At Home: The Tiger Bird....part 5

The boy lifted from that deep sleep, without even realising that he had come back. The world he left felt different. It felt strangely similar to the world in his dream. Its was warm. That was the first thing he felt. The softness and the warm. His skin tingling, like thawing ice after a hard frost. The sun beating down on his bare limbs. The boy stretched at first, to feel the warm blood in his veins run to his feet and toes. The bright sunlight hit his eyes. His long dark eyelashes shielding the startling rays, but allowing tiny streaks of light onto his bright blue eyes. He rubbed them. His hands still numb and heavy with sleep. Heavily he rolled over unsteadily onto his knees, rather like a new born lamb finding its feet for the first time. A gold flickering light. His blue eyes widened and creased a little at the corners too. How easily his long fingers raked into the ground and the tin slipped out from the soil firmly up into the boys hand.


The tin didn't feel like it did before. Its was cold and he was warm. The tin had always made the boy feel warm. The tin was cold. The boy was warm. The boy opened the box, as if by opening it that something would ignite the warm feeling the tin had given him before. Nothing. Nothing except that something fell out of the shiny box at that very point. His fingers again running lines through the dark, black soil. It caught him. Wrapped around his little finger. A small chain. Tiny wonderful patterns inscribed. The boy feeling the warm presence of something around him for the first time, something from the chain perhaps.

He walked without intent, chain tight in his hand. The tin left and still shining under the oak tree in the dark soil. The boy walked. A bird circled in the blue sky above the tiny figure. The boy disappeared under the green of the forest canopy.