Purple feather dissolving into flying birds

You will think I have gone soft, but I have been sitting on the back step of Mrs Pendry's every evening this week watching the starlings come in over the harbour wall. Yesterday one of them dropped a feather at my feet, violet at the root and going blue and then a sort of green-black toward the tip, as if someone had dipped it in the sea at three different times of day. I have it pressed in my Bradshaw now, between the Plymouth and Exeter timetables, where it cannot be damaged.

Mrs Pendry says it is bad luck to keep a feather indoors. She says it while cutting my bread, so I think she is only trying to make me eat faster. Her nephew, the one who mends the nets, told me the birds come off the Dorset cliffs every autumn and roost in the reeds below the church, and that a dozen of them will often go up together for no reason anyone has ever written down.

Last night I went out with the feather in my coat pocket. The tide was full and the sky over the headland had gone the colour of a bruise, and the starlings lifted from the reeds all at once. I stood on the sea wall and watched them break and gather and break again, a long dark flag shaking itself out over the water. When the last of them had gone toward Lyme, I took out the feather and held it up against the sky, and the wind took it out of my hand.

I thought it would drop. Instead it went up sideways, caught the light off the lamps, and came apart into small birds, a dozen or so, each one shaped like the feather's own curl. They flew off after the others. I stood there until Mrs Pendry came out with the lamp and told me my supper was spoiling.

I have not told her. Write back soon and tell me what you think, and whether I am allowed to stay until the swallows go.

Love, Edie