It’s a lazy Sunday, so may I treat you with a story?
The Beauty of Bones.
The owl blamed the owners of the weather. It had been raining for two days straight, and he was starting to believe that this was a personal vendetta against him alone. Whoever controlled the rain coming out of the sky surely did it only to annoy him. He looked straight ahead as to pretend that he didn’t mind it at all, but it was hard to keep up. He heard the family of birds upstairs babble urgently. It was a language he did not understand. At first – he had to admit this – he had been rather dissatisfied with them moving to the tree. He’d lived there alone for so long that he had started to consider it his property when they decided to ruin it all. They got up early every morning and made a ruckus with their chatter, but now the old owl was beginning to enjoy their constant energy. When he once in a while communicated with the other old owls in the neighborhood, he took pride in the fact that such a foreign family had chosen his tree to move into. It kept him young, and even though it did still bother him at times, he said that it was a pure pleasure when asked.
The only good thing about this rain was that it kept the humans away. The owl had spotted them underneath his tree once in a while with long sticks in their hands. He couldn’t see many things with those half-blind eyes of his, but the humans were very hard to ignore. Sometimes they’d see something in the sky, point their sticks to it and a loud bang would pierce the air. This was especially a nuisance because they always did this when the owl was in his deepest sleep. Apparently these people were not concerned with such things. The owl’s theory was that the bangs came from the sticks, but he wasn’t entirely sure. However, he couldn’t see any point to it, and without a point there was no logic, and without logic the owl couldn’t be bothered with thinking about it.
It pleased the owl to hear the birds chatter as the rain kept on. He looked up at them lazily, but they didn’t notice him. He heard one of them flap its wings and suddenly the bird mother sat on the branch in front of him, staring. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. He hadn’t liked it at first, and he still wasn’t too fond of it. It was one of the things that made them seem so peculiar to him. He stared back indifferently which wasn’t hard because he had just woken up and was still a little tired. Behind her the rain was still pouring in strides, and it didn’t make his mood any better. She made sounds in that language he didn’t understand. The owl didn’t move, but lowered his head a little more down in his fur. All this chirping made him feel tired again. The bird flapped its wings and was soon off again. The owl blinked wearily, and stared at the rain viciously.
The family in the nest above him went for a little flight the following afternoon. The owl had woken up and heard them get ready for it. The bird children had just learned how to fly, so once in a while their parents took them out to practice. It wasn’t to the owl’s liking. He wished they could be a little quieter. When they took out their children the four of them only flew around the tree they lived in, again and again and again. They would reach the front of the owl’s habitat once every two minutes, and finally it made him irritated enough to say something about it. They seemed to not hear him. He yelled at them a little louder, but it only had the same lack of effect. He did not appreciate that kind of disrespect and he decided to tell them once they got home. After all, he found this tree first and he intended to let them know that.
He heard the kids make a commotion once they got home. A little later the parents left and came home with food. He heard them eat together, and chirp in that tongue he couldn’t comprehend. The owl didn’t want it to, as a matter of fact he fought very much against it, but this made all his anger and frustration with them go away. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t want to tell them anymore.
The dark was coming and the rain was finally beginning to slow down. Within the hour it stopped completely, and even though this pleased the owl, it also made him aware of one harrowing fact: soon those darn humans would be back with their deafening sticks and if there was one thing the owl didn’t like, it was unnecessary noise. He didn’t like it one bit.
He had been right. Just as he was thinking about getting to sleep the next day, they were there. He could hardly see them with those eyes of his, but he felt their presence. Again they made loud noises, and woke the owl up just as he was drifting away. He heard how the blast gave way to panic upstairs, so now not only did he have to listen to the noise sticks, but the birds upstairs as well. This was shaping up to be a dreadful sleep. The owl could just feel it as he lowered his head and decided to ignore everything the best he knew how. And if there was something the owl knew how to do, it was to ignore things.
Some days later the family of birds went for a flight like they did on occasion. The owl appreciated the silence it gave him for a little while, and grabbed a firm hold of his branch with the claws on his feet. He closed his eyes and waited for them to get home. This time they flew around the trees just twice until it seemed that they decided to advance and fly further away. Just when the owl thought he was going to get a little bit of valuable peace, he heard that awful racket the humans made. The owl, who had had his eyes closed for only a minute, opened one and hoped someone would see his dissatisfaction and stop this infernal rumpus this instant.
