Flights of Fancy

In her boredom she plays with paper birds. Rather, she plays with birds on paper. The birds are sketches in ink, damp and rich and black. Beneath the tip of her pen they flutter across the paper, onto other papers that lie in the chaotic pile on her father’s desk. They grow and shrink, becoming as big as two or three sheets of paper or as small as her thumbnail. They sweep across words, sometimes picking up letters that blend into the darkness of their feathers. They leave streaks of ink in their wake. Sometimes, when she is particularly restless, they leap off the parchment and onto the floor or the walls, black on grey stone, flying in arcs and loops around the room. They disappear behind the bookshelves, or into the books, causing the shelves of the bookcase to expand, as the tomes it contains seem to breath with the movement of the ravens inside them. They gravitate toward the windows and become lithe shadows against the black glass panes. She watches them, makes games of having them chase one another across any surface, sometimes across her skin, feeling only a soft caress when larger birds pursue smaller creatures, until the larger birds decrease in size and become prey, hastily changing direction and soaring over her ankle, down her toes and across the floor. When she becomes tired or feels her time would be better spent studying, she reluctantly calls them back to the papers. Flocks of madly swirling black feathers descend onto parchment, becoming paralyzed images once more. Unless she has drawn too many, released too many into the study, and they return to the paper, soaking it heavily with ink until it is black and wet, crumbling apart in her stained fingers. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay