People on a Bridge

By zerohour

Who am I???

Anybody knows what kind of a bird this is?

Saw this guy a few hours ago, sitting by the house. I worried something was wrong, as it didn't fly away as I approached it... knelt beside it... gently petted its head. Nothing was wrong with it that I could see. It took me a while to realize that another one, just like it, was sitting on the ground nearby! The other wasn't as ready to make friends, and flew away after I petted his/her head. My first pal flew away also, but not before I snapped this photo. I felt like St. Francis of Assisi, petting birds' heads and all, but I am thinking they must have been somebody's pets at some point?

There is another explanation, familiar to anyone who read "Master and Margarita", and remembers Woland's diabolical retinue's stunts:

Just then, behind the wall, in the professor's daughter's room, a gramophone began to play the foxtrot 'Hallelujah,' and at the same moment a sparrow's chirping came from behind the professor's back. He turned around and saw a large sparrow hopping on his desk.

'Hm... keep calm!' the professor thought. 'It flew in as I left the window. Everything's in order!' the professor told himself, feeling that everything was in complete disorder, and that, of course, owing chiefly to the sparrow. Taking a closer look at him, the professor became convinced at once that this was no ordinary sparrow. The obnoxious little sparrow dipped on its left leg, obviously clowning, dragging it, working it in syncopation --in short, it was dancing the foxtrot to the sounds of the gramophone, like a drunkard in a bar, saucy as could be, casting impudent glances at the professor.

Kuzmin's hand fell on the telephone, and he decided to call his old schoolmate Bouret, to ask what such little sparrows might mean at the age of sixty, especially when one's head suddenly starts spinning?

The sparrow meanwhile sat on the presentation inkstand, shat in it (I'm not joking!), then flew up, hung in the air, and, swinging a steely beak, pecked at the glass covering the photograph portraying the entire university graduating class of '94, broke the glass to smithereens, and only then flew out the window.

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