A Strange Walk
The flowers had entered the house to claim Jay’s attention, to tell her it’d been ages since she’d tended the garden. On light feet she’d almost floated across the wild growth of once-neat pink and orange roses, all the way to the back of the garden. With so much work to do, how could she decide where to stop, where to start?
She’d opened the fence gate and fled into the forest. The lines of trees calmed her, but the flowers here were just as unhinged. An ocean of bluebells flooded her feet, pulled her roots towards their own. She pulled, she flapped—a flash of colour caught her eye: as she waved the blue and white and black on brown, she finally saw her own wings clearly. They lifted her to the highest tree top; her beak plucked at them to convince her they were real. Why had she ever believed she was supposed to be human?
Her name was Jay, wasn’t it?
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[Image description: Landscape photo of a forest of sturdy deciduous trees. Many, many bluebells form a violet-blue sea around the bottom of their trunks. Some fallen branches stick out of the flower sea on the right of the photo, and in the background on the left, a decomposing trunk lies on the ground.]
