And there is a fwoom and a flash that blinds me for an instant and oh the birdsong accompanying it is so much sweeter than before. Then my sight rushes back, vision is restored, and I stare up into the sky where my firebird wings its way to the sun.
It was yeards and years and years ago that I first saw it flying away. I was only five, still a child, barely able to comprehend the beauty of what I saw. But for a days and days after, I have been told, I filled many many many pieces of paper with gold and red and a bird on its unerring course towards the brilliant sun.
It made its nest in my mind, coloured my dreams for years and years. I was drawn to fire- any fire, great or small- and it could not bestir me from trying, however desperately, to see that bird flying away into the heart of the flame.
By the age of fourteen I had discovered a little tale of a bird called a pheonix, whose feathers were the colour of fire, who lived and burned and died, only to be born from the ashes.
I hd always, always, wondered how, why it had been brought to Earth, for however brief a time.
The investigative work took ages, I’m sorry to say. It was the year I turned twenty when I realised –oh foolish self! – that the placxe where I’d glimpsed the bird first was the forest of my grandfather’s.
But grandfather was no longer alive, and it seemed there was no one else I could ask.
So I returned to my grandfather’s house, and began my search anew.
Grandfather had always been reticent, reclusive- his nearest neighbour lived five miles away- and it had been that rare occasion that he had deigned to take us into his home for a time. I had been afraid of my grandfather- old and wrinkled and, it hadd seemed to my five-year-old mind, nearly insaen- so I tried to be as cfar away from him as was possible.
When ever I did have to come into hids presence, he told me little tales of this and that.