Lung-Bird

This is a short story that I feel could actually lengthen into a YA novel, or maybe it's meant to stay as it is.... any feedback would be appreciated.

Lung-Bird

  To Marcus, the world always sounded like a tight wheezing whistle. But the sound didn’t come from his chest, it came from Lung-Bird, a small, translucent parasite that lived inside his collarbone. When the wind blew south from the smokestacks of the refinery, the bird would wake up, beating its paper-thin wings against his ribs. On those days the air tasted like wet copper and Marcus’s shadow would snap at his heels, teeth forming from the soot and smog.

In the district, the air was heavy soup. It crawled into your ears and whispered broken promises. It left a greasy, violet film on the windowpanes that hissed if you touched it. The only sanctuary, if you could make it, was Breathe-Easy. Miss Nadia had planted Breathe-Easy after she had performed an exorcism on the soil with crushed quartz and ancient rainwater. When the screaming of the buried metal stopped the earth turned a deep, quiet black. 

While the factory owners grew extra eyes to better see their profit, Miss Nadia chose to soften. Her speech of slow frequency calmed the angry molecules of choked sediment.

Marcus ran; Lung-Bird flapped violently.

Breathe-Easy was safe. In the centre of the yard stood the Mercy-Tree, a hybrid made of an old mechanical air purifier and the roots of a weeping willow. The leaves weren’t green; they looked like thin sheets of white cloth that pulsed while inhaling the violet smog and exhaling a silver mist that smelled of winter dawn.

Miss Nadia didn’t yell at the smokestacks. She knelt in the dirt and fed sugar water to the iron-eating bees, and in turn, they cultivated her soil. When Marcus reached Breathe-Easy she tapped his collar-bone and offered clockwork-mint. 

Neon towers claimed the laws of lungs, but they could not touch the rift - the tear in the fabric where peace slipped through. Lung-Bird slowed. The air here didn’t have a voice. It folded its ash wings and slept. The violet film melted from Marcus’s shadow, leaving it flat and quiet on the dirt.