From the stairs we see a swallow dance in the grey pond of our yard. It performs the forgotten moves like Swimming-with-Pockets-Full-of-Sand, the Lonesome Gymnast, and the Elbow. I think it might be sick, but you swear you've seen those moves before on a beach in Malibu. I have been few places other than the stairs. There is a hush music on the air we can't hear but bob our heads pretending we can. It is only when he stops squirming for a moment I notice the bird's shadow. It is a long, tall shadow - bigger than the outline of an oak tree, and wider than the shade of our tenement. It is a shadow much too big for a small bird. And it keeps growing outward into the street, into other yards. Some neighboring birds in a nearby bath are dimmed to disappearance. We hear their cries until we don't anymore. It swallows the ugly house across the street and the good looking house next to it. I worry about my Honda Civic parked down the street, but you are wiser than that. You declare the bird as some sort of voodoo priest, the dances not a celebration for our benefit but dark rituals. Suddenly there is a tiny bone in its beak I had not noticed before, a miniature headdress materializing on its crown. You get real quiet, as if struggling to remember the last name of a one night stand in college. Then you stand and move to startle it, beating your arms like a bigger bird. The bird takes off into the air and you along with it in pursuit, a pair in chase casting a thick blood over the region. Streetlights come on and a damp vulnerability sets it. That is when we finally hear the music and enter a new age, where we will live in anxiety underneath an ocean of a trillion swallows swarming overhead.