The man wearing the green flannel jacket, tap-tapping his chestnut colored cane against the concrete, was looking, looking for the turquoise colored bird with a toupee of black sitting atop its head. The man had seen the bird, perched outside of the window at Toffenetti’s, had seen it on the sidewalk across the street, amidst the thousands of pairs of feet; like loose trash tumbling down an alley. The man sometimes felt the bird’s feet digging into his shoulder, its feathers so close to his skin that he thought they might be grazing it; a light tickle, the pad of a fingertip brushing against his cheek.

He was told that the bird wasn’t real; that there wasn’t any possibility that kind of bird could inhabit a place rank with polluted clouds of smoke leaking into the sky, with garbage cans barreling down the street, jumping in front of oncoming traffic, like reckless children. But the man knew what he saw.

Day morphed into night. The color of the man’s green flannel no longer able to be distinguished. But the whites of his eyes, they were shining like full moons against the blackness, so clear that you could reach out and touch them, take them for yourself.

Sitting on the bench, the man breathed, the air in front of him a swirl of milky grey. He felt it then, the slight digging in his shoulder, the subtle movement that could have been a leaf that had fallen from its hearth on the branch of a tree, or a cotton flower that had floated up from its roots in the grass, whispering a sweet nothing as it passed by his ear. The man reached his hand over, without turning his head, and let it enclose, gentle, around the soft feathers; the black cluster atop of its head plush, like the wool of a sheep. The man brought his hand in front of his face and saw the turquoise protruding from between his fingers, and he smiled.

The man took many photographs of the bird, as if it were his muse, the lens catching it at all angles, displaying its beauty from near and afar. They will be gifts, he thought, gifts for those who had said no, that it couldn’t be. For here it was, in front of him, like the bird had known that he had been looked for, all of its time, though it knew that some aspect of the hunt would have to be involved, for then the turquoise bird wouldn’t be so sought after, wouldn’t be so elusive, frustrating; forcing those who couldn’t see it to believe that it had never existed at all. But the man, he knew. He knew what he saw. And he would dole out the pictures to the entire city. Do you believe? He would ask.