018 The Robber’s Daughter
18-20

The bird, a pigeon was it? Or a dove (she’d found there were doves here) flew though the air, its colour lost in what light remained. It might have been the wad of rag shed taken it for at first glance, flung at the smallest of the boys out there wiping mud from his cheek where it hit him, catching it up by a wing to fling it back where one of them now with a broken branch for a bat hit it high over a bough caught and flung back and hit again into a swirl of leaves, into a puddle from rain the night before, a kind of bettered shuttlecock moulting in a flurry at each blow, hit into the yellow dead end sign on the corner opposite the house where they’d end up that time of day.¹¹

For Ronja