Excerpt:

The sight of the girl in pink pyjamas digging in the garden made Corey want to giggle. He sat perched in one of the branches close by, confident she was totally unaware of his presence. Although some of those sparrows darting around had given him a wide berth, the girl had not noticed their behaviour or the reason for it.

Was there something wrong with her? A few bones short of a full skeleton? That was how his father used to call it. Anyone walking past her house could see her in full view, flouncing around the garden in pink flannel. He’d panicked as she’d come outside and quickly scampered up the tree, now it occurred to him maybe he shouldn’t have bothered.
Corey wiped his nose absentmindedly with a grubby hand as he watched the girl stop digging and walk back to the fence. He snorted softly in contempt. Some fence. You might not be able to knock it down, but you could certainly jump over it easily - just as the girl was doing now.

Once over, she bent down again with the spade, retrieving not a clod of earth but a broken mess of feathers. A dead bird. The dead bird. Corey nearly growled in anger as he realised the girl was going to bury the bird. Damn her!

Unable to climb down and stop her, all he could do was watch as she finally laid the body into the hole with care and shovelled dirt over it, then patting it down firmly. “Damnit.” he muttered. “Should have just done it straight away.”

The girl started sniffling as she stood over the grave. She stood there for a long time in silence, then Corey heard a bird start singing sweetly from somewhere. He scanned the area; all the sparrows were busy foraging for food, and any other bird would probably scare them away. Then his eyes widened. It was the girl that was whistling?
A Whistler. Was she whistling for any reason? Could she do what he could? Or did she now only wish she could?

Soon the girl finished her song, then quickly went back inside. Once he was sure she wasn’t going to come back outside again, Corey clambered down the tree trunk and crept over to the grave. Where had she put that spade?

Excitement and nervousness bade him to forget the spade. He kneeled over the circle of brown amongst all the green grass and began to dig with his hands.