"I saw it FIRST!" Thistle jabs a claw at the last yellow daisy in the clover patch. Pip jabs back. "NO, I did!" Their claws cross in the air, and the daisy's stem snaps with a sharp crack. The flower topples, tumbling past both their snouts into the dirt.
Thistle's quills pop up like a startled bottle-brush. She bolts into the tall grass, thorns whizzing past her nose one by one. Pip squawks after her, wings beating, into the same thicket. The green swallows both their sounds whole, and the clover patch holds only the broken stem.
Thistle curls on her belly in the clover. She turns over once, twice, three times—her spine scraping the damp leaves. The meadow goes quiet. So quiet she can hear the dry creek bed grinding a pebble into smaller pebbles, far away, patient.
She presses her snout flat against a clover leaf. It smells wet and green, like the whole meadow rolled up small. She breathes in, and waits for the chirp. The chirp is not coming. The leaf is cold under her nose, and she breathes again, slower this time.
She tiptoes toward the creek, quills pinned flat against her back. From the fallen daisy's stem she plucks one single yellow petal—cool and papery between her claws. Scritch. Scritch-scritch. Every step grinds the pale creek gravel, and she freezes, ears flat, listening for a squawk that will not come.
Thistle crouches at the twig nest by the creek. Her quills are too tight, too loud, too many for a sorry. So she nudges the single yellow petal under Pip's outstretched wing with her nose, and holds perfectly still. The twig creaks. The pebbles glow faint.
Pip's black eye cracks open, slow, blinking. It looks down at the yellow petal pressed under his wing. He does not squawk. He does not shift. The petal trembles in the air between them, glowing soft and papery, and Thistle's quills stay pinned.
Pip chirps—once, small, no sharper than a seed splitting. He tucks the petal deep under his breast feathers where it glows like a coin in the dark. He shifts two inches closer to Thistle. She lets her quills drop, uncurl, soften. They sit side by side at the creek's edge while night moths hum past.
