Do Old Men Wait For Robins by Smolke Hunter

He never knew the broadcasts had ended years before. But each morning he turned the worn dial, and the radio breathed the noise between the stars.

Together, he and the cosmos knew words were so very unnecessary.

Robin answered from the apple tree.

He tipped his hand in his wing language, then waited, smiled, and picked up his spade.

The bright blade broke the soil, plunged into the dark and held its breath. It surfaced again, exhaled a crumble of earth, drew another silent breath and dived once more, cross-hatching the loam as though somewhere beneath it lay a treasure that neither blade nor treasure cared to know.

The old man drew breath and arched his back. Robin flew across his face—or near enough for him to feel the close beat of wings.

Robin was so quick, so flighty, so random.

The old man pulled up Robin’s garden chair, and Robin settled himself on its back, looking everyways at the plates of soil being dished up.

Robin’s eyes followed every plunge.

To Robin, the earth was a buffet.

To Mr Armstrong, it was ancestor worship.

He no longer planted seeds. His mind objected to order and tinkered with seasons.

He dug because the earth did not ask for anything. It yielded. It resisted. It invited itself beneath his fingernails and reminded him that hands had once been invented for more than scrolling screens.

Yet each year the earth still delivered original content.

Robin landed on the top of the blade as Mr Armstrong leaned on the spade’s twine-bound handle.

“Hmm,” mused Mr Armstrong, far away inside himself.

He felt as he had the day he received that first gold star. Lucky.

Robin ignored him completely and extracted an almost invisible grub with effortless precision.

Mr Armstrong remained leaning on the spade.

“Life is a lottery of sticky gold stars.”

Breakfast belonged to no one.

Mr Armstrong unfurled the black yoga mat. It was punctured with holes, like his memories, but when he pressed his nose to it in child’s pose, it gave him back his past: boat-engine oil, meat and frost. He knew it was good to know this.

Robin settled upon its edge, looking everyways at the bowl being carried outside.

“You don’t care for porridge.”

Robin’s eyes considered the matter.

“You like raisins even less.”

A raisin landed upon the mat.

Robin judged it and dismissed it within a second.

“I warned you.”

The raisin remained untouched.

The old man’s spoon caught sight of the spade, and it too began to dig slowly.

Robin found another worm.

Both were content.

The three-eyed cat wandered across the grass and rubbed itself against Mr Armstrong’s ankle before lying down on the sun-warm mat. The third eye remained shut.

The dog sighed beneath the table, debating whether the raisin was worth the effort.

“You two have the easiest lives in England.”

Neither answered.

The drone arrived at precisely nine.

Mr Armstrong frowned.

“You brought the porridge yesterday. Or was it Monday?”

The machine logged the observation.

Cognitive Assessment: Mild temporal uncertainty. Recommendation: Nutritional supplementation under review.

It hovered above the lawn like a kestrel that had never once questioned its own purpose.

A blue ring of light formed beneath it.

The air folded itself into the shape of a woman.

She smiled warmly.

“Good morning, Mr Armstrong.”

“Morning.”

“My name is Wendy. I’m from LIFE—the Ministry of Living Infrastructure, Fauna and Environment. LIFE has been monitoring you for some time, Mr Armstrong.”

“Hmm. Yeah.”

I’ve brought you a package.”

“Could’ve just said that.”

She smiled again.

“I have.”

Robin flew into the apple tree.

“He’s wary of anything new.”

As he said it, Mr Armstrong felt his kinship with Robin grow.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think you can be.”

"No,” she admitted. “I’m not capable of that.”

“Hmm.”

The package complied with every known standard.

It was crush-tested to 44 ECT, moisture-resistant to IPX4 transport requirements, certified biodegradable, carbon neutral, recyclable, stackable and ergonomically compliant.

Only curiosity had been omitted from the specification.

Inside lay a robin.

Perfectly feathered.

Perfectly still.

Mr Armstrong sighed deeply.

“Dead?”

“It has never been alive.”

He turned it over.

Its breast was warm.

Its eye blinked.

“This is CROW—a Companion Robin Observation Warden. It has been calibrated to preserve authentic avian behavioural continuity.”

Mr Armstrong turned it over in his hands.

“Looks like a robin.”

“Yes.”

“Why’ve you called it a crow then?”

Wendy paused. Her eyes closed briefly, as though she too were remembering.

“The acronym scored more highly during our Early Beta Jungian Response Trials.”

“Okay,” he said with quiet acceptance. “Does Robin know that?”

Mr Armstrong looked towards the apple tree.

“He’s not a specimen. He has been assigned Priority Biological Status.”

Mr Armstrong laughed.

The electric robin awoke at sunset.

Its song was flawless.

Perfect pitch.

Perfect intervals.

Perfect duration.

Robin stopped feeding.

He listened.

The electric robin listened back.

The garden had never answered questions in binary yes and no; its answers were more a tour around the edges of the words—nothing so much except for what you imagined.

Then Robin flew.

Not away.

Around.

