Aleksei: Goldfinch

When Aleksei was fifty, he found a sick bird in a pet shop.

It was a small yellow bird with black wings. It looked like it’d been beautiful once, but the shop owner had stuffed it aside in a small corner and forgotten about it. “Why is this here?” he asked the shop-owner.

The shop owner shrugged. He had so many birds, it seemed, he’d forgotten about this one. So Aleksei bought the bird and brought it home. The bird was sick, and quiet, and thin. It kept pulling its feathers out. His sister called it a goldfinch.

Aleksei loved the bird.

It was just so fascinating. Here was this tiny little creature that needed him. Depended on him. Of course he’d never hurt it or abandon it, but he could. He owned it. It was his.

He nursed it back to health, bit by bit. He fed it sunflower seeds and dried fruit. He gave it fresh hay for bedding. He bought it a bigger cage, and a bigger water dish, and a mirror so it could see how pretty it was.

Bit by bit, the bird started warming up to him. It followed him around during the day, and at night, it snuggled against his neck. But other times, the bird seemed unhappy, and it would beat itself against the windows.

So he went back to the shopkeeper. “What’s wrong with my bird?” he demanded.

The shopkeeper grunted. “Goldfinches are like that,” he said. “They’re wild birds.”

Aleksei brooded on that for a long time.

--

When Aleksei was little, he read a story about a boy who loved a bird so much that when he let the bird go, it came back to him.

Eventually, he decided to try it. He was very careful, though: he did all the right things. He gave the bird a few more months to bond with him. Then, finally, he took the bird out. He held it in his hands, feeling its tiny heart beating fast against his palm. Its bones felt so very tiny. So very small.

He let it out the window, and the bird flew away.

He sat outside the window a long time, but the bird never came back.

He thought he was okay with it, at first. But over time, he started to… simmer, a bit.

Then one day he saw the bird again. It perched outside his window, peeping a familiar little tune. It wouldn’t come near him, though. Stayed just outside of reach, hopping away whenever he tried to grab it, no doubt afraid of human captivity again. Aleksei remembered how it looked in the store that day-- alone in the corner, abused, sick, forgotten. Probably terrified of being captured again.

The more it dodged, the more annoyed he got. Finally, he dug some sunflower seeds and dried fruit out of his pocket, then tempted the bird back down with treats.

He snatched the bird out of the air. He simmered, staring at it. Didn’t he love it? Didn’t he nurse it back to health?

Well, fine. If it didn’t want him to take care of it, he wouldn’t. He shoved it back in the cage and left it there.

He gave it water, but no food. The bird peeped at him for days. He tossed a blanket over it to muffle the sound, but it only grew more and more alarmed over time. Aleksei ignored it, and after a week with no food, the cage got very quiet, and after two weeks, the bird’s water ran out, and then, slowly, the bird stopped making any noise at all.

And Aleksei was satisfied.

He got a second bird after that. The second goldfinch did what it was supposed to.

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