The smaller of the songbird's two chicks fell from the nest and died only days after he hatched. The remaining chick was large and vigorous and ate enough for two, so that, without her mate to help her, the songbird had to spend all day searching for food, from the moment his screams of hunger dragged her from sleep before dawn to final ebbing out of daylight. Her one good eye did not fail to notice the corpse of the other chick, crumpled and battered at the base of the tree, although she had not been present to witness the larger chick trampling it, then driving it furiously over the edge of the nest to fall to its death. With her altered vision, she didn't notice that her one remaining chick bore less and less resemblance to either her or her mate with every passing day, any more than she noticed the minor fungal infection pearling the ruined socket of her right eye.
The infection develops, the fractured skull knits, burned flesh scars over, the cuckoo chick burgeons, the songbird exhausts herself to feed it while her dead chick melts into the ground, axioms form and branch in lemmas, channel postulates like rain –
