Obayo

Obayo

Once there was a bird named Obayo. He hatched from a speckled egg nestled among others in the highest coconut tree. Obayo had many brothers and sisters and a mother that loved them all. When his brothers and sisters got feathers, the feathers were long and green with black tips on the wings. Obayo’s feathers came in with many colors. He had red, yellow, pink, green, blue and violet. The tips of his wings were black like his siblings but he was not comforted by that. He felt different from them.

His nestmates would sit at the edge of the prickly nest and flap their wings to make them strong. Obayo wandered to the edge the first time, looked down and saw how far the ground was. He wondered why his brothers and sisters were not afraid to fall. Jagged rocks and sticker bushes were down there. Surely, it would hurt to fall.

Time went by and Obayo and his nest-mates grew. One by one the others flew. They came back the first few times but eventually they left for good. In time Obayo was the only one left in the nest.

His mother grew tired of bringing him worms. She sat close to her son one day and peered into his dark eyes. “Obayo,” she clucked, “you are the most beautiful of all my children and yet you stay behind. You do not care to fly like the others. Why is this?”

Obayo looked out over the edge of the nest. “Mother, if I fall I will get hurt or die. The rocks will smash my body. The stickers will tear at my feathers. I don’t want to fall.”

“But Obayo,” his mother said, “it is time for me to go to the east, to find your father and be with him again.”

“You're leaving me?”

“Yes.”

“But who will bring my food?”

“You will have to find it yourself.”

Obayo looked across the horizon and saw that his sister was building a nest in a coconut tree. Beside her there was another bird he had never seen before, dancing and offering her grasses for her nest.

“Who is that with Floozel?” Obayo whispered.

“That is her husband. If you fly Obayo, you will find your own food and you will find someone to love you as well.” With that, his mother left the nest and he never saw her again.

Time passed and the ache in Obayo’s stomach started to hurt him. He missed the taste of worms. He watched Floozel and her mate and called to them. But Floozel was too far away to hear her brother. His heart began to ache for the warmth of his mother’s feathers.

He went to the edge of the nest and flapped his wings. The rainbow of colors that fluttered above in the coconut tree drew the attention of a wild orange striped cat. Obayo looked down and saw the predator far below. Gasping he fell back into the safety of his nest. He waited there for another day. His stomach was aching for food.

The next morning he looked down and saw that the cat was gone. The rocks seemed larger than before. The leaves had fallen away from the sticker bushes and Obayo cringed at the length of the thorns. He flapped his wings and closed his eyes.

His feet lifted from the nest, the air passed under his body and he was free for a single shining moment. He opened his eyes and saw the clear blue sky before him. It seemed endless, a place of possibilities. He flapped harder.

The wind changed and his wings faltered. Too many days with no food were testing his strength. He flapped harder, determined to climb to the sky. He spun round and his eyes caught sight of the rocks and the thorns. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move and so he fell.

The thorns tore at his feathers, leaving a few trapped in the sticker bush. The rocks hurt him as he was dashed against them. He lay still.

At first he thought he was dead. Everything hurt, his wings, chest, beak. He opened one eye and saw the orange cat, far in the distance chasing a butterfly across a patch of grass. One of his own feathers fluttered down in front of his face. It was a cool blue, the blue of the horizon he had almost flown into.

The orange cat caught the tiny movement and stopped. She eyed Obayo. His heart beat fast. He struggled to get up, to pull his wing from the branch where is was caught.

The cat darted toward him, her eyes narrowed, her tail a straight orange line behind her slick body.

Obayo flapped his wings, harder than he’d ever done and broke free in a flurry of rainbow feathers. The air embraced him, held him up, pulled him forward. His body shot high into the sky and he passed into the pale blue of the horizon.