Tweet tumbled out of the sky 

as if from a spun sugar cloud. The colors of her double-buns cycled perpetually like sunlit waves of an oil slick. Her pixie nose could sniff out the most exquisite of aromas, and this was how she found her way through the world, flitting from one bouquet of pleasant notes to another. 

 

Dried white roses - how were they more ambrosial dehydrated than in full bloom? Sagebrush just inside the edge of a desert. The sweet smoke of burning cane. She nuzzled her nostrils into the most fragrant reserves, intoxicating herself on the fumes of ecstasy. 

 

She would get high on these scents, and one trip would send her soaring to the next like a cosmic trampoline bounce. One day, mid-arc after sniffing a particularly dank patch of lavender pods, she collided with a one-third hummingbird who had escaped from being lost in a mint-maze. His beak, a sharpened chopstick, pierced her ear and storked her in a new direction. Together they shot over a patchwork of whiffs, a perfumier’s unattended sample drawer. 

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The passive sensation created confusion for Tweet, now suspended from this pudding-grass-and-spearmint-smudged skewer like an olfactory septum ring experiencing odors she had not chosen herself.

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Her double-buns blinked purple and red, irregularly like glitched morse code. Sordo the hummingbird didn’t seem to mind that he had a new passenger banging gently against his feathered fluff. Onward he zoomed until it began to rain. The pounding pellets of wetness sent them crashing down into a cotton candy nest on a wand held by a child at a funfair. The pair became entangled in a sticky vortex, knotting the airy floss into an orb of winged, buzzing, soft, glowing down, like a bizarre barrette in a beehive hairdo.

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Tweet and Sordo became a jellybean chrysalis of molten essences. They began to emit a shaking, shimmering sound. It vibrated like a didgeridoo. And just as the din grew louder and more soulful – CHOMP! – they were swallowed by the child holding the cotton candy wand. Digestive fluids transformed them once again. And the child licked his lips and gave his ticket for the Tilt-a-Whirl. 

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by Shelley Pellegrin 

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