When he woke up he went for dinner. He found a special treat in the shape of a mouse after which he headed home for the safety of his tree. To his surprise the birds still weren’t there. It wasn’t like them to stay out this late. However, the owl wasn’t one to be nosy, so he tugged himself onto the branch, and minded his own business.
When he was finished snoozing, he opened a single eye and looked upwards. The birds still weren’t there. This gave him tremendous dissatisfaction, but he decided to not mention it when they came back. He didn’t want to give them ideas about him being dependent on them for anything, not even sounds. He was fine before they came around, and he was fine no matter how long it took them to come home. It did take them an awful long time though. He decided to go to sleep, and when he finally dozed off, he dreamt of the same birds he was trying to ignore.
After two days of the birds not being home, the owl decided that they had officially disappeared. Even though he didn’t want to admit it, this worried him incredibly. In the night when he was out scouting for food, he always looked to the other trees in the forest, too, to see if maybe the family had relocated to somewhere else. Maybe they had wanted to get away from him. If this was the case, the owl knew what had to be done. He would simply force them back to their original home, and he would hear no nonsense from them. He had started to enjoy their daily chatter, and he was not going to be cheated from it just because they had gotten some idiotic idea. But he never saw the birds. They had disappeared from this side of the forest, and the owl was alone again.
Sometimes he woke up in the mornings at the exact moment the bird parents would start to chirp and wake up the children, but then he would go back to sleep knowing that it was just his imagination. After a while of scouting for them and needlessly waking up in the beginning of his sleep, the owl knew that he had to admit something to himself: he missed the bird family. Not much, he was sure of that, but enough so that it was irritating that they weren’t around. Now he was all alone again, and even though that had suited him well before, he was now sometimes getting desperate for some sounds coming from upstairs. Their nest was still there. He had noticed that. It looked like they had taken off without knowing that they would do so. Maybe something had happened on their flight? No, this was too ridiculous, the owl thought to himself, and resigned to looking at the rest of the forest from his usual spot on the branch in the tree. The humans were still around sometimes with their sticks, and every time the owl heard it he thought of the birds. He would much rather have their chatter and chirping instead of this. He had started to notice how there was a little glance of light whenever the sticks made their loud boom. But this was not really a thought that interested the owl. Honestly, he would much rather just close his eyes and let them have done with this noise, so he could rest and fall asleep.
In time the owl tried not to think about the bird family anymore. He forced himself to be content in his solitude, and even though the other birds of the forest made him think of the family who had once resided upstairs, he didn’t want to admit that he was, indeed, a lonely owl now that they were no longer here.
One day he heard another loud bang from one of the sticks that the humans carried around. This in itself wasn’t a strange occurrence, but what happened right after sure was. All of a sudden a bird fell from the sky. It didn’t move or fly away or anything. It was just there on the ground like a soft, fallen statue. The owl looked at it for a long time. It was a rather big bird, and it had a lot of colors. He had never seen a bird like this up close. It sure didn’t look like the family that used to live here. A bird like this would never fit in a nest like theirs, and he wouldn’t want to have it anyway, even if it was very pretty. He didn’t trust birds like that.
He waited for someone to come pick it up, but no one came. Every night when he woke up it was still lying there, and every morning when he went to sleep, it was the last thing that caught his old, weak eyes. He wondered why the bird had fallen dead from the sky, and wondered if it could have anything to do with those fiery sticks that the men carried around. The big bird looked like it was still flying with its wings spread out over the ground, but its eyes were closed and gave the impression that it was merely sleeping. However, the owl was no fool, and he knew that if a bird lied on the ground for that long, it wasn’t sleeping, but stone dead instead. A cold rush went through his little body as he thought of the family of birds, and how he had heard those loud bangs right after they’d gone from the tree and never gotten back. No, that was foolish thinking. Nothing had happened to the birds, because there couldn’t have. There just couldn’t have.
