War came to my window in the form of a little red bird. Beak the colour of coagulated rust, feathers dipped in the fresh crimson of oxygenated blood splattered across asphalt. A halo of hydrogen atoms hardened into clear stones resting on its crown. A dainty tilt of its head before its throat opened and the window panes rattled under the pressure of its scream.
They shook again under the second assault: birdsong reverberating in deadly waves. The third threatened to shatter concrete. With the fourth, anything wooden in the vicinity burned. The trees were a funeral pyre for the peace we no longer had, though it would be many months before the spark of retaliation took the quiet of our home, our street nestled beneath the war-torn skies.
War was not a quiet thing when it arrived, thriving on the ascending panic of those throwing themselves out of the way. We scraped our knees as we snuck out in the silence to see the remains of the low hanging moon in the bubblegum pink twilight.
We dug graves with soil softened by the water of the small lake, where the light reflected the sky as the night stretched forever over us. The insurrection of the surrounding stars means there are none, having thrown themselves from this galaxy to the next, heeding the call of their siblings light years away. Some wanted to preserve life-forms like us, small and insignificant to them, while others were trying to take us down with them. The war blazed past us, Earth a speck in the scale of the conflict that has painted our atmosphere this thick, goopy colour, the texture of toffee left too long.
The red bird stretched its wings, metallic feathers sharp as it launched from my balcony into the stratosphere.
The sun went to fight our war across the nebulas and galaxies. The firmament now: the leftover face of the moon turned dark, the sky a perpetual pale pink twilight, and that initial fire which burnt a single memory of the sun across generations. And with the absence of sunlight we dug light from the bioluminescence of the oceans, the plankton swirling in waves as we scooped it into lamps: outside, inside, in-between. They lit up the street of our home, our bedrooms, and those gates that looked out from earth into the Milky Way.
We sleep and wake to birdsong like clockwork chimes. The sky above did not deign to turn its eyes towards what was smaller than dust. Powerless to stop the sun and tear open the linen pale mouth of the atmosphere, we gathered when the birdsong stopped.
We waited for the dawn told of in fairytales and prayed for the absence of that cotton-spun pink twilight, our hope a beacon as we set the lights to lead the sun home from the war-worn stars.