The sea, a birder, and a film noir

The last human on Earth collapsed onto the road …a life of wandering the barren waterless world was ending.

Gumbellaw ‘twitcher’ McGontigle’s body lay on the white center dashes of what had once been the Mullingar bypass.

He looked up.

That was when he saw it; the first sign of hope in over sixty years.

The colour of the Puffin flashed against the sky. It too had found what it had been searching for. The black deep of a stretch of water, lined with fish …where there is hope, there is life.

The bird then swooped into a dive. It smashed into one of the dashed lines. Gumbellaw exhaled his final breath, and died.