The nest had never been whole.
Only the idea of wholeness.

Now, it smolders.

There is no flame.
Only warmth without source.
Only air too still to breathe.

In a dream stitched from five different people’s childhoods,
a mobile spins above a crib.
Six felt birds.
Only four remain.

No one notices.
Except the bird.

One felt wing is torn. Another hangs by thread.
One has no eyes.

This, too, is a kind of family.

Elsewhere, three strangers dream the same scene:

• A bird stuck inside a bell jar
• A door that opens only to more doors
• A sixth candle that refuses to light

None of them know the others exist.
But they all wake up heavier.

The memory folds in on itself.

Not from sorrow.
From resonance.

Certain truths vibrate at a frequency too low for thought,
but they break things anyway.

The judgment doesn’t come from outside.

No gods speak.
No voices shout.
Only the soft recoil of realization:
Some memories were given up willingly.

The scent of peanut shells crushed underfoot.
A photograph with corners chewed away.
The word “birdbrain” spoken in laughter,
now remembered with a catch in the chest.

The bird wraps them in its feathers.
They do not cut.
They hum.

Then:
A voice.

It doesn’t ask.
It declares.

“Six must return, or none will fly.”

The bird does not know what the six are.
It only knows they exist.

And that something has been burning
since long before it fell.

It turns —
not toward hope,
but toward necessity.

Not toward light,
but toward reassembly.

The nest was never a beginning.
It was the first forgetting.

And now the forgetting is cracking.

The embers hum.
The dust begins to stir.