Hark ye! I am hummingbird, tiny as a golf ball, dense as a chicken tender, with feathers the size of tomato seeds. I run on sugar. SUGAR. SUGAR WATER!
Look look look look look look look, SHUT UP. Look. I built my house on your doorknob. Go around, use one of the other doors, climb in through a window. GO AROUND.
Follow my logic: here’s the thing: I AM KING OF YOUR EMOTIONS.
I am very small. “Smol” in your new English, you reductive idiots. SMOL. I am the smallest dinosaur. Small as a Brazil nut. I’ve been inside a dog’s mouth. I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU.
My zip-zipping around is about me, not you, me, not you. YOUR ARROGANCE IS YOUR GREATEST WEAKNESS. I AM UNTETHERED TO YOUR HUMAN FEARS.
I fear nothing but a STIFF BREEZE.
I needed a place to build my nest while you were sleeping. You and the other one and the other two and the furry ones go IN AND OUT OF THIS DOOR all day long. Then the night arrived, and no one came through the door. The handle is curved and hard, and as good a place as a maple branch.
IT MAKES SENSE. IT’S HARD TO MAKE A NEST ON A BRANCH WITH THE WIND, AND IT’S HARD TO MAKE A NEST ON A CURVED DOORKNOB. I’M A TINY BIRD. LIFE IS HARD. IN THE SKY, ON THE GROUND—EVERY CHOICE IS HARD.
I can fly twenty miles an hour. Oh, you’re not impressed? Cool cool cool cool cool. How FAST can YOU fly? Dense ass bones, no wings—YOU CAN’T FLY FOR NOTHING. And that’s just cruising; when I dive, I can fly SIXTY miles an hour, which is as fast as a football travels in your two-legged boom-crash fight.
Oh, NOW I have your respect?
Fools.
Back to my nest, we’ll just be here a minute because all things in life are temporary and hummingbird babies grow up and take off quickly. Gone, bitties, gone. No, “Can I come home for holidays?” no nothing. Everybody just leaves for good, and then we crawl into a quiet bush and die, OKAY?
So you and your creatures went inside to stuff your flesh beaks with sauce worms and stare at your RAWRAWRAWR wall. The time was nigh and I went to work, collecting twigs and sticks and dog fur and stems and cattails and twigs and string and SNAKESKIN and bark and moss and fish scales and thistle and hay and twine and thread and tinsel and CAT WHISKERS and leaves and twigs and DANDELION DOWN and pine needles and Halloween wig hair and USED SPIDERWEBS—THEY WERE EMPTY WHEN I FOUND THEM, GET A GRIP, THE SPIDERS ARE FINE, YOU THINK A SPIDER’S NOT JUST FINE?
They’re fine. Bunch of creeps, but they keep to themselves.
Listen, I’m just gonna be here on your doorknob for a little while longer, two weeks tops. Don’t be a jerk about it, okay? Two weeks is one sixth of my little hummingbird life if I don’t get eaten by a hawk in my first year. Two weeks for you? That’s nothing. Just keep looking at your doom squares and opening the door to pick up brown squares of varying size, AND YOU CAN’T DO THAT FOR A WHILE. NO MORE BROWN SQUARES HERE, GO AROUND TO THE SIDE.
What’s that sound? Oh, it’s my babies. Yes, yes, take your pictures, you rubes, you voyeurs, I know you like tiny things. They take your mind off bigger things. Oop. One of them fell out and got eaten by a cat, such is life. And there go the other two, goodbye forever, my dearest children.
You happy now? The doorknob is all yours again. Wasn’t even a two full weeks—the things NATURE DOES FOR YOU.
Look, do me a favor: keep my nest on a shelf in your living room and show it to all your visiting smols. They will be impressed. I am an architect.
Okay, goodbye, and GET OVER IT.
