A story for my three year old's birthday. The first of our experiments of creating a story based around two words decided upon by him.
15th September, 2026
Once there was a boy who lived on the twelfth floor of a big building in an enormous city. The building sat right beside a park, and his bedroom window opened onto, and high above, an aviary that perched on the edge of it. About a hundred birds of all shapes and colours lived in this aviary, which looked like a big white circus tent with a green top.
The boy didn't ever need to check when to get up, because the birds told him. As soon as the sun crept over the big blue volcanoes at the edge of the city and got tangled up bouncing off the hundreds of glassy skyscrapers, a little bubbling sound would float up from the park. It came from a tiny green parakeet called Judy, who was always the first to sense the rays on the edge of the tent.
Then some cooing would join from the little huddle of pigeons who sat low down in the bottom left-hand corner, by the pond. This was usually when the boy first opened his eyes, and before too long every bird had joined in — the wise grey heron, the big red macaw, the cheepy blue tits, the coy cockatoo with her long white skirt, and the pompous peacock Harold, who shrieked loudest of all. And that was how the boy knew the sun had arrived.
Now, every time the boy looked out at the arriving sun and down at the aviary, he saw the head of a little blue-and-white bird peeping out from a rip in the canvas, high up in the corner. She never once looked back. She was almost always fast asleep by then.
This little bird had a problem. Ever since there had been a big electric storm, where she’d been knocked off her perch by the giant rumble of thunder and had hurt her foot trying to cling on, she’d found it nearly impossible to sleep.
Each night, just as she was closing her eyes, the birds would start to shriek at the fading sun, because they wouldn’t just worship it when it arrived but when it left too. They were furious and impatient and terrified of it going; they wanted it to stay so the people who walked outside the aviary would keep talking to them, making more and more noise: as much noise as possible to fill up their empty days.
People walked around with ice creams and shouted "hola" at the aviary, and the cleverest and biggest parrot of them all — Jasper — would reply "hola" each time. And the birds would laugh at the squeals and giggles of the children outside in the park, whom they could hear but never see. The children loved this trick of Jasper's. The birds would ask him to do it again, and he would, saying, "Hola-hola-hola-hola-hola-hola-hola," for a good six or seven minutes more.
But this would all end at night, when the moon arrived and looked down on them solemnly, and the people went to their houses with ice creams in their tummies and no longer in their hands, and the world began to go dark and silent. And so the birds would yell at the sun to stay, holding on to their last hope of the day’s final sounds, and it became a cacophony, every single night.
It was a special sort of pain, being trapped with a hundred noisy birds and never able to sleep. Not up in a bedroom somewhere outside, listening to the chirps and cheeps echo upwards, but right in among them, with all the shouts, squawks and shrieks. What's more, they were her constant: the only other beings she saw. Her family. She'd been in that aviary for longer than she could remember. And so she had to put up with it, getting what sleep she could while the noise crashed off the walls all around her.
Often, late afternoon became the best time to shut her eyes. The people were heading home, the birds were momentarily calm, and there was just the burr of traffic from the cars that circled all around the park. At around five o'clock, the little blue-and-white bird would drift off and find herself dreaming of an oak tree, of squirrels and mice darting about below her.
But soon she’d hear the cacophony begin—quiet at first, then surging—as the moon made its way up the sky, and she’d be knocked out of her dream, just as she had been knocked off her perch by the storm.
And so, as every other bird settled down for the night, resigned to the fact that the sun and the park people had gone, the bird would sit wide awake, gazing about the dark tent. She had chosen this spot for one reason. Through her special rip in the canvas she could see a single star, twinkling high above in the blue-black sky.
That star was her solace.
“I would give so much to be where you are,” said the little bird each night. “High above in complete solitude, so calm and steady, so peaceful and alone.”
And long after she'd said it, because of the immense distance between them, the star's reply would come trickling down.
“How I wish I were you, down there with so many friends and family, with so much fun and noise and laughter. You have no idea what it’s like to be so alone.”
And so the two would have this quiet conversation each night, and eventually the little bird would close her eyes and dream of being on a beach with the vast Milky Way above her, and the grey waves crashing right out to the horizon, with all the distance in the world between her and any other creature, except those secret ones invisibly squirming and sliding about the sea.
After a long day of “holas” and ice creams and chatter from balloon sellers, the bird’s foot was aching badly. She rubbed it grumpily as she listened to the usual cacophony while the birds went to roost for the night.
When all was finally quiet, and the pain had subsided a little, she looked out through the tear in the canvas and waited for her star — because the world turns on an axis, and she always had to wait a few long hours until the other stars had passed and he was right in view.
That night, she waited and waited and waited, but the star never appeared.
“That’s not you,” she said to a particularly glittery one.
“Go to sleep,” the nasty star replied.
“That’s not you either,” she whispered to a faintly pink-coloured dot, who replied curtly that he was not a star but a planet—Mars, in fact—and it was appalling not to know that.
