He came from very far away, and he came at dusk, when the sky over the orchard is the colour of deep water. No one saw him land. A little later, as the last light faded, there was only a stranger standing among the apple trees, holding something he had found.
It was an old cage. Its wire had rusted, its wooden floor had darkened under years of rain, and its little door hung open. Inside lay a few feathers and nothing else.
The stranger turned it slowly in his hands, the way we turn an object from a lost civilisation, trying to guess what it was for. He understood the bars. He understood the door. What he could not understand was the love. For he had been told that the creatures of this world kept birds because they loved them, and here was the proof: a house built so that the beloved could never leave.
Above his head the smoke rose suddenly, like a jellyfish drifting up through dark water, and for a moment it looked as though the sky itself were trying to fly away.
He looks at us now with his enormous eyes and holds the cage out, as if asking a question in a language we have not learned yet. Where is the bird? Did it escape, or did it simply stop waiting? Is an open door freedom, or only what is left when freedom comes too late?
He does not know. He came to ask us.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in May 2024.)
