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shoulder.
    Or on her arm.
    And look her in the eyes,
    “CHEEP,”
    as she did the very first day,
    and perhaps wonder:
    “And now? What’s going to happen now?”

    She sang and flew
    and sang and flew around all the time.
    Two sounds made her sing
    more than any others.

    One was the shower,
    especially when Holly, my wife,
    was taking one.
    The other was the sound of the piano.
    “CHEEP CHEEP!” she sang along.

    Whenever I was drawing at my desk,
    she would fly to my head
    and play with my hair,
    trying to build a nest.
    Once she even flew to the pencil
    I was holding in my hand.
    And stayed there for a while,
    bobbing and swaying
    and holding on to it tightly.

    Stellina lived with us
    for a very long time,
    in the living room
    of our small apartment
    in Manhattan.

    We left Stellina’s cage open
    so that she could fly
    around the apartment.
    But we never let her fly outside,
    since she was only used to Holly, my wife,
    to me, to her cage,
    and to this kind of life.

    She often sat on the windowsill
    and looked out.
    There wasn’t that much to see,
    except a few windows and a tree.
    She looked pensive at the windowsill.
    She must have wondered:
    “And now? What’s going to happen now?”

    Every night Stellina would fluff her feathers,
    raise one leg, tuck her head into a wing,
    and go to sleep.
    She lived in a cage,
    a cage that was her home,
    and she knew it was her home.

    We often wondered if her mama,
    her birdie mama,
    knew where she was.
    And also wondered how her life,
    so different from other birds’ lives,
    would have been if Holly, my wife, hadn’t heard
    “CHEEP” that day, many years ago,
    in the middle of the
    ROOOAAARing traffic.

    She might not have survived that very night,
    and she might not have lived to love Holly, my wife.
    And she might not have lived to be loved so much
    by Holly, my wife, by me, and by everyone else who met her.
    But still we wonder.
    Her name was Stellina.
    She died not long ago
    after more than eight years with us,
    in our apartment,
    not too far from that post where she was born.

    Her name was Stellina.
    which, in Italian, means
    "little star"

s t e l l i n a was born in Manhattan in the spring of 1995. Her nest was inside a horizontal pipe holding a traffic light on the corner of Third Avenue and 46th Street. Just a few weeks old and still unable to fly, she prematurely abandoned her nest, for reasons that we don’t know. Stellina was rescued by a store security guard, who later gave her to Matteo Pericoli’s future wife, Holly, who sat down and waited for the little bird’s mother to return. When she realized that Stellina’s mother was not coming back to feed her, Holly decided to take Stellina home. She called two New York City zoos, but neither one could take the little bird since she was a common wild finch and not an endangered species. Thus Stellina stayed with Holly, with whom she learned how to eat, sing, and fly, in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When Matteo and Holly moved in together, Stellina came along and lived with them until she died in the late summer of 2003.
    m a t t e o p e r i c o l i was born in Milan, Italy, in the summer of 1968. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic School of Milan, and in the winter of 1995 he moved to New York City. After just a few weeks in the city, he met Stellina at his future wife’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where Stellina had already learned how to eat, sing, and fly. Since that time, Matteo has been working in New York City as an architect, illustrator, teacher, and author. His books include
Manhattan unfurled
(2001),
Manhattan within
(2003), and See the City:
The Journey of
Manhattan unfurled
(2004), his first work for young readers. Matteo and Holly, his wife, live in New York City.