The bird watched the star’s entire constellation pass by, every member of his family, who all floated sternly far away from each other, and knew that something was wrong.
Twelve floors up, the boy was awake too. Something had been odd about the day: it had been busy and empty all at the same time. He leaned out of the window and looked at the little red and white and green lights that flashed or stood still or slid along the roads, making the whole city look like a wide open treasure chest. The boy wondered what everyone could be doing, moving from place to place so late. Were things really still going on every night, long after he'd gone to sleep?
It was odd, the boy thought, that even the aviary was completely silent. He could see the little blue-and-white head of the bird through the rip in the tent, and felt happy she was there, even though she didn’t know he was.
Then something sparked in the sky. He looked up and saw a light he had never seen before, moving along an invisible road, like the cars on the motorway but much further away and going much faster.
The next morning the bird woke early, and not to the bubbling coos of the parakeet, Judy. She was particularly tired; she'd not been able to fall easily into sleep without the star's soporific words. There was an unusual amount of noise going on in the park outside, not the sound of children or ice-cream sellers or popping balloons, but of machines, beeping and crunching.
The commotion, and the funny nervous feeling it gave her in her tummy, reminded her of the time after The Storm, when big machines with huge claws on their arms had come to take away the great palm tree that the thunder brought plummeting down.
Other birds were rousing too, and some flew up to peer through the holes in the top of the aviary at whatever was happening below.
"It's a hole!" said a great-tailed grackle, who was usually the messenger because he was clever and sly and nimble enough to get his head through the mesh and a good view of the park. "There's a big hole in the ground, and a digger is clawing at it, and people are standing all around looking down."
"What could it be?" the bird wondered. But she had a feeling, low in her tummy, as though she already knew.
She craned this way and that to get a view through her ripped canvas, but she had to rely on what she heard from the people chattering outside.
“Can I take some home?” one girl was asking.
“How did it get here?” asked another.
“It came from right up in the sky,” said a parent. “From millions of miles away.”
Nearby, the boy stood looking down, holding his mother’s hand. He knew what this was. He had seen it arrive.
The bird decided, then, to speak to her star, just on the off chance that he could see what was happening from his place way up above the Earth.
“Can you see what’s going on in the park?” she asked.
And, amazed, she got a reply immediately—and it didn’t sound far away, but right close by.
“It’s me,” said the star. “I’m here. I’ve come down to see you and your family.”
“But why?” said the bird. “It’s a mistake to be here. How will you ever get back up into the sky again?”
“I won’t,” said the star. “I’m happy here. People are excited to see me. There’s a whole crowd here. They’re all looking down at me. Some even say they’re going to take bits of me back to their homes and put me in glass boxes on display, or keep me in their bedrooms in their treasure boxes.”
“But why would you want that?” said the bird. “Get away, quick—you’ll be split up and separated and lose yourself forever. You’ll be trapped in the houses of strangers!”
“It’s okay,” said the star, as the digger’s long metal arm started to come crashing down on him. “I’ll be happy this way. I’ll finally have family.”
And with that, the digger started to break up the star, and people rushed in and took parts of him. It was a flurry of arms and hands—everyone wanted him more than anything else in that moment—and they grabbed bits of him and stuffed them into their pockets or handbags or rucksacks. They wanted the biggest bits they could get.
The boy let go of his mother’s hand and moved to the edge of the crater, where the bushes he always liked to hide and play in had been crushed the night before under the weight of the fall. When the arms and hands went in he went in with them, and came out with a piece of chalky, hollow rock the size of a plum. It was still warm in his cupped hands. It was strange, having it here with him. He didn’t know why he wanted it so much. But he put it in his pocket anyway and kept his hand around its warmth all the way home. It felt like a piece of the sun.
Later on in the day, all was normal again. The children with ice creams shouted “hola” to the birds, and “hola-hola-hola-hola,” replied Jasper for at least ten or eleven minutes.
But for the bird, nothing was normal. She sat there anxiously, her foot aching more than ever, as the afternoon sun made its way across the canvas of the aviary and heated her side. What would she do when night fell? How could a constellation survive without one of its stars? Would she ever see her star again?
All around her the birds were settling after their cacophony. Judy was always first to sleep, being first to wake with her bubbling trill. Jasper the macaw stood very still, muttering ‘hola’ faintly under his breath. The pigeons snored down by the pond. The grackle slept with one eye open, as he always did. Harold’s long tail lay slumped behind him, resting after a day of spectacle, and the cockatoo dozed upright and elegant, like a lady at the opera.
She turned to the tear in the canvas, and the blank piece of dark sky behind it, and waited.
Little did she know that right above her, much closer than ever before, a piece of the star sat comfortably on a windowsill on the twelfth floor, looking down — just as the boy did, and just as unseen.
“I’m here,” said the star.
And from then on and for evermore, without knowing why, the bird slept peacefully all through the night.