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She often finds herself wishing that she were one of her mother's birds.
The birds, the objects of her mother's affection, are real and imaginary.  There are coops upon coops out back, among the faded lilacs that her father tried to grow, and the looping, drooping vines that never really had a chance to live.  Under the vines and amidst the lilacs the birds whistle softly, sing.  That is what her mother says, but really most of the time they just make noise, clattering and flapping and chirping and cawing until the girl rolls over in her bed and levels her palms with her ears in search of a quiet respite.  These are the real birds, pigeons and goldfinches and sparrows whose greatest and only pleasure seems to be filling the air with an intolerable chatter, day and night.
The imaginary birds are on paper, captured by her mother's shaky hand and a charcoal pen, oftentimes by a thin globe of light cast by the antiquated lamp that sits on her mother's oak desk.  It seems that these are the birds that come to her mother in the night, as the whistles and chirps fill the air and the parrots squawk nonsense babble that they picked up in some distant place.  The imaginary birds are sketched with thick black lines and often blurred until you cannot distinguish the robin from the jay, each individual feather a unique but indistinct smudge.  They are hung from the walls of her mother's office, their thick Manila paper starch and stiff as days and weeks and years pass.
But the birds that the girl envies the most are the rescued, the victims of neighborhood cats or other minor avian horrors.  These are the birds that her mother spies with uncanny frequency on her daily jaunts about the neighborhood – so frequently that the girl is sure that her mother goes walking solely for the purpose of finding the birds.
The rescued birds, with their frail wings or their pierced breasts or their mangled claws, cheep feebly from shoeboxes that her mother lines with rags from the closet: old t-shirts and blankets, shredded down to be birds' beds.  Her mother croons to them from their place on the kitchen counter – so many different songs that the girl comes to realize that she cannot remember her mother once singing a song for her.  As these foreign melodies fill the kitchen, the girl peers around the stair's banister and watches her mother dip wads of white bread (the kind she is not allowed to eat) into a porcelain bowl of milk, watches her mother tenderly feed the dripping bread to the greedy, unappreciative birds, their eager throats bulging with the starchy sustenance.
These birds seem to always die anyway, despite her mother's loving care and the hastily gulped wads of bread.  The girl must pretend not to see her mother crying when this happens, because mothers don't cry, but mostly because the girl knows that her mother would never cry over her.

One night, when the birds seem to have lulled themselves into a semblance of quiet interrupted only by the wayward flutter or squeak, the girl rises in the dark.  Her mother is curled in the nest of her bed, wrapped snuggly in the white duvet.  Her father is sleeping on the couch, his ample stomach rising and falling as the wind blows gently through an open window.  She sneaks in sock-feet to the kitchen.  There she opens the breadbox and pulls out a slice of the forbidden white bread.  She pours a bowl of milk and balls the bread between her palms.  She dunks the ball again and again, finally raising it to her lips to taste it.
The taste is horrid.  She spits the remainder of the wad into the sink and washes the evidence away before washing out her mouth.  Having so meticulously hidden her covert act, she falls to the floor and starts to sob.
A shaft of moonlight leaks onto her thin nightgown through the open window – it seems to her a finger tapping on her shoulder, asking her why she is not loved.  She does not know how to answer it.  All she knows is the sound of the songs her mother sings to the birds, the songs that no one ever sung to her.  Under her breath and between her ragged sobs, she begins to hum.

The melody, which no one ever taught her nor sang to her, rises over her bowed head, over her moon-stained night gown.  It transcends the peeling linoleum and the scoured-clean dishes, flies over her shame and her loneliness and her father's rotund stomach.  It soars past her mother in the makeshift duvet-nest, gliding out to the coops with the real birds, flitting under the door to the imaginary birds.  There, amongst the objects of her mother's affection, the melody stretches and expands and embodies all of the misplaced love in the tiny, bird-filled house.  It lingers momentarily until the girl drifts to sleep and the melody drifts to a close.
With her chin on her chest, the girl sleeps on the kitchen floor, a baby bird fallen from her nest with her feathers ruffled and tears on her cheeks, in dire need of a shoebox and some bread.  In dire need of love.