Carbon Monoxide

Cordelia Cherie was a brainless yellow canary who got the feeling of dying inside whenever she wasn't doing something.

For this reason, as well as the fact that canaries are, on the whole, very small and easily devoured, she never stopped moving. She had a very small wingspan, so she had to flap her wings very, very fast to keep herself flying, and she still couldn't keep up with, fly as high as, or escape from a lot of the other birds.

One morning, after waking from bloody, feline-colored dreams, she checked her feathers in the mirror and then flew straight out the window and into the day, stopping for none of it, but doing her best to make sure that everyone could hear her sing.

Everyone did hear her sing. She was so bright and sunny on the outside, and nobody seemed to notice how completly solidly black her eyes were, and how impossible they were to interpret. It was because of those things that she was caged and sold.

Eventually she was bought by a man who promised to take good care of her forever, because she was so beautiful and talented. So he took care of her and she sang from her pretty little guilded cage and chirped when he asked her to, and stopped singing when he asked her to, and he found all of her birdseed for her. She just ruffled her feathers and preened, for she couldn't think of anything else to do anymore, and loved it when the man came home and hated it when he left, because she didn't have anything else.

After a time of this, the man inevitably became subliminally bored with her, and her chirping began to make it very hard to watch t.v., so he donated her to a mining company. She was very bright in the dark of the mine shafts. Her death saved a few lives and destroyed a few minds, that pretty little, noisy little bird.