Luminescent flakes drifted and scattered, glowing in the pearly light of the neon moon. A blackbird, head cocked and body stilled, sat in silence, scaly feet near-dead in their lack of movement. For a moment, he remained statue-like, before the shrill cry of an excited child startled him out of his stupor. He blinked, ruffled his glossy feathers free of a thin blanket of snow, and craned his fluid neck warily in the direction the noise had come.
There in the moonlight, a child danced, shrieking in delight, wooly hands pounding thickly against one another. Blond hair curled from under the rim of his scarlet wool hat, spilling from underneath the material in unruly corkscrews every chance it got. A woman, face young but back bent and weary, stood beside her son, chapped lips drawn into exhausted, somewhat forced smile.
Her fingers, bare, were clasped tightly to each other. And from the black bird’s vantage point, he could see the sallow band of skin, lighter than the adjacent stretches, which stood bare where once a ring had sat.
The black bird shifted and shuddered for a second before slowly, delicately parting his ochre beak and warbling his song into the night, the notes curling into the depths of the blackness like the strings of a reverberating violin.
With a tremor, the sky unfolded, a ribbon of color snaking through the darkness in a drifting dance of green, red, blue, orange, and yellow.
The woman’s face lifted, startled, even as her son’s breath quieted in awe. The northern lights rippled through the hazel of her eyes, washing the dull ache away. With a slow, broad ripple, she beamed, and the northern lights danced in her disbelieving eyes.
And the blackbird, his purpose fulfilled, lay down once again and settled himself into his cozy, sleepy stupor with a content glow warming his inky chest.