@Achromatic: I really, really, really love your poetry- it's got a certain style to it?- and, well, anyways, it's just gorgeous.
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cardinal ♂ -
samuel ♂The cardinal always fluttered past his house. Rain or shine, it was there, beady eyes gloomy and focused. There was something about it that always struck him as odd, something about the bird was indeed different, but he never cared to look into it.
He was, after all, just a boy.
But the bird was much more than that, much older than that, in knowledge and years. The bird had lived for a long time, the bird lived for longer than it ever wanted to. Then again, the bird got variety; he wasn't always a bird. Sometimes he was a cat, sometimes he was a snail, and he even used to be a human. That's what he was last time, in Victorian era England.
He quite liked that.
However, with the new era brought a new body, wrought with the same spirit. He didn't know what he had done to be cursed as a bird, but there he was, trying to get the attention of the only one who could help him.
He very very much wanted to return to being a human; he didn't care how much technology there was now, how complicated everything got with knowledge, he just wanted hands.
He wanted to be able to create art and to write stories of far away lands, tales of his life, everything.
And in order to do that, he had to befriend the most powerful human out there; nine-year-old Samuel, a boy in a small town in the middle of America.
Samuel was a sad kid. He didn't have many friends, he didn't have much of his family left, and whether he knew it or not yet, he was also being hunted. Hunted by the fiercest demons in hell and the most of succulent angels from above. Everyone wanted his power, whether they acknowledged it or even thought of it- they all wanted to be powerful, the humans.
Animals, in general, usually stayed away from Samuel. It was his aura- deep and sickening and terribly innocent. But, just as the brain disregards a smell after a good bit, the cardinal ignored the gloom.
Every day, he would wait for Samuel to wake up. When he did, the bird would wait on the tree outside of the kitchen window. He sang the best he could, chirped only when necessary, and tried to communicate with Samuel.
Today, he thought, would be the day.
Clearly, the bird was unable to speak English- or any human language- but for a good bit he'd been trying to write it. He would find pens and whatever he could write on in trashcans and practice from newspapers and magazines, from the speech he heard and still understood from his days as a human. He had long forgotten how to write it, especially when locked with a set of wings and talons.
He only wrote two words on the piece of cardboard, and they were "SAVE ME". They were in capitol letters but they were sloppily drawn, however legible.
He flew to the tree and waited for the boy to come down from breakfast. When he didn't come down, not even an hour after he usually awakes, the bird flew to his bedroom window.
The boy laid on the floor, with a piece of paper that said "SAVE ME" in between two pudgy fingers.
Good lord, thought the cardinal.
They're after his subconscious.