“.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t like the winter. It wasn’t that the season was too cold, or white. It wasn’t that it was too blinding, or quiet – he was used to the quiet, after all. The real reason that he wasn’t too fond of the time of year – not the season – was because of how long it was. There were other times of year that seemed long, all of them, really. But this time of year was a bad sort of long, because no matter how long he had to wait or how many snowstorms he had to sit through, there was still the knowledge that spring was only going to come after winter was over. And spring, he’d decided, was his favorite time of year.

This winter would be the longest, though. He didn’t know that at this instance of course; but he would find out in due time. That fact didn’t matter at this particular point though, because at this current moment he was heading back home along the sidewalk after a full day of school. School was another thing he wasn’t too fond of. It wasn’t as if he’d chosen not to be able to talk, but he was ostracized for it just the same. People bugged him a bit in that way. They seemed to think that to get to know someone they had to be able to have constant conversations, verbal ones; and if they couldn’t then surely it wasn’t worth trying to befriend someone who was silent all the time. Reading, waiting for things to be written down, and writing apparently didn’t count for conversation; it probably took ‘too long’.

Breaking away from the sidewalk he turned to cut across Central Park. Even if it was winter, the trees and plants were better than the buildings. They never wanted him to talk, anyway. His home was right on the edge, it was already in view. The house itself wasn’t anything lavish, just one of those small sorts of houses with the shutters that looked too fake and the yards that looked too unnaturally clean. The ‘forest’, if you want to call Central Park that, bordering the back yard seemed to contrast the city limit to an extreme; as if, compared to the dull forest scenery, the green that the lawns of the city portrayed were exhibitionists.

The boy’s name was Chaim, in case you wanted to know; some people are interested in that sort of thing. He’d stopped in his stride just outside of the wooded area, looking silently down at a small, rounded sort of fag. There were feathers mixed in among the twigs, and bits of mottled brown shell. It was a nest. The twigs were wound around each other with grass, the feather bits, various bits of string and other such random things one might find on the ground. The weaving was done in such a conscientious way that he had always been amazed how small a time frame it had been made in. Chaim had watched them build the nest, the cardinals; they had built it a few years back, and had been coming back every year since to lay their eggs and raise their young. The avians had been gone for the winter of course, but seeing it on the ground led him to wonder what would happen now that the nest was no longer nestled in the tree that they had always housed themselves in during the warmer seasons, during spring.

When he picked the nest up, he realized that it felt much rougher than he had thought it would. For some reason the boy had always assumed that something made to hold and protect life year after year must have been softer, like silk. Leaving the thought to dawdle along the recesses of his mind, he continued on towards the home in front of him. Upon nearing the back door he realized that it was open, and tilted slightly to the side as well, hanging apparently only on the chain lock that kept the door shut instead of the two now broken hinges. Stepping inside, Chaim clenched his hand lightly around the cardinal’s nest, feeling a qualm sensation pressing against the base of his throat. Something wasn’t right, he could tell just by the way the air felt, by the way it tasted, really. Yet even so, there was the compulsory sensation that drove him to continue walking into the house, heading into the kitchen as he normally did upon returning home.

The first thing he quite realized was that the floor was sticky. Not bubblegum sticky, or popcorn sticky...it was a sort of sticky that he wasn’t able to place. As he shifted his gaze down to the inspect it the vibrant yet dull color of crimson flared up to infect a seemingly flawless hazel, the infectious color becoming disrupted as the clutched bird’s nest was dropped to the floor and footsteps were staggeringly taken backwards in shock. He tripped over something, falling and coming to land with a light ‘thud’ on his back, staring at the ceiling for a brief moment before shifting his lightly emptying gaze over to his hand; the appendage now infected with the crimson as well. Chaim tore his gaze away, quickly scrambling away from the cadaver he’d fallen over, swallowing in an effort to fend off the putrid bile that had been threatening to rise in his throat in place of the cry that wasn’t able to rip free.

