She felt restless itching in her arms (wings), and she spread them wide. She circled the cabin, faces of people around her barely registering, until she found the open door and flew outside. There were other birds there, but there would be time for them later, and she circled over the cabin, rising higher and higher into the air.
She saw a woman and a man, both looking familiar-the woman tall and hunched and pale, the man squat and blocky-exit the cabin and walk down the path. As she rose higher into the sky, they became two black dots slowly traversing the great powdery whiteness below, the black tree branches weaving a delicate net above them. The river, still free of ice, snaked in its wintry desolate blackness between its white banks, and a white church stood almost invisible on a white snow-covered slope, only its onion roof golden with captured sunshine.
She spiraled downward, to take another look at the small wooden cabin tucked away in the very heart of the park, and watched a tall, skeletal man exit the cabin and crane his neck, shielding his eyes from the sun. A woman in a black velvet dress holding a shotgun stood next to him, watching Galina like he did.
She also saw a small gypsy girl, surrounded by an army of rats, make her way to the river; a tall lanky guy followed her, not quite with her, not quite separate. They sat on the bank, the rats spread around them like a living blanket, and watched the smooth river surface.
Deep inside the jackdaw knew that sometime soon she would find those people again, follow them by flying through an imaginary window or a reflection of a doorway in a rain puddle; a part of her had an inkling of other birds underground, and a fond memory of a white cow glowing with warm bluish light and spilling stars like milk. But not yet-she had things to attend to here, on the surface, first.
She rose high enough to see the streets beyond the park, animated with a slow churning of crowds and smells of fire and exhaust; she saw the squat tomb of the subway station and its slow disgorging and consumption of the dark throngs. There was ringing of trams and heavy sighs of the kneeling buses that carried tourists and honking of automobile horns; there were smells of fresh bread and beer and ash.
She headed north-west, where more golden domes lit up under the sun, and the clock on the Spasskaya Tower announced the time with deep hollow beats; she circled over the Tsar-Bell and Tsar-Cannon, both blue with patina and gigantic, ludicrous in their excess. Her wings clipped the air into even, turgid fragments as she swooped down over Red Square and the blue spruces by the Mausoleum, as she flew over the river again, perching for a rest on the guardrails of the humpbacked, ornate bridge. She circled over the New Arbat and took a cursory swoop down Gazetniy Pereulok.
There was a sense of significance to her flight, as she remembered that these places were important somehow. But her human memory was receding already, leaving behind only the keen intelligence and the cunning instinct of a bird. Only a few images lingered behind, and in her mind's eye she saw the tall woman walking through the snow-covered park, the woman with hazel eyes and bewildered frown. Galina did not remember how or why that woman was important, but she thought about her with the warm regard one afforded to kin.
"She's going to be all right,” the jackdaw thought. And that was all that mattered.