It is the sound of wings
that should not beat —
but do.
The memory descends.
Not to chase.
To answer.
This is not flight.
This is retrieval.
It finds itself not in shadow —
but in the hum below names.
That psychic subterrain where forgotten things compost
into myth.
On a street corner paved over decades ago,
an old man waits for someone
he doesn’t remember forgetting.
She was supposed to return with bread.
The calendar still says Thursday.
It has said Thursday for six years.
The bird hovers.
And in the man’s chest,
a folded card ignites.
Sixth anniversary.
Never sent.
The feather it births glows — dim, warm, true.
The descent tightens.
Memory sharpens where it should fade.
A church.
A choir.
Six notes.
One held back.
The seventh was never allowed.
Too sacred, too wrong.
Too revealing.
When the bird hears it unsung,
its feathers tremble.
Something locks into place —
but remains unnamed.
Now the memory understands.
It was not falling from the sky.
It was falling into others.
It slips sideways into a hospital stairwell.
A nurse cries without knowing why.
Somewhere in her body,
the smell of chalk and blood stirs.
She was six when she let go of a balloon.
It never came back.
She never grieved it.
The bird does.
Memory is not solitary.
It is soil.
Grief is not held.
It is shared weight.
A keychain rattles in the dark: six keys.
One always jammed.
A hand reaches for the wrong one, again.
Somewhere else, a man laughs at nothing,
then forgets why he was sad.
The bird gathers all of it.
This is not possession.
It is stewardship.
It does not carry the dead —
it rethreads them.
Six feathers shimmer.
The final one flutters into form
as a child dreams of a bird
with eyes like spirals
and a beak shaped like a pause.
The bird no longer flies.
It traverses.
Between memories.
Between people.
Between things not quite remembered,
and things almost let go.
It is becoming something else.
And something else
is waiting.