Five

It’s a small room with a single window through which sunlight falls for a time in the morning. He likes to sit in the window seat and look out across the short distance between his building, the roof-tops just slightly below, and the gap through the buildings beyond that allow him his moments of sun. The book sits to one side between his now-empty bowl of cereal and a half-finished tea.

His room is much as you’d expect for a young man of few means. He sleeps in a never-made cot, and eats cold food due to a lack of a kitchen, his meals usually cobbled from small items garnered from local stores and padded with what forage he can find in a part-wild city. It’s a modest existence he enjoys, and it provides a type of freedom for him to indulge simple vices and a penchant for laziness. Unfettered by fashion or house pride, the room is little more than a box in which to keep his stuff, a modest treasure chest of items gathered and protected in his short journey to manhood. He keeps found art, old and damaged books, notepads and worn paper bearing scribbling or doodles. There’s little to suggest a man with a plan or intent, just a jumble of objects the meaning of each of which is never immediately obvious, a haphazard catalogue of insignificant monuments known only to the moment and the man. Like all hallmarks of poverty, each thing is an imperfect note played to a melody of years, a marking of time and unwillingness to surrender objects lest they provide respite in some fanciful future moment.

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, glances at the book. He knows it’s a children’s story, a cautionary tale of the fickle nature of kings and gods, but it triggered a long-forgotten unease. “Where are the sparrows?” he asks himself.

He remembers being a child and seeing the flocks flying from the fields to the low, forested hills outside the city. They would mass in the twilight, a rush of chirrups and fluttering wings, swooping low over the buildings and folk, before settling in a garrulous chatter in the distant trees. He’d seen them with his grandfather, the old man’s arthritic fingers pointing out the quarrel coming up across the city before it gathered up and dropped into the forest. He remembered feeling that every bird in the trees was shouting at once, marking time and space, or sharing news of their day in the sun, friends and family alike jostling for attention before falling asleep with the loss of the light.

But he can’t remember seeing such a quarrel for many years. Sparrows are there, flitting between the cracks in the flat, hard, sun-baked pan of the city, but the joyous flocks of his childhood are gone, individual birds now eking their own existence from the tailings of humanity, like the broken remnants of a civilisation that tumbled beneath the eroding waters of an onrushing flood.

“Are they lonely…” he murmurs, and shifts in his seat again. As the sun slips behind the buildings across the roof he stands, dresses, and leaves his small room, his brow furrowed.