Episode 6: Cardinals and Robins

“Some birds leave only to return later, in some distant future. Some were never yours to begin with.”

Following the flood a waterline still marked on the diner wall.

Faint, muddy, shoulder high.

They’d scrubbed it three times, but it never disappears completely.

Kind of like the ache in Jackson’s chest.

Whole blocks are gone.  Some homes collapsed like wet cardboard.

Some were bulldozed before their owners had a chance to return.

Nobody talks about the development plans, but the surveyors came fast — too fast.

The same names that funded Marjorie’s campaign signs are now printed on the orange zoning flags staked into the mud.

Jackson walks the edge of the flooded neighborhood with Jane.

They don’t speak much.

She points out things — a child’s shoe caught in a chain link fence, a protest pin glinting in the weeds — and Jackson nods.

Sometimes silence says more.

“I used to believe everything could be fixed,” she finally says.

“But now I think… some things are meant to break.

So we can decide what’s worth keeping.”

Asha is everywhere now.

Distributing bottled water. Organizing volunteers. Speaking at vigils.

She doesn’t smile much, but when she does, it lands like sunlight through storm clouds.

She and Jackson aren’t close. Not yet.

But he feels something stir when she talks about rebuilding with justice in mind —

affordable housing, public transport, real food access.

She’s not asking people to believe.

She’s asking them to show up.

At home, Jackson writes again.

Not a letter this time.

A kind of journal.

The words come slow, but they come.

He writes about Becky.

About Marcellus.

About The Tower card, and how sometimes the end allows for a new beginning.

Outside his window, a robin lands beside a cardinal on the telephone wire.

They sit in silence.

Then fly off in opposite directions.

Hope doesn’t always arrive with trumpets.

Sometimes it perches quietly and waits to be noticed.