Thing With Feathers

An excerpt from one of my novels in progress. Fun fact, I wrote "Don't Talk To Aliens" as an exercise for this novel!

Cold wind bit at my ears and neck, yet a single bead of sweat conspired to slide down my forehead like a glacial snail into the hollow of my left eye. Appalled at the audacity of this lone salty invader, I wiped it away on my jacket sleeve. 

I was marching double-time this morning, but that wasn’t the reason for my solitary perspiration. Hundreds of beady black eyes were blinking in multitudes, tiny black beaks clacking quietly. The birds had been following me for several blocks; hopping, gawking, squawking, looking.

They shifted positions endlessly, black wings and black beaks both fluttering in mouthless mutters which uttered no sound. They crowded along power-lines, decaying stumps of old oak, rusted shed roofs, the tops of street signs, the head of Jesus Christ with arms spread wide in benediction.

A statue of Jesus, obviously– I’m seeing birds, not Christ (thank god). 

I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining the birds, though. I dream with just enough lucidity to know when I’m stuck in ol’ terra vitae. How could I not? Reality is just so... dull. There's something about it that coats everything it touches and... sticks, like the nicotine stains colonizing Post Malone’s often touted Bentley interior.

I really like birds. Corvidae contains numerous avian polyglots which speak a wide range of unique dialects. Most of the crows looking down on me with their very small, very black, very beady eyes spoke more languages than me. 

Why does that make me feel more uneasy?

As the library came into view at last, my brow had broken out in numerous new drops of cold sweat, and I was letting them run down my face rather than raise my arms. The birds had started to drift in closer. I didn’t want to fire the first shot. 

Luckily it remained a cold war all the way to the glass swing-doors, though I more or less burst through them in my haste to get away from the awful (and weren’t they also cute?) creatures. 

An older woman (I recognized her as one of the library techs, but couldn’t remember her name) was eyeing me with a raised brow from behind rounded desks and piles of hardcover novels. I smiled, embarrassed, and offered an apologetic nod. True introverts both, neither of us felt motivated to pursue the issue verbally, and I went about my quest to find a new favorite novel. 

I nearly forgot about the birds once I began browsing. Trying to compete with my previous read would be difficult– Rushdie’s prose had been an intoxicating brew, a difficult act to follow. As I struggled toward the conclusion of a page from a (now previously) favorite author, I heard the occasional patter of rain on the window panes. Had the library grown a bit darker? It was difficult to tell from between the shelves. 

I've always loved to read. Books! Wherein nets of words captivate your mind and of themselves weave silver threads of nuanced expression. Music is sexy, and it hits many of the same buttons, but…

Books, novels, stories, collections of words– these were the things of dreams, untouched by the sticky fingers of reality. Books helped me survive.

“Oh god, what is that?” piped a small silver-haired dame, her reedy voice fluting through the shelves by merit of its glass-shattering capabilities. Through the rows of tomes I became aware of an absolutely buzzing conversation (by library standards), and resolved to peek out from the aisle. I could imagine dozens of things that could make an old lady to explicate religiously.

My imagination, in this instance, had failed me. What makes little gray ladies pipe “Oh god!?” in the middle of the library?

In this instance, at least: mute fluttering of black wings, black scratching talons, black gnashing beaks, inky feathers smeared with bird shit plastered on glass. All this, and more, and at the local public library, too!

I was conflicted. The crows were following me, weren’t they? Yeah, why not? I had inflicted an inexplicable bird menace on these poor, innocent people. Unwittingly, of course, but did that ease the guilt or assuage my fear? Contrasting this sentiment was less a question, and more a feeling: 

Uh, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, why? why? WHY? the FUCK?

The crows, perhaps in reaction to my fear (and why not, at this point?), began to hurl themselves upon the glass doors and windows with greater force. The facsimile of rain transformed into charcoal hail, until cracks weeping red tears began spidering out from the force of their collisions.

My fellow introvert, the librarian, yelped as the first cracks bloomed. I was frozen in place, just like all other poor saps who find themselves reduced to zero in the face of a terrible unknown. Escaping from reality of my own free will might be a fun activity, but having the rug pulled was too jarring. It was as if little dark corner of the universe had opened up and swallowed the library whole.

A window burst, and suddenly the cacophony was inside. Another window exploded, then another. A torrent of black beaks gushed inside like foul water; black wings, tiny beady black eyes, darkness swimming and swirling, gnashing and biting. 

And did not a single person notice the crows all converge upon a young man of average height and dark hair, wearing clothes beginning to wear too thin and a rather unremarkable fellow on the whole? Did the crows not chase him through the aisles of dreams and tales of horror and warbling gray ladies who, abandoning propriety, were waving racy romance novels about their heads to fend off the sable aerial attackers?

I fled serpentine through several rows of bookshelves until they began to collapse, and I was buried under thick non-fiction volumes with birds still swarming. I covered my eyes with my hands and thrashed against the impossibly heavy shelf pinning me down, but the blood-thirsty cawing of crows was now loud in my ears, and hateful beaks jabbed over every inch of exposed flesh. Boiling hot blood was trickling down my face and arms.

A memory—

I am eight years old, and my father has taken me dove hunting. We stand in a field, his gun pointed up, my eyes pointed down at the labrador retriever picking its way through brown, shriveled grass and pale shoots. A thunder crack, eyes up, and a little gray shape is falling. The retriever is off, and soon returns with a dove held gently in its mouth, eyes bright. My father orders the dog to drop it! and it drops, a vacant thing with morning-fog feathers freshly wetted in bright blood, so red. I'm asked to pick it up, and I do. I raise it up from the freshly desiccated ground and its blood drips onto my hand and it's so hot, so impossibly hot. I release it and my throat gurgles with pain and disgust, and my father chuckles. He palms the bird and tosses it in a clear tupperware container. 

Voices now in the storm of inky feathers and boiling blood, but not the cries of beak-assailed library-goers. Choked, cracked whispers muddled in the frenzy, muttering single unintelligible words. I'm screaming, I can feel it in my throat, but it doesn't reach my ears. Time becomes a loose association, a mystery stew. I finally escape.

---