The magpie sat on the corrugated concrete wall, observing nothing, as magpies never do. A cat moved backwards through the field adjacent, whisking its twitchers and sensing the sky for rain. Spanned pinwheels everywhere; festooned in all the trees and stuck like spinning crucifixes in the damp soil, strung up along fences and floating freely through the air. All different colors and sizes but all of exactly the same cruft, cheap doppelgängers whistling out the same trite designs. A storm was gathering, fluffing up the trees and forcing flowers from the fingernail beds of all in town. They ate, frustratedly, in the building pressure of the afternoon, passing small sets of scissors round the tables so as all could trim their phalange'd tulips and rhododendrons.
The magpie amused itself by hopping from plane to plane on the makeshift rampart, back and forth, over and over again. It had no thirst for variation, as magpies always do. In the stillness following the storm freshly-ruined loads of laundry wept noncommittally on backyard racks, the technicolor plastic hangers staining shirts and stockings and stick-me-ups forever. Snails spelled out cyrillics on the bricks downtown. Later, garbage men would come to cross out their graffiti with slashed-through boxes.
The magpie could still read them, as magpies cannot do. The cobblestones remained spongy for days, claiming single shoes through stick or sludging from all trudgers-through. The streets laughed at midnight and shook the shoes down its gutter-clutches and towards its horrid, gaping mouth, lurking someplace no-one knew. No maps could ever be produced; the streetlines crossed themselves before the next could be drawn out. Still, some parties worked long nights on legends that corresponded with nothing.
The magpie stood on one foot, considering the other, which magpies ought to do. Fresh pies of pumice and pity put out on rotting windowsills to heat up in the cold air. Small birds sang from their centers as the temperatures misunderstood each other and began to brawl, heavily armed. A scarf on the rack forgot where it lived and cried quietly to itself while oblivious waiters passed. A little girl beneath it pulled her curls from out of her pocket and paid the bill.
The magpie fell over stone dead, as magpies must do. Antithesis howled furiously in the immediate foreground, batting its wooly wings. The lights went out as the night came on, fatigued, and losing all interest in illumination, extinguished. There was nothing interesting, after all, outside one bird living, uncaring, on a corrugated wall.
And the pinwheels rusted and grew holes in their sails.
And the snails crushed themselves under the weight of their sadness.
The scarf sighed a last effort towards hope and was smothered out.
The magpie....