Gone for a song: A short story

It was the week after New Year’s Eve, strings of fairy lights still dangling from the trees and silver stars decorating the windows, when they discovered the dead birds. Dozens, at first. Then more. Four thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight in total. Goldfinches, greenfinches, bullfinches, skylarks, reed buntings, yellowhammers, grey wagtails and red-throated pipits — those long-distance migrants with their rusty breasts and high-pitched songs, cut short.

The Slovenian officer who made the discovery was a wisp of a man with soft brown eyes and a halo of grey-white hair. His name was Marko. He had been working at this post for the past five years, this border that was no longer a real border, just a formality of paperwork and protocol, but in Europe you never knew what the future might hold — old frontiers could be drawn afresh, new frontiers could shift unexpectedly, he always thought, because on this continent the past was never simply the past.