It was the dingiest bird you ever saw, all the color washed from him, as if he had been standing in the rain, friendless and stiff and cold, since Eden went wrong. In the house marked FOR SALE, where nobody made a sound, in the room where I lived with an empty page, I had heard the squawking of the jays under the wild persimmons tormenting him. So I scooped him up after they knocked him down, in league with that ounce of heart pounding in my palm, that dumb beak gaping. Poor thing! Poor foolish life! without sense enough to stop running in desperate circles, needing my lucky help to toss him back into his element. But when I held him high, fear clutched my hand, for through the hole in his head, cut whistle-clean . . through the old dried wound where the hunter's brand had tunneled out his wits I caught the cold flash of the blue Unappeasable sky.