FJ Dagg has delved into worlds natural and supernatural this time, for his second entry in our Independence Date contest. A flight of fancy, you might say.

********************

Independence

Hummingbirds, once grown, have no predators, apart from their own prodigious appetites. But that is sufficient.

Samantha clung to a branch near the top of the remaining tree in the courtyard by the Pacific Ocean that had been her home all of her four years. Her chicks of the season were gone—taken from the nest by an especially audacious raven—and now she held on by a mere thread herself. The apartments to which the courtyard belonged had been sold and the new owner had had the thick, twisting junipers and the dense eucalyptus—on which she depended, respectively, for hunting and for cover—cut down at the beginning of the day. The trumpet vines on which Samantha depended for nectar were crushed under the falling trunks and branches.

It might not have mattered had she not spent much of the previous afternoon fighting off in succession two other hummingbirds who had designs on her courtyard. She had gone to sleep hungry and exhausted, and woke up even more so. Before she could get a sorely needed breakfast, however, her world filled with the sound of chainsaws—and began to fall down all around her. If not for the exhaustion owing to yesterday’s battles, she would simply have dashed off to find a new home. But all she could do now was hang on.

Samantha wobbled on the branch, and her vision went in and out of focus and at times, dimmed. A couple of tiny insects drifted by—the kind she usually had for breakfast after a day’s first draught of nectar—but she couldn’t do anything about them. Her wings flickered, as if of their own volition, but she seemed to have forgotten how to fly. Then the light seemed to go out of the world for a space and when it came back, the world was inverted. She dimly realized that she had rotated on the branch and clung to it by one toe, upside-down. She remembered her first chicks—fine, strong birds who had grown nearly as big as she by the time they left the nest.

As her tenuous grip relaxed, her world filled with light—a tremendous, sun-like incandescence that blotted out her scattering memories and her awful hunger and filled her with a sublime peace. She didn’t know that she was falling.

- – -

When she awakened, she was disoriented. She understood that some enormous event had overtaken her, and was surprised by the familiarity of her surroundings, not knowing what to expect, but not expecting familiarity. She found herself perched in a eucalyptus quite like the one in which she’d built her last nest, and the sound of the ocean a short way off was much like that at her old home. There was a structure, a dwelling, near at hand, like the apartments that surrounded her courtyard, but smaller and somehow finer. She even heard the sound of a violin. A man in the apartments had played, but his modest gifts vanished next to what Samantha heard now. What was unfamiliar was the feeling of fine strength that filled her, and the strange, lovely light that seemed to come from everywhere.

The music stopped and in a moment an angel—small and blonde, with great wings of white, blue-tipped feathers—emerged from the little house carrying yet another object familiar to Samantha: a feeder, though this one was not of plastic like the ones the people put out, but rather of a lovely pink quartz that seemed to give off a light of its own. The angel chose a low branch of Samantha’s eucalyptus on which to hang the feeder. She looked up in the direction of Samantha’s perch and though the angel’s eyes didn’t meet the hummingbird’s, she smiled as if they had. She returned to the little house, and the lovely music resumed.

Samantha hummed down to the feeder and drank deeply of the finest nectar she had ever tasted. She somehow knew that, having had this draught, she would never be hungry again, and savored, for the first time, independence.

*****************

That mystery prize is all but tied with string and ready to post out. There’s only one way to win it and that’s to take part. But hurry, July 31^st is fast approaching:

www.awordwithyoupress.com/2010/07/04/we-hold-this-contest-to-be-self-evident/