The Ardent Lie, by Angus Nicolay

substance to force the homing pigeons away, but it’s quite a superfluous arrangement, as I’m eager to leave this place. Theodore has indicated that I fly to 38 Rue des Rondeaux, 75020 Paris. In small rolls of parchment paper, he has filled the tiny tube with messages. My back is full, my body is empty. I feel the aluminium weight described in my handlers’ stories bonded to my body, never quite thinking I’d be the subject of these stories. I arrive to a familiarized setting that feels a bit more like home. A narrow street, cobblestone wall covered in a riot of fluorescent green vines and bougainvillea. On the other side a barricaded home, identical green door and receding behind the door, the thin, tall house is stacked with three identically shuttered windows. I perch myself on the top sill, waiting for someone to empty my load. Pale skin, velvet ambers of hair and eyes. I am greeted, Confusion-struck. Her tender, welcoming gestures are a relief. She immediately lifts the weight off my back, seeming to know exactly how it burdens me. Was I expected? The room is warm and our spirits higher for company, Laure and I are introduced. Inside my tube concealed a letter from my human handler, explaining. Dear Laure, I have hope amongst the fear for I have found a way to reach you. How are you my dear? I long for my life back by Pere Lachaise with you, our stroll past Wilde, the intricacy he opens in our imagination, the variety you give me. There is no variety here. I’m overwhelmed with such a longing. I wish there was more I could say. I don’t want you to worry, I will be home. Love Theodore I can resist everything except temptation

I can feel Laure’s face is filled with apprehension. What does she recall exactly? The longing for a life back, strolling arm in arm with a mate, my favourite Jardin des Tuileries, anise flavours of absinthe

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and the fresh smell of our favourite city. I am fed an array of eggshells and raisins, completely stuffed and spoilt. I don’t want you to worry, I’ll look after him, we’ll be back soon. My back is empty, my body is full, I fly back to my mate.

I’ve Found a way Home

Back beside Theodore, I bathe in success, a temporary excitement surged my body. He opens the note Laure had tightly crafted earlier. Loving Theodore, Your words have flooded my day with yearning and desires for the past, I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you have left. Our instinctive presentiment for death is creeping on the city. Almost obviously we enable ourselves into hurt and pain. Wouldn’t it be easier to let go of this entirely, a life of solitude without the punishment of this cruel time? I like to think you ease all the pain, please come back. I am sorry, the place you long for is dismantling itself. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all

Your Laure Theodore seems to have never heard of Laure thinking this way; he sobs for the remainder of the night – she must have dodged his desired supposition. Theodore didn’t want to hear the truth- Laure, surely you knew that. She always sat at her window waiting to hear from us, and she always read his letters allowed to me. I loved our afternoons together. She would speak to me with some indication, assuming that I don’t listen, yet I was consistently immersed in the strings she strangled her sentences with - her capability to confine her life to nothing whilst amounting mine to an envy. Then, at dusk when Paris appreciatingly lit my path, I always flew back to Theodore. Days that

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felt like weeks passed. Exhausted from flight, I fed off the life Laure would invent in my mind, nourishing me in conversation about her idiotic ideologies. I am not young enough to know everything, she says.

Lost in Translation

It was impossible to know the meaning of his works, as I sat perched looking up at Oscar Wilde’s tombstone completely hopeless for interpretation. The snowfall had come and started to bury us deeper. This half-knowledge of the world around me would not stop growing. I only felt myself when I was here, I’d become intoxicated, France had become a cataclysm of the first world war and Laure alongside us too. She had started to speak about others in a malicious way, inflicting more harm to herself; about how we are placed into the presence of destruction and have no control of how we want to live. She was infuriated that a bird like me, could have my life so punctured by a war neither my species nor I had created. I was grateful for her consciousness, but had she not realized I’d become her product in result of this war? Laure felt so much for me, I wanted to live like her, to feel the way she delineates the world, to mourn losses and to fear death, have something to lose. The value of her life decreases - she lived like a cynic, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing. Laure wanted to live like me. Looking out the window and over the wall, in tribute to Wilde she recited, ‘he made me see what life is, and what death signifies, and why love is stronger than both’, dangling her humanity in my face. To walk tall on two feet, to feel the air without crumbling in pollution, experience a life, rather than exist and to be so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what [she is] saying. The official narratives of her life left out so much that is meaning to me, all her thinking of a sinister reality. The endless expectation for her life to somehow feel fuller kept ebbing away, she was being selfish. Empathy was becoming a one-way street and I couldn’t take

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anymore from a person like this. I decided then, it was my final flight, I’ve been lost in translation.

Death must be so Beautiful to You

Theodore is on his last limbs, Laure had taken no sign in caring for him, she’d become too occupied. I’ve been disloyal to Theodore, robbed him of his daydream. In feeling sorry, I would take his last letter. I can’t recall why I hadn’t just flown away, injured and aching I wanted to reclaim: Laissez-faire, I detach! It is the way to be, do not get involved. Dear Theodore, Have you sustained any physical damages or rather the psychological ones? Your friend has indulged me in comfort and joy, but I cannot thank you. There is a presence of destruction I cannot escape; he has made me aware: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. I am not young enough to know everything, I understand this now.

Laure “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”, ‘take me with you’. My body would be aching, ripped apart in dispute, achieving strength only through duty. I would lie rotting by her dreaded window, recalling the party played in bringing destruction to Theodore, Laurie and I. Laure handled my body with care, I don’t know why I completely trusted her. She did not seem to grieve my loss, instead she grieved hers. How dare she envy me. She had killed me herself. Submitted into the grasps of this world and I am killed

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just as cruelly. You would have to think we were living in the wrong souls for I finally felt the instinctive presentiment for death while she sat there with no fear. Death must be so beautiful to you, to grapple a choice in your hands, hold full control and choose when you are to say goodbye.

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THE ARDENT LIE

Soul of Donkey

Died 1915, Gallipoli By Angus Nicolay

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