August 7 - Free Color

Interesting - turns out today ended up being a continuation of yesterday’s post. I might keep coming back to this as a multi-part story. For part 1, start here: https://www.sammykatta.com/writing/2026/8/7/august-6-trees .

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That first time I saw The Bird, it was dressed as a crow, head to toe in solid black with just the slightest touch of violet iridescence in its wings. It hopped up along the branch closest to my window, the movement catching the corner of my vision as I typed. Deep in the flow of this paragraph as I was, I turned my head, registered The Bird with some sub-threshold part of my brain while my eyes gazed right through it, and continued channeling words from my brain to my fingers.

The Bird tilted its own head, scrutinizing me with its left eye, glancing up and down, and over to my screen as if curious what form my current prevarication on behalf of the government was taking. We continued like that for a moment longer, and then The Bird opened its beak and let out a series of three guttural caws, black ruff juddering with the effort. Somewhere in my brain, the image from my eyes finally dragged itself up above the surface, and I finally looked -- actually looked -- at The Bird, my fingers falling still a moment later.

Despite the clear impression of sound, I had heard...absolutely nothing. Perhaps it was the pane of glass, but our windows had never been that soundproof. The calls of crows perched across the street were often audible through the closed window, and at this distance, even the whistles and chipping of sparrows and cardinals going about their day regularly vibrated their way through the glass. Briefly, I felt a sense of curiosity, but very quickly, the imminent deadline of my assignment reasserted itself. Ignoring the evidence of my eyes, I put the anomaly down to the fact that the window was closed, and turned back to the screen.

Picking back up at the start of the paragraph to remind myself where I was going, I re-read my last few sentences, until I hit the end:

"...terminated to align with Administration priorities. However, new programs How interesting You are shiny Yet your eyes have no shine"

What? Confused by what on earth had caused me to type this, I fell back on my default staring spot, the tree outside my window. Fluttering greens played shade along the branches, full of leaves, but otherwise empty of avians -- The Bird or otherwise.

August 6 - Trees

It is a surprisingly marvellous thing to have lived in one place long enough to notice how a tree has grown. I don't mean that I've never seen a tree be bigger than it once was, but as with humans, the radical changes you see in a tree's early years are much more noticeable than those you see in maturity.

In my mother's garden, there were plenty of these young trees - those brought and transplanted by my mother as saplings, tenderly cared for, watered, fertilized. I watched them slowly put out leaves and begin to bloom as they overcame the trauma of being uprooted and displaced into a new environment and began to interact with the nitrogen-fixing residents of their new home soil. As fruit trees, however, they were lovingly pruned each year to help them grow more fruit. Some were dwarf varietals and some were more actively shaped to remain short, in either case aiming to both avoid the power lines above and keep the fruit within reach for my mother below.

In contrast, when I moved into my urban-ish apartment on the edge of suburbia, the tips of the most eager branches greeted me from the bottom of my third floor window. This was a tree that was already twenty-some feet in height, branching out just as far in diameter. Peering past the top of the tree, I could see its fellows alternately lining the rest of the street, trees of similar size clearly planted many years ago around the same time. Even back then, this was already a mature tree, its welcome shade in the DC summer the result of someone else's foresight.

Each day when I worked from home, it provided a welcome place for my eyes to focus whenever I turned away from my screen to think. It occasionally provided drama and intrigue, as a sometimes hangout for a passel of sparrows and the occasional crow. In spring we'd often see the sparrows flying up from the tree to the corner above our window, beaks laden with twigs, and know it was time to keep a careful ear out for the peeping of stray chicks in the walls near our dryer.

This spring, I began to notice some sparrows flying higher up than before, not to our window but perhaps the one above. And with a jolt, I realized that indeed, the top of the tree was now to the fourth floor what it had been to ours, seven years ago. The tree had grown, both up and out, a dozen feet since I had been here. Where once I could see the buildings across the street all year round, now I could only see them in winter when the branches were bare. It was a few days after I first stared into the tree with this realization, appreciating the extent to which the tree had grown and become an ever greater haven for the sparrows, that I first met The Bird.

August 4 - Muddy Waters

Stream of Consciousness

Flowing, flowing, always forward 'til the land turns up before me, then off I bounce and swirl and flare. Forward now at an angle, forward but I’ve lost the parallel, lost my banks, ‘til gravity grabs me, takes my mass and points me back down there.

Downstream now, the rocks appear, and oh the rush, the rush! Here the rocks, never moving, yet spearing constantly toward the sky. To each successive surge of water, stone presents a new encounter, as my waters swell with rain or dwindle down to dry.

Smoothly, I glide o'er their humps, under the surface. Part my flows around their protrusions, at that threshold where it all bubbles up as I splash and I leap and let myself mingle, ever so briefly, with the air.

And in this amorous interaction, we three lovers carry each other, shape each other, shifting our paths and changing our futures, some for now and some forever – the earth, the air and I.

August 1 - Mechanical Garden

Floria absolutely loved her work, but absolutely hated telling others about it. When pressed by folks who didn't yet know her, she would say she was a gardener. It wasn’t even a lie, not really. It was just a more expansive definition of a garden than her people generally used.

After the collapse, the remnants of local communities had really taken to heart the need to stop living off the land and start living with the land. Generations later, this cultural shift had brought with it a deep mistrust of mechanical and electrical technology.

