Buzzards, bread, and cardinals.

The whole family gathered around the fire for our seasonal burning of dried cornstalk. While my brothers and sisters were captivated by the swirling glow, my eyes were captured by the sky. Beyond the field of golden rye, a buzzard circled the pasture.

The buzzard flew and flew but never took its eyes off me. I looked around amidst the burning smoke to see if anyone else saw what I was seeing—alas no. Suddenly, it let out a cry. It was just a few meters above my head.

And there I saw the buzzing buzzard, sitting on the bunting. It cheeped and chirped and looked straight into my eye, as if my pupils it were hunting. The bird seemed to carry with it an aura of deceit and cunning.

“Wait,” I thought, “do buzzards chirp?” Reality sort of shimmered and skipped for a millisecond. The raven looked at me, tilted its head and cawed. “Wait,” I thought, “wasn’t that a buzzard?”

I thought nothing of it, continuing through the forest, which had suddenly become far more over bearing. I felt as though every tree watching me with interest.

Indeed, the eyes of the trees protruded like the nose of Pinocchio. I began chopping them off with my electric machete. "Finally, some solitude." I said as bloody tree eyes lay in my wake.

Now that I was all alone I could focus on my studies. I sat on the ground & looked at the pictures of buzzards & buntings in my bird guide. A ruddy, chittering bird alit on a nearby branch. "What am I?" it teased. I looked between my guide & the bird but it didn't match anything.

And how wrong was I to indulge so deep that a force must intervene. "You know they say cardinals carry a spiritual message to those it shows itself to?" A casual smile sent the words off to my ears. She sat not too far off, a stranger comfortably unnoticed, shamelessly watching.

Eating his dirty 2 year old bread, he was losing his eyesight ever so slowly, tears coming down from his nostrils, he thought to himself, "dang I should have brought a nice and thick tissues..."

Tears filled the room, but he didn’t notice the rising water. By the time he felt the pressure, it was too late. He drowned, and the police found his body with a wet piece of bread. The forensics team found nothing abnormal, and the slice remains wet in a museum today.