It didn’t take long before the bird on the ground was starting to look ghastly to the old owl. It was starting to smell a little bit too, and if there was something that the owl didn’t appreciate it was foul smells. The bird no longer looked as if it was asleep. It just looked as if it was in decay. The owl wondered who he could complain to about the smell, but he couldn’t think of anyone at all. This upset him very much.
It was after a good day’s sleep that he got the idea. He was getting tired of the constant lack of sounds coming from the birds upstairs, and truly missed the days when the mother would come down and watch him for a while. The bird below was rotting, and he was able to see the bones now. As a matter of fact, the bird was now simply a skeleton, and it was by looking at this development that the owl got the idea of using the bones to his advantage. If he couldn’t have the family of birds back, then he would create his own. When the dark arose he flew down to investigate the rest of the bones and the body. The latter didn’t interest him much, but he took a great deal of notice to the bones of the bird. The rest of the night – when he wasn’t eating, of course – he found the remedies he needed for his new project. The owl had never had a project before, and wouldn’t mind if it ended sooner rather than later. He collected the bones one at the time, and gathered them in a little nook in his tree. When all of this was done, he had a well-deserved sleep, and dreamt only of happy things.
The following night he started to build. By the nest where the bird family used to live, he now re-invented them so he could pretend that they had never left at all. With his beak he tightened various bones with rope made from long leaved grass by the edge of the forest. It took him longer than he liked to get the family of bones together. The owl was about to give up many times, but the constant delight of his idea kept him going. Soon he never had to be lonely again. It was on an early morning that he finished his work. He was thrilled. According to himself he had created a perfect replica of the bird family. Made from the collected bones of the dead bird, he had made two small birds and two big ones. This was evidently the two children and their parents.
Now, when the owl felt lonely, he merely had to take the short trip to the height of the tree to visit the birds, who had now become friends of his. They never left their nest, and they never woke him up in the morning with their useless chatter and chirping. In fact, they were more likeable now than before, when they annoyed him more than half the time. The owl enjoyed their company and, if he had to say so himself, he was rather proud of the work he’d done. When he visited them he could see more of the forest than he ever could from his own place in the tree. With the birds he would sometimes sit and enjoy the view until he finally left for his own branch below. There he would sit and be satisfied, for now he finally had peace and friends who understood the importance of such a thing.
The Beauty of Bones.
The owl blamed the owners of the weather. It had been raining for two days straight, and he was starting to believe that this was a personal vendetta against him alone. Whoever controlled the rain coming out of the sky surely did it only to annoy him. He looked straight ahead as to pretend that he didn’t mind it at all, but it was hard to keep up. He heard the family of birds upstairs babble urgently. It was a language he did not understand. At first – he had to admit this – he had been rather dissatisfied with them moving to the tree. He’d lived there alone for so long that he had started to consider it his property when they decided to ruin it all. They got up early every morning and made a ruckus with their chatter, but now the old owl was beginning to enjoy their constant energy. When he once in a while communicated with the other old owls in the neighborhood, he took pride in the fact that such a foreign family had chosen his tree to move into. It kept him young, and even though it did still bother him at times, he said that it was a pure pleasure when asked.The only good thing about this rain was that it kept the humans away. The owl had spotted them underneath his tree once in a while with long sticks in their hands. He couldn’t see many things with those half-blind eyes of his, but the humans were very hard to ignore. Sometimes they’d see something in the sky, point their sticks to it and a loud bang would pierce the air. This was especially a nuisance because they always did this when the owl was in his deepest sleep. Apparently these people were not concerned with such things. The owl’s theory was that the bangs came from the sticks, but he wasn’t entirely sure. However, he couldn’t see any point to it, and without a point there was no logic, and without logic the owl couldn’t be bothered with thinking about it.
It pleased the owl to hear the birds chatter as the rain kept on. He looked up at them lazily, but they didn’t notice him. He heard one of them flap its wings and suddenly the bird mother sat on the branch in front of him, staring. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. He hadn’t liked it at first, and he still wasn’t too fond of it. It was one of the things that made them seem so peculiar to him. He stared back indifferently which wasn’t hard because he had just woken up and was still a little tired. Behind her the rain was still pouring in strides, and it didn’t make his mood any better. She made sounds in that language he didn’t understand. The owl didn’t move, but lowered his head a little more down in his fur. All this chirping made him feel tired again. The bird flapped its wings and was soon off again. The owl blinked wearily, and stared at the rain viciously.
