Bird

There was a small crack. The egg trembled slightly. Another soon followed. The shell was pierced, and the small crack grew as the creature within pushed against its cage, eager to escape. A beak peeked through momentarily, before retreating back into the egg. This continued until the hole created was large enough to fit through. A small, fragile bird emerged from its own juices and spread its little wings. The little bird stumbled out of the egg and landed in its nest with a small thud.

The little hatchling looked around. From beyond the borders of the rim of the nest, the bird could see only blue, and spurts of something white interrupting it. In the distance the little bird could see a black thing, coming towards it. Helpless to stop it, the little bird remained limp on the floor, waiting for the thing to come. The thing eventually became it´s mother. The mother landed inside the nest, and looked at the egg and then at her child. She propped it up and began to feed it. The little bird innocently choked down the food it´s mother had brought.

This cycle continued for a seemingly impossibly long time. The little bird grew in strength every single day, gaining mass, power, and confidence. The mother brought whole worms now, and the little bird could peck and dismember them all on its own. On one very special day, the little bird did more than look beyond the rim of it´s cage. Just as it had broken free from its egg, it would now break out from this nest. Towards the blue, perhaps into the white. The bird jumped from the nest. The little thing fell through the sky. Millions of years of instinct immediately kicked in, and all of the previously superfluous features of the little bird were suddenly paramount to its survival. Its little wings flapped, and flapped, and all of a sudden the bird was flying.

At first, the little bird, now quite a normal sized bird, was sloppily maneuvering through the sky. After a few moments, the instincts were reinforced by muscle memory, and the bird seamlessly glid, to its amazement, into the white. The bird emerged from the white and the whole world became evident to it. The green, the blue, the brown and the yellow.

The bird felt a strong pulse in the air, a sharp clap that disrupted its flight. A single bullet flew into and through the bird. It instantly died, and its limp body fell towards the Earth, except no amount of instinct could save it from touching the ground.

¨Dammit, you shot a small one¨

¨Well, shit. That´s not even big enough to eat¨

¨Just leave it there, we´ll find another¨

The mother returned to an empty nest, and understood.