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The girl in this story is not a girl, for she is now forty years old, and a mother of two children and becoming a divorcée and she works in a business, wears suits and tight shirts which she pays extra money to clean at the specialty dry cleaning stores; she pays bills and mortgages and takes her children to their lessons for improvement and cooks them dinners and organizes closets and drawers, discards rubbish and used-up items. The girl looks up from where she is seated on the sofa of her home, and there appear to be hundreds of small grey birds who settle into the bushes and then dash out for no reason she can ascertain, settle and dash, rush out and make a V in flight and return, the nexus disassembles and the flock explodes into the bush amidst wild cries and flight again and crash again into the brush and singing loudly. And this is not a usual home for the flock; she sees birds daily—the robins and blue jays and loud crows, the fast-green hummingbirds and the great blue heron which flies each morning over her home toward the state park and each evening back toward his home by the sea. But not these. And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a California city, who has undone the tight bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.