The family in the nest above him went for a little flight the following afternoon. The owl had woken up and heard them get ready for it. The bird children had just learned how to fly, so once in a while their parents took them out to practice. It wasn’t to the owl’s liking. He wished they could be a little quieter. When they took out their children the four of them only flew around the tree they lived in, again and again and again. They would reach the front of the owl’s habitat once every two minutes, and finally it made him irritated enough to say something about it. They seemed to not hear him. He yelled at them a little louder, but it only had the same lack of effect. He did not appreciate that kind of disrespect and he decided to tell them once they got home. After all, he found this tree first and he intended to let them know that.
He heard the kids make a commotion once they got home. A little later the parents left and came home with food. He heard them eat together, and chirp in that tongue he couldn’t comprehend. The owl didn’t want it to, as a matter of fact he fought very much against it, but this made all his anger and frustration with them go away. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t want to tell them anymore.
The dark was coming and the rain was finally beginning to slow down. Within the hour it stopped completely, and even though this pleased the owl, it also made him aware of one harrowing fact: soon those darn humans would be back with their deafening sticks and if there was one thing the owl didn’t like, it was unnecessary noise. He didn’t like it one bit.
He had been right. Just as he was thinking about getting to sleep the next day, they were there. He could hardly see them with those eyes of his, but he felt their presence. Again they made loud noises, and woke the owl up just as he was drifting away. He heard how the blast gave way to panic upstairs, so now not only did he have to listen to the noise sticks, but the birds upstairs as well. This was shaping up to be a dreadful sleep. The owl could just feel it as he lowered his head and decided to ignore everything the best he knew how. And if there was something the owl knew how to do, it was to ignore things.
Some days later the family of birds went for a flight like they did on occasion. The owl appreciated the silence it gave him for a little while, and grabbed a firm hold of his branch with the claws on his feet. He closed his eyes and waited for them to get home. This time they flew around the trees just twice until it seemed that they decided to advance and fly further away. Just when the owl thought he was going to get a little bit of valuable peace, he heard that awful racket the humans made. The owl, who had had his eyes closed for only a minute, opened one and hoped someone would see his dissatisfaction and stop this infernal rumpus this instant.
When he woke up he went for dinner. He found a special treat in the shape of a mouse after which he headed home for the safety of his tree. To his surprise the birds still weren’t there. It wasn’t like them to stay out this late. However, the owl wasn’t one to be nosy, so he tugged himself onto the branch, and minded his own business.
When he was finished snoozing, he opened a single eye and looked upwards. The birds still weren’t there. This gave him tremendous dissatisfaction, but he decided to not mention it when they came back. He didn’t want to give them ideas about him being dependent on them for anything, not even sounds. He was fine before they came around, and he was fine no matter how long it took them to come home. It did take them an awful long time though. He decided to go to sleep, and when he finally dozed off, he dreamt of the same birds he was trying to ignore.
After two days of the birds not being home, the owl decided that they had officially disappeared. Even though he didn’t want to admit it, this worried him incredibly. In the night when he was out scouting for food, he always looked to the other trees in the forest, too, to see if maybe the family had relocated to somewhere else. Maybe they had wanted to get away from him. If this was the case, the owl knew what had to be done. He would simply force them back to their original home, and he would hear no nonsense from them. He had started to enjoy their daily chatter, and he was not going to be cheated from it just because they had gotten some idiotic idea. But he never saw the birds. They had disappeared from this side of the forest, and the owl was alone again.
Sometimes he woke up in the mornings at the exact moment the bird parents would start to chirp and wake up the children, but then he would go back to sleep knowing that it was just his imagination. After a while of scouting for them and needlessly waking up in the beginning of his sleep, the owl knew that he had to admit something to himself: he missed the bird family. Not much, he was sure of that, but enough so that it was irritating that they weren’t around. Now he was all alone again, and even though that had suited him well before, he was now sometimes getting desperate for some sounds coming from upstairs. Their nest was still there. He had noticed that. It looked like they had taken off without knowing that they would do so. Maybe something had happened on their flight? No, this was too ridiculous, the owl thought to himself, and resigned to looking at the rest of the forest from his usual spot on the branch in the tree. The humans were still around sometimes with their sticks, and every time the owl heard it he thought of the birds. He would much rather have their chatter and chirping instead of this. He had started to notice how there was a little glance of light whenever the sticks made their loud boom. But this was not really a thought that interested the owl. Honestly, he would much rather just close his eyes and let them have done with this noise, so he could rest and fall asleep.
