THE BIRD'S SONG

by

Dirk Vanden

He was fourteen at the end of winter; and the long nights of snow and wind had pushed him out of last year's clothes; his arms grew out of the sleeves, and the denim trousers reached high above his ankles. Each night he would stand before the mirror, his head tipped with a frown or sometimes laughter at the stranger in the glass. His mother behind him, near the fire, shook her head and pulled the needle through the new denim of his summer trousers. And sometimes she laughed with him.

And nights, in the long cold winter nights, as the moon shone through the midnight glass, throwing the window pattern across the patchwork quilt, he would stand looking down at the sparkling snow, out across the woods, over the valley and the quiet chimneys, feeling the surge of life within him and only remembering the child who had left his deep footprints across the icea child with red bright cheeks and shining eyes at the wonder of icicles and frozen sprays, and naked trees with new soft coats of fluffy white that flashed as sparrows shook it down in fanning showers a child who watched the cake-frosting clouds that galloped, antelopes, and prowled tigers, across the blue upside-down world. But now, in the moonlight, the prints were filled and crusted, almost gone; and the child was gone. But the clouds were geese across the moon.

And in secret times he would close the door, shivering with the stove cut off, and look in his own mirror at his new body, amazed, delighted and yet

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