BIRDS are scary

The child runs in that shimmer-heat, that beastly burn that comes up off the oblong rocks distorting things- the landscape seen through dusty water. The child trips, flips, slides, scrapes, cries aloud and gains its feet, welts rising on its legs, soon to flood with soothing blister-sacs.
The child holds dear against its shirt a small, bright thing cupped like a cricket- sure and tight.
And runs.
Fissures spit out sloughing steam about the child, steam to slip the muscles from your bones in dead white shapes. Arenal is quite a hillside, quite the active cone of spitting smoke above the long cool lake below.
The birds are onto the game, though. The birds are hep, and start in shapes toward the child. They do not caw, or call, or beat; They slip like knives behind its feet.
The child can feel them driving the burnzone below, pressing upward in a bubble of bad intent. They come in thousand-color blades, in clouds, in eerie silent purpose up the face. The child tries to push, increase its pace.
Not near enough the lip a fissure spits the child up, and down, and the birds fall upon it there. Each beady creature drives its beak into a piece of meat and holds, drawing gently from the archbacked child, too stretched to scream, its hands still clasped in rigor vivis round the precious thing at breast.
The birds begin to flap; Those parrot, toucan, raven, sparrow, pigeon, cormorant, chrometipped, redtit, brighteyed murderous skystains beating wings as best they can enmeshed against their beakstuck cousins; flap, and flap, and spread their mouths inside each driven wound until they lift off in a prune-shaped, maddening mess,
And disappear over the long cool lake.