Excerpt: Fss

A dead bird hung wrapped in boxing string between a beaded necklace and a black pendant on a chain from your middle mirror and it swung entwined in the two like the pendulum over the pit. A broken sparrow with gray unsettled eyes, dirty white chest, wings painted with the dead brown of drying blood; it swung head down and feet bound with their soles exposed to the bleak winter light which was settling nervous all over your seat and lap. Occasionally we would break from each other and one would run their knuckles up the side of the sparrow and it would swing away from the hand, swing between the lakes of light and back again; in the same way it's body would look when caught in falling flight between the branches in a tree. Exactly the same except for the deadness of the eyes, which caught and ate the shadows and the light all the same: pulling them down and buried in a fog, denying anything a dynamic inside, withholding and cruel.