Wild Bird

I eat cold oatmeal. It’s lumpy and gross. It’s not the instant kind, either, so there’s no sugar or flavor. It’s just paste.
I’m wishing I’d saved a few of the dried apricots that Dvorka gave me, but they’re long gone. And adding powdered milk just makes it worse. I flash back to spoon-feeding Mo when he was a baby. His little tongue pushed out more oatmeal than it took it. Now I get why.
Although his oatmeal wasn’t at all lumpy-bumpy.
And he didn’t have to eat it with a rough wooden spoon. Gross as it is, I’m still hungry, so I make more. I stick the billypot in the sun and hope some of the building heat from the sky will soften my oatmeal. Then I sit in the dirt in the shade of a juniper tree and watch the rest of the Grizzlies doing some dumb tree-building game. There are blindfolds involved. And zombie walking.
I’d rather eat pasty oatmeal.
After a while, I go to check the billypot oatmeal to see if it’s gone from cripsy to pasty. Not yet, but maybe ill eat it anyway.
Then I hear footsteps behind me.