Feathers

It soon began to grate, her obsession
with putting things in things. Like everything,
it started off innocently enough –
a feather in a bottle on the shelf,
drying that nice bouquet of flowers left
over from a cousin's wedding
and putting it in a vase on the mantlepiece.

I blamed low prices and two-for-one deals
at the supermarket. She drained cheap wine,
gin and champagne just for the bottles. Food
was incidental – an orange here and there
sliced with tonic, perhaps, but nothing more.

And the feathers? I still marvel, years later,
that even in her constant state
of inebriation she was such a bloody good shot.