Critique is appreciated though please bear in mind that I´m neither a professional writer nor a native English speaker.
The Red Bird
There it was again, a red speck on a branch of the
old oak tree outside his window. He had noticed this peculiar bird a
few times already. With its bright feathers it was hard to overlook
after all.
The first time, he ignored it, not being overly
interested in the avian fauna. The next time however, he started to
wonder what kind of bird it might be and how it ended up in this
vicinity, for he could not recall ever seeing another one like it. He
tried to look it up in books and on the internet but to no avail. It
was neither a robin nor a northern cardinal, not a parrot and most
definitely no flamingo. Whenever he saw the bird, it would be sitting
on the same branch of the same tree tilting its head and looking at
him. He never saw it land or fly away. It seemed to just be there at
one moment and gone at another. Only after a few weeks would he begin
to understand the meaning of these encounters, reluctantly at first.
It was on one of those nights: having returned home after an old man had died in his car, sitting beside the window of his kitchen, he remembered that he had been sitting in the same spot this morning before driving to work, being looked at by his crimson visitor. For the first time his mind made the connection of the red bird and a dead patient, almost offhandedly discarding it as purely coincidental. And yet...hadn't it been last week, on the day the little girl had died in a car accident, that he too had seen the bird? Rubbing his eyes he decided to stop brooding and to go to bed.
Days passed without anything unusual happening. Then,
one morning, sipping coffee in his kitchen, he saw the red fellow
again. With an uneasy feeling he hit the road, wondering what the day
would bring. Shortly after lunch he was called to an apartment
complex. In a rundown flat a young woman who looked twice her real
age had taken an overdose. Despite his best efforts, she was dead
before they could make it to the hospital. Even though being a man of
science, he couldn't suppress his gnawing doubts any longer.
The next time the bird appeared, he felt fear and anger building up within him. He opened the window and frantically searched for something to throw to shoo it away, but when he looked up again, the branch was empty. Sure enough he was called to a man with cardiac arrest that day. Angry about the lingering prophecy and eager to prove it wrong, he gave the man cpr for almost an hour before finally admitting defeat. The next encounters with the bird evoked the same response but after repeatedly exhausting himself on a series of hopeless cases, his anger faded.
By now he had gotten used to his personal prophet of doom. Though glad for every day looking at an empty tree, he was not above acknowledging the bird's presence with a grim nod and lately even got the impression that his companion would slightly return it. Being dedicated to his job he would still give his best to help everyone he could. With up to a dozen patients a day he could never be sure for which one his visitor had appeared, but he didn’t try to fanatically avert the inevitable anymore.
After his retirement the appearances stopped. Over the following years his memories of their encounters faded and whenever he recalled seeing this red bird in his past, he couldn’t decide if it had been real or just his imagination.
He enjoyed his free time but eventually the years began to take their toll and each new day seemed to be more troublesome than the one before. On a bright October morning in the 81st year of his life, he woke with a sharp pain in his right arm. While grabbing the phone to call an ambulance, he noticed the red bird sitting outside his window. Instead of the former grimness he now almost felt pleased to see his longtime companion again. For what felt like an eternity he would bear the pain and have a quiet conversation with his friend. After finally seeing him fly away for the first and surely the last time, he decided to put down the phone.
