A dance in silence and ashes

That day, ashes danced.

 It was normal to forget your Hatching day. At that age, memories run, lively like a stream, most of the time never to be seen again. But Smoke had never forgotten the day he left the warm confines behind the shell, for a forest made of silence. The world was gray. Mute, unseen and unseeing. 

And there he was, in what was his nest, surrounded by the eggs of those who should have been his brothers and sisters. Or were they ? How could he have known, after all, they too were silent. He was waiting, he didn't know what, but he was waiting, as if something was meant to happen. As if someone was supposed to happen. 

“Something” and “ someone” never happened. And he waited.

What he later learned were trees, were black, still smoking from what had happened before he arrived. What he didn't yet know were ashes, fell endlessly between the singed branches, covering the ground, the plants, his silent siblings, him. When they touched his eyes, they stung and itched. When he breathed them in, they burned his throat and made him cough. And when they fell on his body, they clung to his still-wet feathers. As if the deathly silence was trying to make him its own, claiming him, changing him from the very start. What wasn't made of cinders was soot, and the only air permeating his lungs was smoke.

He decided to stand up. His still shaky and unsteady legs carried him out from under the large, gnarled root where his nest had been built. He watched as his feet left imprints in the thick silvery layer covering the ground, without making a single sound. Above his head, what must have been the sky was the same color as the ground beneath his feet. The forest of silence seemed to stretch on forever, in front, behind, above, and below.

As he walked in a small clearing, he saw it. Not a rock, not a nest. It could have been a plant, but it was something else again. It was something like him. Or at least it was supposed to be something that had been like him. 

But this one was completely motionless. Smoke approached gently, slowly, vocalizing weakly to attract the sleeping creature's attention. Nothing. It didn't react when he gave it a light nudge in the flank with his snout and its body was almost too solid but too light. Like there was nothing inside of this one. Smoke thought how similar it was to the shell he had left behind. It was frozen in a grotesque movement, as if it had run with all its might before stopping abruptly and collapsing, rigid. It didn't have feathers like Smoke's, or perhaps they had already crumbled and flown away with the wind. Its open mouth, as if stopped in a scream, as if it had desperately tried to cling to the breaths being ripped from it, was black inside. Its skin and claws were too. The same black that colored the trees. Where its eyes should have been, two gaping holes remained. It no longer had a tongue. This one wasn’t sleeping. 

Unmoving, unseeing and mute. 

Smoke stared in awe at this body that would no longer move, this body that silence had managed to claim entirely. He was fascinated. 

He was so engrossed in this vision that he almost didn't notice the movement in the corner of his eyes. No, it wasn't really movement. It was like a twinkle in a blackened fern bush. Tearing himself away from his contemplation, he approached. Wary.

It was nothing like anything he had discovered during the first few minutes of his existence. It was tiny, shiny... and red. How could this be red? How could anything shine in this forest of gray and smoke? And it looked hungry as well. Spreading slowly from the leaf, the more it moved, the more the leaf disappeared in dust. It didn't have a form, it didn't have a breath, but the closer Smoke got to it, the warmer it felt. And the smell of it…

It was then that he realized. He realized he was standing before silence itself. The silence that had lulled the one in the clearing to sleep, that had blackened the trees, made the ashes rain down and claimed his siblings. And it was smaller than him. So small that Smoke could have crushed it with his new, frail paw. Even if he had wanted to, he would never have done that. He looked again and again at that silence that seemed to continue to take as long as it continued to live. Then, as quickly as it had devoured, the silence disappeared, leaving only a faint trail of black smoke as witness to its passing.

Smoke felt something rise up his throat, something that made him feel good, uncontrollably so. Then a sound escaped him, then a second, and many more at once. He couldn't hold back the sounds anymore; he was so happy, and he loved the sounds he heard coming out of his mouth. For the first time, he laughed. He hadn’t been the only one living in the whole world! For a split second, the silence had lived with him. He wasn't afraid,he had never been alone. 

And he laughed and laughed until the smoke scratched his throat again and tears trickled down his jaw. Then, almost without his command, his legs began to move. First, little jumps on the spot, then he began to spin around. Faster and faster. His little arms began to beat in time with his jumps. Swirls of dust rose up with his movements, following him in his frantic dance. Yes, that's it. He was dancing. He danced, laughed, and shouted. And no one answered and no one danced alongside him. It didn't matter. At that moment, he was certain of it , he was the only being in the world moving, shouting, seeing. 

The first day of his life, Smoke danced.

And the ashes danced with him.