Her story is like the Little Mermaid story. She is actually a bird who falls in love with a man and a witch gives her this key (that she wears around her neck) that allows her to talk like a human but she can't sing. So when she meets the man he goes on about this beautiful voice he heard and she wants to show that the voice is her voice. So she takes off her key necklace and the guy freaks out (naturally) because she turns into a bird. The only way for her to turn back into a human is for a human to give her the key but the guy runs away and so she (as the bird) flies away broken-hearted and only sings sad songs.
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Once upon a time, there was a bird called Calendre. But, as any story would have it, Calendre was, of course, no ordinary bird for not only did she possess a name and pretty ocean-blue feathers and a fine, tough little beak, but also a remarkable voice unlike any other of her kind.
"Ah, her song is like that of a zephyr in a field of silverbells," A poet mused from under the tree of her orchard.
"No," replied another--a rival of the first's, "Hers is much more like rain water on an August day."
Zephyr or rain water-- all the same, when the Calendre bird sang, each and every person and creature paused to listen and marvel.
The one who listened and marveled most closely, most tenderly she came to realize was a man. And though he was human and she a bird, she found him so fetching with his crooked nose and gentle whistle-calls, that could she bat her eyelashes and blush when he passed under her branches, she would’ve. But she could not so she simply perched and sighed and sang somberly as he wandered about and around her garden, before leaving again at dusk for the city.
“If only,” she thought one night in her nest, “He were a bird, or I a girl because, I dare say, I am absolutely infatuated with him.”
(She tries to imagine him as a bird and the image is as follows: brown feathers, like his hair and the bark of a chest nut tree. Big beak. Long tail. Handsome.
She tries to imagine herself as a girl and the image is as follows: yellow hair, just like her beak, ocean-blue ribbons and ocean-blue eyes, just like her feathers. Pretty, she wanted to be pretty for him. To be pretty for him and to have him hold her and love her back, she would give most anything)