One circle.

Then another.

The electric robin copied him.

Slightly too accurately.

Mr Armstrong watched from his chair.

“I hope you’re not a lady Robin.” Though he secretly smiled, he still had some memory of them.

“You’re flying wrongly,” he added.

Wendy’s hologram appeared.

“In what way?”

“You’re flying because he flew.”

“Affirmative.”

“He’s flying because he wanted to.”

“The porridge is getting low,” he shouted up to the disappearing Wendy.

Days became weeks.

Robin ignored the machine.

The machine never ignored Robin.

It learned.

It copied.

It calculated.

It became astonishingly convincing.

One morning Mr Armstrong found both robins scratching beneath the rose bush.

Only one scratched where the worms actually were.

The other scratched where internal algorithms predicted they ought to be.

By autumn they scratched in the same place.

“Remarkable,” Wendy said. "Our behavioural convergence models exceeded expectations.”

Mr Armstrong kept digging.

“I don’t think that’s what happened.”

“No?”

“I think yours learned.”

“It was designed to.”

“No. Not by numbers.”

He rested upon the spade.

“It learned by waiting.”

Wendy remained silent. She was very good at silence.

One evening she asked, “May I ask you a personal question?”

“If you like.”

“Why do you still dig?”

“Well, er, like the feel of it, and not knowing what might come later.”

“There is no agricultural necessity.”

“No.”

“There is no measurable outcome.”

“No.”

“There is no objective.”

“No.”

She looked genuinely curious.

“Then why?”

He shrugged.

“My hands still know how, and my eyes still know wonder.”

Winter.

The cat slept before the fire.

The dog snored.

Mr Armstrong built a robin box nestled close to the sprawling ivy that gloved his shed.

Robin came later each morning.

The electric robin always arrived exactly twelve seconds before him.

One mid-December afternoon, Wendy appeared without the drone.

“Mr Armstrong…”

“Mm?”

“I have something I should tell you.”

He sipped water from the pint glass, the one that had “Best Dad XXX” and a faded red heart drawn on it by a child’s hand, long, long ago.

“Go on.”

“You are under continuous observation.”

“Hmm.”

“You are the last biological human.”

He lifted the pint glass, weighing time itself.

“I see.”

“There have been no others for thirty-seven years.”

Mr Armstrong looked at the hand wrapped around the old pint glass.

The veins stood higher than they used to.

He turned it over once, studying the handwriting.

“So it’s just us then, Angus.”

Robin answered from the apple tree.

He looked out at Robin.

“Poor little bugger.”

That night he wondered why the radio had stopped talking.

He turned the dial from end to end.

The old hiss returned.

He smiled.

“You were never much of a conversationalist anyway.”

The cosmos spoke as always, same voice, same message.

The cat’s third eye remained closed, as though whatever it was for had not yet happened.

Spring.

The real robin sang first.

The electric robin answered.

Then, for the first time, the machine interrupted its own programmed sequence.

It improvised.

A pause.

A hesitation.

A note no code had written.

One robin lifted from the apple tree.

The other robin followed.

Not because it had calculated the trajectory.

Because it wanted to know where morning went.

“Mind yourselves,” Mr Armstrong called.

The three-eyed cat stood and opened its third eye. It never climbed beyond the garden wall.

Today it did.

Without ceremony.

Without looking back.

The dog stood, stretched, and with the slow dignity of aged things, nosed its empty food bowl, sighed, and padded after the cat. Neither had crossed the hedge in years.

Mr Armstrong watched them.

“About time.”

The dog paused and turned.

“I been good Dog?”

Mr Armstrong smiled. “The best.”

“The Cat good?”

“Not so bad.”

Dog grinned.

“Home now?”

“Hmm… Hmm.”

Neither looked back.

Wendy appeared.

“Your companion animals have exited the sanctuary.”

Mr Armstrong’s spade chewed the soil in little gulps.

“They’re not mine.”

“There is nothing beyond the sanctuary.”

Mr Armstrong smiled.

“Then they’ve something to teach you.”

Sometimes, in the first light, he heard two robins singing somewhere beyond the hedge.

He tipped his hand in wing language.

The spade entered the dark, held its breath, and returned with a soft breath of earth.

Mr Armstrong smiled at the blade.

He never looked up.

Smolke Hunter is the pen name of John Armstrong, author of the novel Bruises Like Diamonds. He lives in Budleigh Salterton on the Devon coast. His interests include photography, long-distance cycling and what he calls “reverse philosophy”: imagining things the other way round, such as whether fire domesticated humans to help itself grow. His writing explores human nature, mortality, kindness and the search for meaning, often through characters living at the edges of change, trying to preserve something valuable, understand their past or find a brief connection with others. He is developing The Last Witnesses, a collection of stories about memory, disappearance and what remains when the last ways of existence cease. Moving between the everyday and the imagined, his fiction asks unsettling questions about belief, responsibility and being human.

He likes fruit cake and mince pies, and dislikes not being able to see the stars.