Read Recreationally

City of Gold

- Inspired by "Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space" from "Only the Animals" by Ceridwen Dovey, as well as "The Happy Prince" by Oscar Wilde- 

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Soul of a swallow

Died in Dublin, 2020

To live is the rarest thing in the world,

Most people just exist, that is all

-Oscar Wilde

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I was alone, caught in the coldest breeze I had ever felt in my young life.

How could I have forgotten?

It was the end of Summer in Australia. The other birds in my flock must have started to migrate to wherever was warmest. I was the only bird left who was not fully fledged yet, and, in their haste, they left me behind.

I felt a cool shiver ripple through my bones as I trudged through the park. Everywhere I tried to rest, I was shooed away.

As I wandered, relentlessly followed by the words "Shoo! Get away bird!", I felt my legs grow heavier and heavier with each step. Before I could even stop myself, I tumbled to the ground, landing flat on my stomach. I struggled to pick myself up again, but it made my body grow

heavier. I flapped around helplessly to no avail for what felt like hours before the sky turned black and the sun on my feathers vanished. When I looked up, there was someone looking down on me. Her expression seemed almost pitying as she examined my injured form. She knelt down beside me and gently reached out to touch me. I flinched, sending a shooting pain through my wings and all over my small body.

"It's okay," she cooed, almost patronisingly.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she extended her hands out to me once more, only this time I could barely resist. I felt as though I was freezing and her hands felt soft and warm. As she gently lifted me off the ground slowly with both hands, I was reminded of my mother. The way we would all nestle close to her affectionately to keep warm. She glanced around the park almost nervously as I nestled close to her, warming my freezing body against her warm skin.

"Come on, I'll take you home," she whispered to me, almost as if she was worried someone would hear her.

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There wasn't much space to walk around in the shoebox, but she tried her best to make it comfortable. The small desk lamp leaning over the side provided warmth and light and the shredded newspaper that lined the surface would crinkle each time I moved.

"You doing okay in there?" She would ask me. I often wondered if she could understand me at all. Her answer to everything was usually,

"You must be hungry,". I always knew when to expect food from overhearing her shout "Alexa, what do swallows normally eat?". She would return moments later with cut up berries or birdseed in some sort of makeshift container. I never found out who Alexa was; from what I could see, she lived alone. But I eventually got used to her odd idiosyncrasies with the prolonged time we spent together. She never seemed to leave the house much, but she was always busy, working on her computer for hours on end. On the rare occasions she did leave the house, she would partially cover her face with a blue surgical mask. It used to frighten me, but I soon learned to identify her from just her eyes.

I lost track of how much time I must have spent there, just sleeping and eating and listening to her talk, as if she hadn't spoken to anybody else in months. It was hard not to pity her; she was lonely. We both were. My favourite day was when I found her sitting beneath the window eagerly, watching a man walking down her driveway with a parcel in hand. There was a knock at the door, and she disappeared, returning a moment later.

"Guess what?" She asked me, tearing open the parcel eagerly. The object appeared to be a book, with the words "The Happy Prince" printed in decorative letters on the front.

"This was my favourite story when I was a kid," she explained, turning each page carefully with wonder-filled eyes.

"It's about a lonely swallow who falls in love with a statue of a prince," She told me, holding it in her hands as if it was a precious memory. She told me the most beautiful story about the swallow and his statue of the Prince, of love and sacrifice, of compassion and empathy, and a little swallow who was delivered to God's city of gold with the leaden heart of the prince as I nestled between the paper shreds beneath the warm light and clung to her every word. As she read the final words on the pages, and closed the book delicately, I couldn't help but feel as though the story wasn't quite over. It couldn't just finish.

Every night, before she would turn all the lights off and fall asleep, she would read me the same story. Even though I heard the story countless times, I still waited for a happy ending. Sometimes after the story was over, she would tell me all about how she travelled to Dublin to see a statue of Oscar Wilde, and how she hoped she could get there soon. I wanted to tell her that my wings were getting stronger everyday, and that I felt like I finally had the strength to fly. I would often find myself looking out the window and dreaming about the day when I would finally fly to Dublin to meet the statue of Oscar Wilde. I thought about where my flock might have migrated to, and if they even realised they left me behind. I thought about how my wings weren't in as much pain as they were before, and, if the window was left only slightly ajar, I might just fly right out of it, on a course for Dublin.

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The air felt clearer than it usually did, even though I had never flown before. If I fell completely silent, I couldn't even hear the far-away buzzing from an airplane engine. It was as if everyone in the entire world had fallen asleep, leaving the sky only for the birds. I had never been so far off the ground, completely weightless, as if my body was being magnetised towards my one true destination. I soon lost track of how long I had been flying, the sky around me progressively getting darker and then lighter over and over again. No matter how much my limbs began to ache, and how weak my wings became, I never stopped flying. Below me, I saw the most amazing things; oceans as blue as the sapphires that the prince delivered to the playwright and the poor match girl, and forests as green as his precious emeralds. I flew over the greatest wonders of the world, and watched them vanish beneath my wings as I stayed on my course. I, like the swallow in the story, had fallen in love deeply; I was in love with the feeling of flying. The way the clouds would cradle my small, delicate body reminded me of nesting with my mother and the rest of the fledglings. For the first time since my flock migrated, I felt safe and at home. Not as if I was wondering through a park, injured and alone, at the mercy of any predator that may have been on the prowl, or as if I was some sort of quarantine art project being used to kill time; I was finally my own bird, soaring through the sky and searching for my own true purpose.

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I had never felt so complete in my life. As I sighed a content sigh as I felt the pain surge through my entire body. I was completely exhausted after flying for however many days it took to finally get to Dublin. Even though every part of my body ached and each shaky breath became harder to take in, I couldn't believe that I had finally made it. As I perched on the shoulder of my literary hero and looked around at the complete stillness around us, I felt as though I had finally reached my final destination. As if the hand of God had personally lifted me from the park-ground or the shoebox and delivered me to the City of Gold once and for all...

THE END