Painter’s annotation: There are days when a bird arrives and I know I won’t paint. Not right away. I’ll sketch, observe, re-organize paints I already know by heart. Because some birds don’t ask for a portrait—they ask a question instead.

She arrived with no prelude.

No flutter of wings against the window frame. No finch whistle. Not even Élian.

She was simply there—already perched on the edge of the brush jar when I looked up from cleaning a rag. As if she’d always been in the room and I was the one who had only just arrived.

A Zebra Finch.

Strikingly small. More delicate than any I’d seen up close. A pale orange beak like a ceramic bell, precise as punctuation. Cream chest, soft gray head, a warm russet tear beneath each eye. But it was the black and white bars on her throat that held me—her mask. It looked painted on. Too sharp to be feather.

She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. But she was watching.

Not the way Élian did—not the way of someone who’s already chosen you and is waiting to see if you’re ready. No, this was different.

She hadn’t decided yet.

Her posture was balanced. Confident, but not open. Her tail flicked only once. The way a tightrope walker tests the wind.

I didn’t speak.

I set the rag down. Turned my palette knife edge down in the jar. Sat on the low stool instead of my chair. A soft sound of wood on wood.

She let it happen. She glanced at the wall.

Not the pegs—at the wall itself. At the chipped white paint along the lower edge, where the light tends to bleed through in morning. She studied that area like it mattered, like she was looking for something beneath the surface.

Then, without ceremony, she hopped once to the ledge above the flat file. Stared directly at me.

I didn’t reach for anything. No pad. No brush. I waited.

She walked along the ledge—three short steps—then turned sharply toward the sitting wall and lifted into the air.

Only a few wingbeats. But enough to make her point.

She didn’t land on the empty peg. She landed beside Élian’s—on the highest peg, the one I’d added but never used.

She stayed there a long time.

Élian wasn’t there. I don’t know if she expected him.

But she looked at the lower peg once. A long, quiet look. Then back toward me.

A whisper of wind passed through the cracked window. The curtain stirred but didn’t billow. And still she waited.

I whispered, “I haven’t mixed your colors yet.”

She tilted her head. Not in reply—just acknowledgment.

Then she flew to the sill, glanced once more at the wall, and was gone.

When I stepped forward, I saw it: one of my bristle brushes, tipped slightly in its jar. Not knocked over. Touched.

Just enough to be noticed.

That night, I studied her colors under lamplight. Gray, rust, ivory, ink. None of them easy to mix. None of them easy to name.

But I set out the pigments anyway.

And I left the top peg empty.