A feathered body flies over Eustatia, following the river current downstream. The air is warm and muggy, but the leaves are light and leftover from last fall, blending in with her spectral coat. She moves from leaf to leaf, looking to rebuild her home after the disturbance of two nights ago. Glancing left and right, without flapping her wings once, she floats to her new location: a nook on an oak tree adjacent to a green, sagging barn.
The new home is already almost complete. She perches on the edge of the hatch for a moment before ducking in and burrowing into place in the warm shadow inside. The home is strange: hard to the touch, dissimilar to the soft nests in other branches across the way. It's made of the usual dead grass, light fibers, root material, various bits of refuse, but has been treated differently, has calcified.
Once settled, she picks up some of the materials already collected and begins to weave them into each edge of the hatch, slowly closing off the aperture to the outside world. The sun drops below the clouds and the silhouette of the open hatch projects onto her for a moment. She continues to work, slowly making the hatch smaller and smaller until only a pin prick of light can shine through. Proud of her work and puffing up her chest, she settles in and falls asleep.
The next morning, an inverted image of the adjacent barn projects through the pinhole onto the opposite wall but she is gone, late into the day.