In time the owl tried not to think about the bird family anymore. He forced himself to be content in his solitude, and even though the other birds of the forest made him think of the family who had once resided upstairs, he didn’t want to admit that he was, indeed, a lonely owl now that they were no longer here.
One day he heard another loud bang from one of the sticks that the humans carried around. This in itself wasn’t a strange occurrence, but what happened right after sure was. All of a sudden a bird fell from the sky. It didn’t move or fly away or anything. It was just there on the ground like a soft, fallen statue. The owl looked at it for a long time. It was a rather big bird, and it had a lot of colors. He had never seen a bird like this up close. It sure didn’t look like the family that used to live here. A bird like this would never fit in a nest like theirs, and he wouldn’t want to have it anyway, even if it was very pretty. He didn’t trust birds like that.
He waited for someone to come pick it up, but no one came. Every night when he woke up it was still lying there, and every morning when he went to sleep, it was the last thing that caught his old, weak eyes. He wondered why the bird had fallen dead from the sky, and wondered if it could have anything to do with those fiery sticks that the men carried around. The big bird looked like it was still flying with its wings spread out over the ground, but its eyes were closed and gave the impression that it was merely sleeping. However, the owl was no fool, and he knew that if a bird lied on the ground for that long, it wasn’t sleeping, but stone dead instead. A cold rush went through his little body as he thought of the family of birds, and how he had heard those loud bangs right after they’d gone from the tree and never gotten back. No, that was foolish thinking. Nothing had happened to the birds, because there couldn’t have. There just couldn’t have.
It didn’t take long before the bird on the ground was starting to look ghastly to the old owl. It was starting to smell a little bit too, and if there was something that the owl didn’t appreciate it was foul smells. The bird no longer looked as if it was asleep. It just looked as if it was in decay. The owl wondered who he could complain to about the smell, but he couldn’t think of anyone at all. This upset him very much.
It was after a good day’s sleep that he got the idea. He was getting tired of the constant lack of sounds coming from the birds upstairs, and truly missed the days when the mother would come down and watch him for a while. The bird below was rotting, and he was able to see the bones now. As a matter of fact, the bird was now simply a skeleton, and it was by looking at this development that the owl got the idea of using the bones to his advantage. If he couldn’t have the family of birds back, then he would create his own. When the dark arose he flew down to investigate the rest of the bones and the body. The latter didn’t interest him much, but he took a great deal of notice to the bones of the bird. The rest of the night – when he wasn’t eating, of course – he found the remedies he needed for his new project. The owl had never had a project before, and wouldn’t mind if it ended sooner rather than later. He collected the bones one at the time, and gathered them in a little nook in his tree. When all of this was done, he had a well-deserved sleep, and dreamt only of happy things.
The following night he started to build. By the nest where the bird family used to live, he now re-invented them so he could pretend that they had never left at all. With his beak he tightened various bones with rope made from long leaved grass by the edge of the forest. It took him longer than he liked to get the family of bones together. The owl was about to give up many times, but the constant delight of his idea kept him going. Soon he never had to be lonely again. It was on an early morning that he finished his work. He was thrilled. According to himself he had created a perfect replica of the bird family. Made from the collected bones of the dead bird, he had made two small birds and two big ones. This was evidently the two children and their parents.
Now, when the owl felt lonely, he merely had to take the short trip to the height of the tree to visit the birds, who had now become friends of his. They never left their nest, and they never woke him up in the morning with their useless chatter and chirping. In fact, they were more likeable now than before, when they annoyed him more than half the time. The owl enjoyed their company and, if he had to say so himself, he was rather proud of the work he’d done. When he visited them he could see more of the forest than he ever could from his own place in the tree. With the birds he would sometimes sit and enjoy the view until he finally left for his own branch below. There he would sit and be satisfied, for now he finally had peace and friends who understood the importance of such a thing.
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