Sparrow

She stormed out of their shared apartment, keys to their flat between her sweaty fingers. The sun beat down on her shorts clad legs from its zenith, drying tears in sticky limbo on their way to her chin. She was disoriented by the fight she just had with her sister, about her dad's lung disease, need for a transplant and decision to be buried immediately without a funeral if things went south. "It's selfish of him, it's about our closure, not his!", she screamed. Now she stood in the middle of the hot tar road, amidst a collection of Dutch-Victorian houses and quickly stumbled onto the side walk as a car approached from the short-right to her rear. She sat down in the dirt, next to a succulent garden - the overly manicured, yet unnoticeable suburban type - and her eyes fell to a series of three stones next to the pole of a street light.  She was taken back to the day she left the flat with her last boyfriend and they found a baby sparrow, freshly dead, fallen from a nearby nest. Soft tears filled her eyes then, and they decided to dig a tiny grave in honour of its short lived life. She picked up the soft body and handed it to him before he placed it in the shallow hole. They marked it with the three stones they used to dig it. Now, as the sun blinded her, she looked up, paused for a moment and patted her cheeks before walking back up to the flat. A smile on her face.