Bird and arrow with quote design

The swift came in through the staff entrance at ten past three, when the doors were propped for the laundry trolleys. By the time Dev caught it in a bin liner it had worked itself half out of the sky and into the ward kitchen. It was a swift, I'm nearly sure, because the wings were scythes and the throat was white as a collar. There was an old arrow through its back, the shaft gone grey, the fletching chewed to nothing. Nobody on nights could say where a thing like that had been.

I sat with it in a shoebox lined with a tea towel while Bay Four breathed around me. Mr Okafor in bed nine asked whether it would live, and I said I didn't know, which was true. He said it was the only honest answer anyone had given him all week, and I laughed until I had to put the kettle on.

We pulled the shaft at half four, Dev holding the wing still and me counting under my breath the way you do for a cannula. It didn't cry out. It shook once, like a dog after a bath, and sat there looking at us with an eye like a bead of jet. Then it went up the stairwell towards the skylight and was gone before the sun did anything.

I keep thinking the arrow was the easy part. Somebody fired it, somebody meant it, and the bird still flew in here with a hole in it, looking for a way out. I don't know what that says about anything. Only that I'm catching the 7:12 home and I'm going to sleep with the blind up.

Love, Jen