Page 111 of Where Broken Wings Fly

“It’s over, isn’t it?”

Urram cocked his head at me, his beady eye blinking ever so slowly as he watched me come to terms with that.

“In a way.”

I couldn’t help but smile at him. “You actually came with me?”

“You are my caraid. Now, and always.”

It would have been sweet, had it not contained the hoarse croak of a bird's voice.

Wanting nothing more than to sink back into my mattress and fade off into dreams of pixies and grasslands and dragons, my eyes caught on the alarm clock to the side of my bed and made me groan.

“Time for us to get ready for work, Urram.”

Before I left for the day, while I was dressed in my scrubs with my hair tied back into a messy-bun, my rounded ears on display for the first time in a month, I made breakfast.

Not for myself.

I retrieved four ramekins and filled them to the brim with porridge. One with a layer of cut ruby-red apples on the top. Another with a hearty drizzling of maple-syrup. One with a pinch of cayenne, no matter how wrong it felt to do. And lastly, though I knew it would go untouched but it deserved a place amongst the rest, a dollop of porridge with three pinches of cinnamon on top of it.

I slipped out to my back-yard, placed the four dishes in the grass, and left without a word.

Apparently, a workplace isn’t thrilled when you take a one-month unexplained absence. However, when I arrived at the clinic and spilled a false story all about getting trapped high in the Alps during a hiking trip gone wrong, my boss had no choice but to nod and return my position to me.

It probably helped that Urram was with me, perched in the back-room on a coat-rack that one of my colleagues had retrieved for him. They thought he was hilarious, his little chirps here and there and his random spurting of words that they were led to believe I taught him. The odd swear-word tossed in there for good fun had the whole clinic erupting into laughter.

But when I returned home, the porridge was untouched.

Three months later, Urram was the office-mascot. He was also the devil on my shoulder, warning me every morning when I made my four dishes of porridge that there was no point. And when we returned every night to only prove him correct and have to pour the porridge into the trash, I hated his wisdom more and more.

But that evening, as I finished shedding my clothes from my body and sunk into my bed, Urram chirping away above me on the headboard, I opened my computer.

I wasn’t looking for a job. I loved the clinic. It was chaotic and a little unruly, but it had been my home for almost a decade. Yet there, in an email inbox that I hardly ever checked, was a job posting.

I clicked on it, my heart thundering in my ear so loudly that Urram heard, his avian head tilting to the right as he hopped down to my shoulder.

“Don’t do it, Olivia,” he cawed in my ear.

I scrolled through the listing, taking note of the salary that was slightly lower than the one I had now, but my heart was still pounding and my soul was crying out to me.

I clicked off of the posting and switched my attention to real-estate in the area.

A home popped up, quite possibly my dream-home, and the type of thing I could afford.

“Olivia… You are tempting yourself. No good will come of this.”

We moved three weeks later.

I left London behind. I packed up a home that I had lived in for years and didn’t look back. I didn’t fret when I was on the train, Urram grumbling to himself on my lap as he had to resort to being silent or else we’d lose our seat.

We arrived at my new home, in my new town, hours later.

“This is a bad idea,” he continued, the moment we entered the space. I set my few bags down, content with sitting on the porch until the rest of my belongings arrived in the lorry later that day.

The next morning, I had my first shift at the new clinic.

Urram stood on the counter of our new kitchen, hissing like a cat as I made another batch of porridge. He flew around like a buzzing fly to shit as I dolled out the servings. He cawed like a crow as I added the apples, the cinnamon, the cayenne, and the maple-syrup.