Previews.

It was easy for him to tell.  Just by touching it, he could tell its whole story.  He knew the paths it had travelled, its place of origin, where it would go next and when it would be no more.  He didn’t know how or why he knew, but he knew.  

His parents told him he had too vivid imagination and refused to listen to their son explain how the twig in his hand had last seen the insides of a moose’s mouth because it was stuck between its teeth.  

They also shut their ears to his following comment on how the twig would break in two three days later at the event of a bird looking for fitting twigs to build a nest, and how that nest would one day fall down from the tree and rot.  He didn’t know anything more he said, because when the twig rotted, it died, and he didn’t know anything about dead things.