Small Birds

// UPDATE 'Small Birds' has since been selected for the university's annual anthology, 2011! //

It has been a long time since last I saw you. Your hair has grown, and your eyebrows are different. I have a keen eye for good eyebrows. Yours are not good. 

In fact, I had completely forgotten you existed. It was as if your life and mine had never come into contact, until I made a list of all the people I know, and you were on it. That's when I remembered. So I decided to knock on your door.

A big wooden door, painted black, with an iron letterbox in the shape of a mouth at its centre. Oxidisation had caused the letterbox lips to turn a dirty crimson, and crack around the edges. You didn't answer, perhaps because when I knocked, I used the fleshy part of my hand, wrapped up in my scarf, and even then I tapped lightly. But you didn't answer, so I let myself in.

It's difficult to hear you when you're shouting with your mouth closed. When your lips are hermetically sealed, firmly covered, and you're shouting. It's hard to hear you yell all of those words, so violent, so angry, over the shallow breathing at the back of the room. Over the falling snowflakes outside the window, and over the whisper of the gas cooker in the room next door. 

I follow your glance across the room to a small chest on the mantle piece. Oak, perhaps, and into it carved once again an ornate pair of lips. But when I open it, I find it is filled with the sounds of small birds: sparrows and robins, whispering awkwardly to one another. This makes it harder still to hear your shouts and whimpers.

So I close the chest, turn off the cooker, stop the snow and silence the breathing at the back of the room, so that you can be heard. But then, as you appear to be having trouble speaking (perhaps because your mouth is in a state of self-induced paralysis) I myself speak, on your behalf.

Don't worry, you say. You can have me back, you say. We can wile the nights away, trapping sounds of conspiring birds in ornate boxes, and perhaps even bake a lip-shaped cake, out of our love for one another.

But I can hear your sarcasm in my voice. And I don't like it one bit. So I turn the gas cooker back on, and just before leaving the house, I remove your eyebrows, as a courtesy.