​

A Fugue of Silence

 

Not four and twenty black birds baked in a pie but every avian species thrown into the cooking pot, harried to the point of extinction, broiling beneath the crust of the Earth’s overheated atmosphere. Gentle maestros of the air falling from branch and bough until a fugue of silence settles over the planet, that most ominous of sounds: the want of birdsong. The absence of wings. The air as quiet as the Somme at nightfall. All the moments of the Earth as hushed as falling snow.

​

Each creation, once a numberless host, brought to life by the animating breath of an incantrix. Bodies of down and thistle and chaff, light as dandelion seeds, stitched together by master tailors. By the infinitesimals, creatures too small and swift for our eyes to see. A palimpsest of feathers, a da Vinci sketch lifted from the parchment upon which its inscribed, borne aloft by the merest breeze. Now all undone by a more callous hand.   

 

Perhaps envy prompts us to smother their exquisite canticles, to suffocate the sky. Despite our clever simian brains, we can never do what they can: our limbs will never be wings. Now, when we look up, every nest and roost is empty. As empty as the oceans soon will be. Abandoned eyries like forsaken sea-castles, sad and mournful places at the margins of the sky. No longer haunted even by the ghosts of the fallen aviators, by the revenants of those who were once born on the air.  

 

It is not the sun which has brought Icarus down but our withering self-regard. An obsession fixed, with the steadfast aim of a sniper, on the pursuit of our heart’s desire. Imprecations as false as the promises of any shaman.

 

The sky a grey canvass where colour once reigned.  

​

Now all we have are pale memories of a land where angels used to sing. 

​

​

Extract from the short story collection The Last Aviator

​