The day you died, you saw a cardinal grinning on the windowsill of your fifth floor apartment.  You had just awoken, bleary-eyed and probably hungover, but you pulled your limbs out of bed to examine the royal creature.  Something about birds had always attracted you magnetically, like nothing else could.  The cardinal perched there with its brown stick legs and its curving red body and its black face that you always thought looked like botched eye shadow.  It didn’t run away from you as you brought your beer-stained breath just inches from the un-scraped window.  Instead, it stared as if it knew all your problems: like the nights you would drink alone on your ex-wife’s couch until you passed out stone cold until morning or the days where you’d stagger into the children’s playground while panicked toddlers fled and worried Filipino nannies pulled the kids back in fear and disgust.  If anything kept you sane, it was birds.  You were fascinated by their vibrant colors and their uncherished gracefulness.  You always stopped on the way to work to admire the birds perched in orderly lines on the overhanging cables.  Once upon a time, you even owned a bird, a sparrow named King, who disappeared one fateful night you had carelessly left the cage open.  But your love of birds never died and when the cardinal appeared on your windowsill, you examined it with passion.  It was probably just the dewy Pennsylvania light reflecting off raindrops, or maybe it was a sudden twitching to bite at a bug climbing the windowsill, but you remembered, crystal clear despite your pounding headache and hazy vision, the jagged beak turning upwards into an upside-down frown.  

You could have watched the cardinal forever, but you had a job.  You hated most of your life, but you particularly hated your job.  You couldn’t stand waking up every morning, stuffing your limbs into a desk too small for you, and scrolling mechanically through page after page after page of numbers and anagrams.  You wished you could be unbridled by society, free to travel the world and watch birds for a living.  But you couldn’t.  Bills scattered your countertop and your fridge hung half-open, empty except for a lukewarm six-pack.  Yesterday, your boss had issued the fourth warning to you for arriving late, and you knew you were just another one or two from unemployment.  So as much as you hated to do it, you dragged yourself out of bed for work.  You pulled your misbuttoned shirt stained with beer over your head.  Then you dug through the pile of reeking clothes and sniffed each pair of pants before eventually giving up and settling on a pair of creased khakis.  In a vain attempt at class, you weakly sprayed a bottle of expired cologne on your face twice.  You sighed audibly and waved a sullen goodbye to the cardinal, still staring, and blundered through a sea of crushed cans and broken bottles out of the doorway.

A lot of people asked why you loved birds so much.  It was a strange obsession, especially for a man who had shown interest in little else than alcohol in his life.  What you would tell those people was that you loved birds for their physical beauty: their silky feathers which you would stroke gently with the love of a parent, their vibrant colors which reminded you of the ineffable joy of childhood, and their unique aviary allure.  And you meant it.  But your love of birds truly came from experiences – not physical beauty.  It came from your decades of struggle with alcohol.  It came from lonely nights.  It came from lonely days.  It came from your unsuccessful marriage.  It came from failed job interviews.  It came from living in the streets.  It came from sitting alone in the cafeteria.  It came from taunting and bullying.  It came from crying silently beneath a present-less Christmas tree.  It came from missing parents.  It came from broken dreams.  What truly attracted a lost, apathetic drunkard to loving birds was your desire to fly, like a bird, from your scarring past. 

But today, today was different. 

Because hidden behind your dejected figure there were tiny hints of something unusual brewing.  Like the way you put the beer can back in the fridge rather than drinking it.  Or the way you dropped Lucy, the landlord’s bad-tempered pitbull, your leftover breakfast instead of throwing it out.  Or how, for the first time in the fifteen years, you said good morning to Mrs. Anderson, your elderly neighbor.  Random strangers would not be able to notice these changes.  Your co-workers, when later asked about your behavior that day, would insist you acted normally.  But if they really looked, much closer than anyone who knew you could see, they could catch tiny specks of optimism hidden beneath your sorrow. 

When your shift ended at eight, you walked home briskly through the eerily empty streets, your overcoat wrapped around you to shelter yourself from the biting cold.  You cast a lonely figure as your hunched frame glided through cobbled roads, swallowed by buildings that leaned over the street threatening to collapse.  Far in the rafters of a building, faint disco music was playing.  But nobody watched you.  Nobody noticed you.  Nobody cared about you.  The silent city was slumbering beneath a blanket of sleep. 

When you got home, you stepped into the ancient elevator, pressing the “R” button which had long since faded into a “P”.  Soon, the doors parted onto the tiny roof, revealing a cluttered conglomeration of items: two armchairs where you used to watch the stars with your wife, three empty twelve-packs of beer which you used to go through weekly, and countless books and papers with blue-pen diagrams strewn on the floor.  And, standing on the edge of the terrace gleaming against the Stygian jet-black sky, stood the wings. 

They were a mechanical marvel: a set of stainless steel wings, glowing softly from the moon’s gentle light.  Years and years of calculations and work poured into every detail of the contraption.  Tiny screws connected layers upon layers overlapping silvery feathers, forming spreading wings.  Interlocked gears and pulleys stretched across the metal frame.  Each piece of metal was woven together in a giant spider’s web.  On the skeleton, a tanned leather harness hung limply, designed perfectly for your body.  It was a flawless machine: a work of art.

With a mechanical gait, you climbed up onto the edge of the terrace, looking out onto the sea of lights of the Philadelphia suburbs, flickering like the dots and dashes of the Morse code.  You wrapped the leather straps of the wings onto your body, hugging your chest with a perfect fit.  You glanced downwards at the street below, noticing the cold pavement.  You tilted your head, remembering years of strife.  You cried a single tear, dripping down your face and plopping plumply on the street beneath you.  You turned around, catching a final glance at the remnants of your lost life.  You paused for a second, a martyr in the black sky hanging on the brink of life and death, of hope and broken dreams, of the past and the future.  Then you jumped. 

The feeling as you hit open air was indescribable.  The metal wings caught each puff of air, pushing you upwards with each forceful push.  Every movement felt natural, as if you were always meant to fly.  As you soared higher, the wings seemed to melt into your back, merging with your vertebrae.  Your memories of your bullying, your failed marriage, and your alcoholism faded into the distance one by one, growing smaller and smaller like the spinning miniature buildings and streets beneath you.  Eventually, the world became a blur -- a mixture of smell, touch and sight.  You even tried a spin, twisting and turning like an acrobat, imitating the birds you watched.  As you flew, a soothing calm spread throughout your body.  Finally, you could relax. 

That was when the first screw came loose.  It was a tiny snap on the right wing, which you barely noticed.  But as the snaps grew more and more grew frequent, more and more screws came loose, spiraling down into the darkness below.  Unclasped metal feathers began to follow, and the wings grew less and less powerful.  You tried to beat the left wing harder to make up for the rapidly deteriorating right.  It didn’t work.  Soon, only a few metal feathers hung off the shattered frame.  Forceful gusts battered these weakened metal pieces, which rattled together like a man gasping for breath.  But by now you had long stopped fighting the inevitable.  You were used to losing, to having your dreams snatched away piece by piece just as you finally grasped them.  Life wasn’t always fair like that, and you knew it. 

As you twirled and spiralled downwards through the crisp night air on the remaining wing, you smiled.