The bird hangs so gracefully that, for a moment, I can almost believe that it is more than dead. Unfurling gray wings for the sheer joy of the rusted feathers within them, leaping for the sky, without tethers to hold it back—it becomes as graceful a symphony of motion as it is only possible for something unbound from the earth to be.
But only for a moment. A single glorious moment of song, before the notes clash and collide and tumble, leaving a beauty stripped of all of its spirit.

The flare of the one extended wing twists around a branch—invisible at first, but unforgettably clear turning back to look again. A steel-gray spike claws for the sky through a flurry of torn feathers, stained rust-red not by nature, but by a trickle of blood from the wound that caught them. It’s all that remains to hold it to the sky, this body that believed itself invincible. A branch. Barely strong enough to keep its own weight upright—strong enough nonetheless to rip through muscle and flesh and catch on bone, and keep a bird bleeding on it long enough to die.

The head cocked against the straining joint of the wing—close to tearing itself free with the weight of a body beyond life—curves down instead of up, soft enough to resemble an exhaustion almost human. The shining eyes are lidded—or perhaps their rotting simply blurs, blended into the fine feathers of their sockets, and the gray of a fall sky, by the panic that is beginning to pop within my vision. The beak is blunted, dust and dirt and gray smeared across its chipped white, pressed into feathers that ruffle over it with the wind.

The other wing swoops across the body, tips of shimmering plumes trailing over talons whose scales peel free in tiny, curling strips. Feathers, the gray of a sky clinging to its snow, hide the down of the chest, almost all of the tail that juts, panicked and broken, away from itself. It should leave the wind-tossed silhouette graceless, lopsided, broken by its surrender—

But there is a beauty in it too, that hollows my chest as thoroughly as the images of fluttering wings and a desperate fight to escape that my mind clamors to imagine. From far enough away, it blurs into a pastel scrawl against the heavy sky, lines soft enough to render it gently. Poised, despite the stark wrongness I know I would find were I to step close enough to the tree to meet it head-on.
And so I cannot look away.

There are a million reasons to. The aching in my lungs that screams that I am nowhere near to done with the lonely run everyone at today’s cross-country practice set out on. The weight of the sky above my head, gray painting over the sun and the mountains alike, and promising the type of cold that settles easily into your bones. The scars on my wrists that tingle already with a knowledge of far too much sadness, and a darkness in my mind that does not need to be fed.

But there is something breathtaking about it, something that has seized my heart and refuses to relinquish it. The thin tracery of the tree, a cage against the slumbering form, the perfect split of the trunk into branches that build a dark frame, cutting a perfect slice from the mourning clouds. The gentle toss of the wind, cold and desperate, as it toys with a body on the gallows.

And a bird. A single wing flared, torn upwards with a futility so powerful it gentles the pain.

As though it is simply leaping for the sky, suspended with the force of its own joy, eyes slitted in ecstasy instead of anger.

As though death was the most beautiful thing it met that day.