Vis avis

You make a habit of staring directly into mirrors as you pass them, watching your reflection like a ____. With everyone else, the birds were only there out the corner of your eye at first; feathered faces in a crowd until you risked another glance. Soon as you looked straight at them, they'd be regular old people again. That lasted ten days or so. You started losing sleep about a week in, and part of you steadfastly refused to commit your visions to paper, so you don't recall the exact timeframes.

---

Stray voices on your morning commute one day dissolved into the raucous squawk of a gull and a parrot, unnoticed to anyone. You whirled around in your seat, a tourist couple lowering their maps. Your eyes went to the parrot first, vivid crayon-box hues that would draw anyone's attention, but she was in high-vis hiking gear and some kind of wraparound skirt best described as “ethnic” again before her gullfriend cleared her throat.

“What do you want?” Her question began with an unlovely yawp, drawing your attention to a toned and take-no-shit (human) Australian, you'd have to guess from the accent. So captivating was her increasingly-rancorous chewing out of you (you couldn't take your eyes off either one for a minute without them no longer appearing/sounding human), the other passenger ______s caught you by surprise.

You stammered an apology, and slammed the emergency door button at a red light. The driver chattered at you, an oddly delicate noise for a creature so large, before the bus was promptly rear-ended by an SUV. You power-walked five, six blocks, maybe, heart hammering, before whipping out your phone and calling home.

The <dialtone>

continues for over a minute before you hang up, nauseous. You figure if he had picked up, you would've yelled something distressing and unhelpful, so you find a storefront's glass windows to lean on, focussing on the static, unchanging mannequins, breathing in and out until you can greet him like a sane and totally-not-hallucinating person.

“... Maverick?”

He got up early (by his primarily-nocturnal standards) to eat breakfast together and see you off, but usually goes back to bed for an hour or three. His voice is mumbling, thick with sleep. Distinctly non-avian.

“You mmkay?”

“Y-yeah. I woke you up, didn't I?

“J's dozing. D'n wrr'bou'i'.”

“Sorry. Uh, Hal. Are you alright?”

“Huh? Mmm. Yes. I'm alright. Just... had a spot of bother with the phone. Screen wasn't quite swiping.”

The street's too loud, birds many birds nothing but birds as long as you're fixed on Hal's sweet, correct voice, for you to hear the futile tak-tak right then of kingfisher claws on a touch screen. “Shit, did you drop it again?” You laugh, not feeling it. “You've had it, what, three weeks back from the shop?”

“No, no. Must be this new case you gave me.” tak tak tak. “See? It's not switching to speaker, no matter how I oh how about that!”

---

You spent the next couple of days cooped up in your room, sleeping fitfully and waking up with a start, running hands through your hair and anticipating glossy feathers. You must've looked like shit, because Hal slept on the couch, germophobe he was.

You kept to yourselves, mostly, until you came up with a plausible excuse to leave, with a couple days notice. Out of guilt or some last-ditch chance to regain what you lost, you survived cohabiting with him again.

---

The birds are a logical chain to look at, a smiley little parabola strung between two pillars of good sense. You examine them, try to rationalise what the fuck you're looking at, only to find missing links in that metaphorical chain.

The chain still dangles, smiley little parabola, indifferent to sensible rules like gravity. A gap-toothed smile.

Birds don't have teeth. You've been reading up on birds, trying to wrap your head around the oppressive sense of normality.

Hal's wings irked him, useless when it came to answering phones or picking things up, though he resorted shortly after the first failed attempt to pick things up with his feet or beak. You asked him, one time, to “do that again with your feet”, with a clean spoon you dropped. He obliged, but asked what you meant by “again”.

The bird he was didn't occupy any sensible space – he was a pied kingfisher (you looked it up), not 20 cm long. He could still reach the top shelf. He could heft a book four times his bird-weight. He could be perched upon his dining-room chair, morning light through the kitchen window blinds leaving stripes of light on your face and little refractions in his facial plumage, the new day's rays still not quite reaching your breakfast on the table. He was, in perfect concert, a perfectly normal-sized bird and a perfectly normal-sized resident for this mammalian dwelling. It hurt to think about, but you eventually couldn't stand to search his face for clues any longer.

You couldn't shake the feeling as you left that Hal was still in there, somewhere, whichever direction “in” qualified as. There was still a gangling human who could never instinctually grab something with his face before his hands.

---

You keep checking mirrors, closing your eyes and undergoing tactile tours of your body. You're still human.

You wish you weren't, more than you wish you knew why.