No new-born’s cry disturbs the deathly silence now. Ave has ceased rowing her log canoe across the water to the Island. The rusted trees alone remain there. L— continues to crumble but death rises still like chimney smoke, in the blasted clearings and the cursed square. The absence of new-born screams has left its mark here — the birthing chair, the pots – and on the forest too. Infertility has ring-barked the trees.

She collapses onto the ground, propped up against a green log reading, in the rising spires of smoke and the gaseous stench wafting across the River her own memory of L—‘s horrible last days. Olden boughs, like the arms of women, sawn and axed. Saplings shoved, planted, watered over. A Forest disappearing. The City of Ahem. City of the Almond. There it stood, for a while at least, at the centre of its own imaginary Empire.

We too heard the sounds of Ahem, first its dreams, then the town and then its inhabitants. We felt the first chopping of the trees, then our own anxious flights from nests and islands, retreating to the temporary Forest, the forgiving black branches, and the sun, where our chicks and eggs were assured protection on the ground, and where our tiny reed nests did huddle like miniature shanties on the bank of the River.

We took an immediate dislike to the Almonds, of course, and their attendant Bees. The nuts we could not crack with our beaks. Returning to the island despite ourselves, we found the strange green saplings impervious to our claws. While the smell of burning boughs rose we pecked at the worms and moths dislodged by the axe’s blows.

As the Forest retreated, so too did our shanties. Bakers came scavenging then, raiding nests, trampling upon our newborn chicks. Havoc spread like a word that previously had no meaning. The small remainder of our flock, our crooked V in the sky, fled south. Then springtime came again. Then the Almonds and their Bees were gone.

Ave began to find us frozen, feet up, along the snowy paths. We took a while to thaw, for the eating. On some days she gathered more of us than she could carry, hoarding us in a hole, where we fused with each other into a solid frozen flock. Then the winter ended and those of us who were left took off, as if the icicles fastening our claws to the branches had melted. When spring came, our feathers wetly fluttered, and our almond drop eyes opened. That was when we sang again our long and sad song:

Aeiou!

We did not exist.