Up Flew The Jackdaw

She walked back to the house wondering about Buddy and his mother and Magic, and why it had given up on them. She felt her old resentment at Magic welling up again. It left me to grow up without it, she told herself before realising that was not strictly true. It had never given up on her. Rather she had chosen to absorb her mother’s unreasonable fears and be scared of the messengers Magic had sent her.

  A loud caw to her left shocked her out of her reverie and she laughed at the timely intervention of a jackdaw sitting on the nearby wall, having all the appearance of indignant outrage that she had been about to walk right by him.

  “I didn’t even see you. Buddy and Magic and all of it is taking up all my mind?” she said by way of an apology, and it answered with that same rasping caw.

  “I can’t believe I used to be afraid of you once.”

  It turned its head to one side and boldly met her gaze.

  Then it stretched and preened and ruffled up its feathers for her, so obviously for her, that she laughed.

  “You’re pretty,” she told it. She admired the way its claws gripped so neatly on the wall, the shine on its feathers, the glint in its intelligent eye.

  “Or maybe you’re a boy and you’d prefer to be called handsome.” Without realising she had made it all the way to the wall and when she put a hand out to stroke the bird it leaned into it, like a cat would.

  “Little softy,” she said, as she stroked its glossy back. The jackdaw stretched its wings wide and fanned its tail and she found it so gloriously beautiful that it took her a few moments to realise she was being given a reading.

  She knew he was showing her that her previous fear had prevented her from seeing his beauty. The fear Buddy’s mother had of losing Buddy and her belief that she wouldn’t be able to live without him jumped into her mind and she knew that was what the jackdaw had come to tell her about

  “I’m sorry,” she said to it. “I just can’t see anything beautiful in Buddy’s situation.”

  The jackdaw stepped solemnly into her open hand and automatically she curled it around him and held him to her heart.

  Forgiveness, she read. She hadn’t ever explicitly asked for it, but the birds had given it to her anyway. Had put aside those years of her being disgusted and frightened, and had welcomed her back without a shred of resentment.

  “Thank you,” she told it. Briefly she caught a glimpse of a different life she might have lived, one where she had lost the birds and the connection with Magic they afforded, forever, and while it was a reasonable enough, muddling along sort of a life, the absence of Magic was like the sun never escaping from behind the clouds.

  Then why have you abandoned Buddy? She asked the jackdaw, feeling it was a perfectly good stand in for Magic and should at the very least relay the question back.

  Again she had the image of how she’d felt Magic had abandoned her and how it had never been true, that she had simply been too willing to believe the lie. How the lie had been wrapped up in fear and had been irresistible to her fragile sense of worth.

  “So you have not abandoned Buddy?” she clarified with the jackdaw, and when it continued to nestle comfortably within her hands, she took it as confirmation.

  She turned around to see if Buddy was still under the tree and found he was staring at the bird in her hand with a look of want and desolation.

  “Will we try?” she whispered to the jackdaw. The birds and the beasts had ignored Buddy since the accident, but she wondered whether this messenger of Magic with its particular reading might let Buddy stroke it. “It would mean so much to him.”

  The bird did not protest or struggle when she turned and walked towards Buddy. He took some faltering steps forwards and they met in the middle where they quietly swapped the bird over.

  Buddy held it in his hands. He couldn’t speak. She could see there was a tremor in his shoulders.

  “It’s a reading for you,” she told him. “From Magic. It hasn’t abandoned you. I don’t know what that means exactly but it’s a good reading all the same, isn’t it?”

  Buddy smiled, probably the first genuinely happy smile she had seen from him since he had died. All of his misery had disappeared and she knew she had to remember this moment for ever, Buddy after the accident as happy as he used to be, even if she never saw it again.

  “It lets me touch it,” was all he said.

  “I must go inside now. You let that bird go when it wants to.”

  “I will,” he assured her, and he shuffled away with the bird cradled in his grey hands, his back hunched protectively over it, guarding it, keeping it safe from all the world’s many arrows.