I slowly lift the rifle, lifeless in my hands but ready to bark at my command. For a moment I see my prey, a fleeting glimpse of too much flesh for so unsightly a man before my view goes white. I see nothing. All of existence is momentarily gone.

Blinking, I peer around the scope. A bird no larger than a baseball has landed on the barrel, a testament to my stillness. He is white and brown, a delicate intermingling of the colors among feathers, minuscule projections upon projections. Glassy black eyes gaze this way and that with furtive cocks of a head roughly the size of my bullet, almost hidden within a stripe of black feathers. The triangular beak opens and closes, but he refuses to sing for me.

To him, I must seem a leviathan or the universe itself. He puffs his chest and finally lets out a confident peep. His body shudders, perhaps shaking off the night’s sleep. Transfixed I watch him take wing, a dart of life into the morning’s void.

He lives. He breaths. He pays the universe no heed.