The boy turned over on his side, shutting his eyes tightly and instead groping around on the bloodied floor for the nest that had escaped his grasp. Once he’d gotten a hold of it, the boy pushed himself to his feet and going back through the house with his eyes shut the entire time. When he managed to get outside he let himself fall into a sitting position atop the uppermost step of the front stoop of his home, staring at the now crimsoned nest held clutched in his hand. As Chaim stared at the nest he started to think once more about what the cardinal’s would do now that it wasn’t where it had been for the past years. He could feel his mind steering itself away from what he’d just witnessed, poignantly narrowing onto the subject of the birds. Running a hand through his hair in a lightly nervous gesture, the boy got to his feet, figuring that he’d go further into the City and maybe try and figure out where he would make a new nest if his nest fell down. He figured that if he would no longer be able to watch the cardinals from his back window that he would see where the most logical place to watch them next year was, because he wasn’t sure if they would go back there now – he wouldn’t go back there.

The sun was already starting to dip further towards the horizon as he walked along the very edge of Central Park, thinking about where he would go in the spring if he were a cardinal looking for a new nesting area. Besides it being winter, the only detail that made the walk a bit unenjoyable was the fact that everyone he walked by stopped for a minute or so to stare at him. It was the strangest thing, he thought, because it wasn’t as if he was doing anything to make people want to stare at him. The boy set his face in a blasé expression, acting as nonchalant as he was able to. Chaim had never felt particularly inferior before, he had never really had a reason to; but with every person that he went by staring at him as if he hadn’t a head, or something...he was starting to understand what the feeling was.

To get his mind off of them, he ran through in his mind where he thought good nesting areas would be. He paused for a moment, trying to think of the best way to get to the library from where he was; and as he did so he caught sight of someone out of the corner of his eye, turning to get a better view. It was a store window actually, the person he was looking at almost looked like him; but he knew that it just had to be a coincidence, and that who he was looking at was inside the building. Chaim wondered why anyone would want to go shopping with dark red paint splattered all over themselves. It didn’t seem to make much sense to him, because he knew that he was staring at the red paint, and surely other people would stare as well.

Brushing aside the thought, Chaim continued on his way down the street, blinking lightly and looking up ahead, there was a fenced in sort of area with a bunch of younger children and children his age running around. He couldn’t hear anything, but just by the way they’re mouths were open wide and their arms were flailing, he could tell they were screaming and doing other such boisterous things. When he was close enough to stand beside the fence and look into the lot he saw an older woman, waving her arms and shouting to the children to head back inside – the sun was setting now, and all. As he went on his way he thought she must have seen him, but by that time his mind was already set once more on trying to figure out where the cardinals would most likely go, and if he would be able to see them the next year.

Going around the side of the building, the boy pulled the cardinal’s nest out of his pocket, sitting down on the bottom of a set of stairs in front of the building. He got to looking at the details again, wondering where it was they found all the small bits and pieces that it took to make the nest, and how they knew just how to put them all together. If it took so many different things to make, and certainly must take a certain combination or contortment of the different items, how was it that they finished it so quickly? But at the same time, that just made it make all the more sense that they would use the same nest year after year.

Chaim started to think then about what would happen if, after the cardinals built another nest and their eggs hatched, the nest fell down again. He thought about what would happen if the baby birds weren’t too young, but still just young enough to where they wouldn’t be old enough to take care of themselves. If they were able to fly, but not support themselves. It almost depressed him in way, to think of how lost and confused the fledglings would be. He wondered if something like that did happen, if the parent cardinals would stay with the fledglings and teach them further.

The thought of them alone like that, lost and confused, and probably scared actually started him crying. Silent crying and silent tears, everything was silent about him. A tap on the shoulder made the boy spin around to look at the culprit, blinking his vision clear and looking up into the face of the woman he saw out in the back with the other children. Her mouth was moving, keeping a warm smile as it did so, and her eyes made it obvious that she was asking something in a worried tone, probably why he was crying. In answer to the unheard question, Chaim held up the cardinal’s nest for her to see, covered in crimson just like him. She smiled, but there was still that worried look in her eyes, and motioned for him to go inside with her.

Normally children would think about – if anything – how it was a bad idea to go into a building with strangers; but Chaim was going over in his mind about the premature fledglings. If he was one of them, all lost and confused with no more nest to go back to, and another bird – an older bird, of course – came to help the fledgling even after the parent cardinals had flown off. Surely the fledglings would take the help, so he didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t do the same thing. And really, once he thought about it as he followed the woman into the building, the ridges and such on the outside walls looked to be the perfect place for a new nest to be built.