Probably the most depressing animal narrative I've written

The iron pipe hung from the ceiling by horse hair strings. Rust spread inside the pipe from the top where the rain water leaked through the roof and down to the lower end. The rust and water dripped down to the floor of the empty shop and a dogwood tree grew through the rotted wood slats. Its leaves had dropped years ago and curled up like dead spiders on the far side of the kitchen where the wind blew them. The white flowers clung to the branches and spit pollen on the north wall covered by daisy wallpaper. Spotted moths sucked the dogwood drupes dry before they could fall to the red ants circling below. Sometimes a white moth with blue spots would eat a seed inside a drupe with rust still caught in it and its stomach would decay so the moth would be too weak to fly. Then the ants would pick the moth apart as it hit the ground and one of them would eat the rusty seed or bring it back to the ant hill where the queen would eat it and those ants that ate the rest of the moth would be the last of their generation.

A female tree swallow nested in the dogwood. She had nested there for two-hundred years eating moths and grasshoppers and mantises and building her nest with twigs, hay, Q-tips, and rusted pieces of shopping carts. She would vomit on the ingredients to stick them together and lay infertile eggs in the nest that she built. When the eggs did not hatch she would peck them open and empty the albumen inside the tree where it gathered in a pale yellow pool in the trunk. She would drop the cracked, brown shells out of the nest where the ants could find them and tear them apart looking for the yolk. The other swallows had died from a fungus that grew mushrooms in their bellies.