dust of the horizon.

[Steve Wayne]

Wow, that's profound, Teresa.  One of those replies I'm going to have to read a few times.  Thought provokingly scrumptious.  Thanks.

[Teresa]

And so the family of the bird asked one another at the funeral, Why?  And wise grandmother bird said, "It was his time."  Or she said, "It was God's will."  These stray unexpected stones always make me scratch my head.  They make me feel unsafe, unsteady.  Because they make life look so random, so disordered and mindless, soulless.  I hate the stones - drunk drivers, badass hurricanes, cancer - and the shooters who send them in our direction.  Well done, sir.