It was a slippery slope, the argument went. Machines by definition allowed you to do more work than one person could, extracting more from the environment than the community could give back. That way lay a race to death: overpopulation, ever-increasing exploitation of the land to support unsustainable growth, and the eventual descent into resource hoarding, scarcity, and war.

Yet there were still machines her community simply could not yet do without, the sources of light and heat on which they were forced to rely because of how thoroughly those who came before had fucked up the sun in their quixotic quest to harness every watt of energy. "Sustainable energy", they'd called it, with no regard for what sustainable usage might look like.

Floria understood why her people resented the need for these machines, and she too, felt that rage at their ancestors for stealing away the heart of the solar system. But the machines themselves, she found utterly beautiful. The synchrony of their actions, the slow and elegant rotation of the mirrors throughout the course of the day, a waltz of gargantuan proportions.

In her mechanical garden, Floria fertilized the plants with oil and pneumatic fluid, watered them with current data about the state of the land and the needs of its flora and fauna, pruned the broken ones to repurpose parts for repairs, and harvested their fruit in the continued survival of the land. So she said she was a gardener. It wasn't a lie, not really.

July 31 - Friendly Monsters

Damien rang the doorbell politely, smiling for the camera. The door swung open, and Rupert grinned back. "Hey there neighbor! What can I do for you today?"

"Good morning, Rupert! I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to finish up a project today, and it's been a little hard to focus with the noise – would you mind toning it down a bit, just for the next few hours?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it had gotten so loud!" Rupert replied. "It's just like comforting background noise to me at this point. You know how it is, like when you see someone everyday, you don't notice how they've gained weight little by little, but someone else who hadn't seen them in a while would notice it immediately!"

"Of course, of course," Damien said, relieved that Rupert wasn't offended. "And I'm not asking you to be completely quiet, just…turn things down a bit so we can't hear it over in our house."

"Will do!" Rupert agreed affably. "By the way, how's your friend Ralph?"

"Oh, he's still in bed – and normally I'd be right there with him too. But I just woke up with a really great idea about my project this morning and had to get it down on paper, so here I am!" Damien explained.

"Well, you know, it's been a while since we've all gotten together. Why don't you both come over for dinner tonight?" Rupert asked. "I'd love to test out some new recipes on you!"

"That sounds lovely! I don't think we have any plans tonight, but I'll check in with Ralph and let you know. I've got to get back to my project now, so thanks again for being understanding about the noise!"

*****

The screaming grew louder as Rupert wended his way through the living room and into the barely living room. He paused at the door and cocked his head, trying to pinpoint which of his victims was making enough noise to be heard next door. It kind of felt like a tie between the one he’d picked up for not having papers and one he’d picked up in the wrong bathroom…but the latter had been one of the first he'd brought in, so maybe it was time to wrap that up.

As Rupert filleted his catch, the screams turned to whimpers and then dwindled into silence. Rupert separated out the edible portions and tossed the rest into a bin for composting. It was a shame to lose the screams and his freezer was still partially stocked with his last batch, but at least this stuff made great fertilizer for the Pilea peperomioides in the back garden.

You know, it really was unfortunate that his neighbor's house was so close to the property line on this side. Damien was generally one of the good ones too, only mildly flaunting his lifestyle and rarely making some sort of scene. The big issue was his noise complaints – Rupert didn't understand why Damien made such a big deal about the screaming, but he was starting to get annoyed at being constantly called out about it. Well, he'd deal with that at dinner.

*****

Damien savored the blissful quiet as he sat back down at his desk. He pulled out his notebook and quickly became absorbed in sketching out his grand idea. He'd been trying to design some sort of helmet or earmuffs that would help him focus, and the epiphany had come to him this morning as he dreamed of the beach on Waikiki – sand! Sand was the key! It was dense and would easily dampen sound! Now if he could just find a way to incorporate sand into this helmet design, he would never have to hear those dreadful noises from next door anymore!

July 30 - Rooftop View

As the sun rose, so too did the wind, and the sky began to fill with fluttering diamonds. From her perch on the edge of the water tank, Navya watched as the battles commenced, airborne fighters bobbing and weaving as they sought to gain purchase on each others' lines.

Just below, she heard the excited clamor of voices as her cousins spooled the string and argued cheerfully over who would get to launch the kite. She felt no rush to join the fray. As always, it would be the eldest cousin, who could most be trusted to run along the roof without falling off or tripping on the pipes snaking their way across the flat expanse.

But there! A few streets upwind, a pink patang swooped under and up, catching a gust and spooling outward to cut the line above it, freeing a white kite with a large blue spot.

Navya very carefully skirted the opening of the tank – her aunts' stories of children falling in and drowning had at least partially stuck – then scrambled quickly down the ladder, wrapping her small hands as best she could around the thick, knobbly rungs. She ran to the closest end of the rooftop, leaning on the whitewashed concrete wall as the kite glided toward her. Would it soar up in a gust? Would it fall before it reached her and get tangled in the trees? Would that boy on the next rooftop manage to grab the string as it passed?

She tracked the kite as it passed just barely over the corner of their building's roof, and reached as far out as she could without falling over the edge, just barely snagging the string. She laughed excitedly as cousins jostled around and congratulated her on her capture.

It was always a bit of a risk, trying to fly a losing kite. Maybe the pilot had simply made an error…or maybe the kite just wasn't maneuverable enough and would be cut again as soon as its string was knotted onto theirs and took to the air again. In the end, though, kites would come and kites would go – the joy lay in the striving.