Vis avis

Something strange happened. To you or the world, you're not even sure which.

---

You had to figure out what was going on, so you told your boyfriend your rich great-aunt upstate was on her deathbed, this time for probably realsies, and she could use a reminder that you were totally the favourite grand-relative, god (or more practically weren't this all a big excuse to get out the house, her executor) willing you get there in time. He could tell you were stressed about something, and left you to your packing. Made do with a peck on your cheek on your way out the door, told you to drive safe. You looked tired, and tried not to flinch as you kissed him back on a proffered cheek.

Tried to ignore the not-taste of feathers.

You've been gone four days now, holed up in the university library. Other than the library staff, the place is deserted. You commandeered the aisles in the late 500's, mostly because they're furtherest off from the main entranceway, neo-gothic double doors left open to the elements during the day.

(The staff close them at night, but they can't seem to get the hang of keys, or automated security alarms. Small blessings.)

You'll venture out on expeditions, pulling anything off the shelves which might offer some insight. The head librarian is pretty helpful and nice, for a vulture. (Incertae sedis, your only resource here for her family is an early-1900's tome, with glossy “plates” in the middle to sequester all the illustrations. Her near-garish colors don't resemble any of them, probably because the artist only had a shot and stuffed phantasm to draw from). She helped you drag a bunch of mythology-pertaining eventual dead-ends out of storage, after you both took a tour of the 200's upstairs and concluded “Dewey decimal is bullshit”.

She thinks you're writing a thesis paper. It got awkward turning down her offers to request transfers from other libraries, considering you've not seen a car on the streets since you left home, so she eventually got the hint you wanted to be left alone. The staff rotate, but the ones that manage to show up for their shifts are university kids flatting near campus, so they've no interest in anyone old enough to have to defend their inclusion under the banner millennial. They shelve your shit once you're done with it, ignore you for the most part.

Of course, you're really here because sticking your neck in the sand (like an _______) under pretext of research beats having to confront the situation. You're hiding. From what, you can't even begin to contemplate. There's a frightening normalcy to all this. Other than plane crashes and other mechanical disasters attributable to “human” error, the news websites report nothing out of the ordinary. World news is peaceful, like everyone who was fighting forgot what exactly it was they were fighting about.

You're not sure you believe that, though. The articles are as rife with misspellings as their comment sections, though the most offensive comments therein only get as bad as being banal. If no news is good news, then less news might mean better-than-before news. A new paradigm, maybe. A global skein migrating its way new era of lazy peace on avihumanity's wintering grounds.

Who the hell are you then, that you missed the final boarding call?

Flannery Grivling, freelance florist and rock pigeon.

a mammalian human being. not a number, but a free man

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You are not a bird

You're half a trio of cops

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.

tar and feather yourself

Surely the internet can help.

The library has wi-fi, a godsend barring a couple of irksome filters that should've been ditched with dialup. A ban on filesharing you can understand, but youtube? Seriously? Your commandeered row of shelving is lacking in outlets, so on your second night here you relocated a comfy chair and a coffee table to the far end of it. With only one person's worth of books to reshelve, the staff don't take much prompting to linger around the front desk, so nobody's stumbled upon you.

The internet's been useful - to a point. While every fact about bird anatomy, behaviour, and mythological referencing has been graciously forthcoming, more recent contributions to the global web of knowledge and varingly-informed opinion have been far less useful. You made some disposable accounts on assorted web communities, reaching out to anyone who might also be aware of the issue. Your correspondences asymptotically approached the qualities of a Youtube comments section - riddled with typos and scorn, and going from "this is my headcanon XYZ theme song!!!" to "you fuckin imbecile. You think your history books aren't revisionist crap too? COMMUNISM. DOES. NOT. WORK. PERIOD."

-in 20 comment chains flat. Vaguely surreal and a great foundation upon which one might despair over/question humanity's trajectory. Yeah.

Responses (best as you could decipher them) ran the gamut from claims you should write a book, to follow-up inquiries as to where one might acquire "whatever dank shit you're smoking". The spelling worsened, but in a way you'd associate less with regressing reading levels and more with devil-may-care keyboard-mashing. Still, through the haze of keystrokes caught in the crossfire, the content itself pointed to people getting on with their lives, posting about the trivialities of their regular human existences. Sudden anatomical rearrangement notwithstanding. Nobody, best as you can tell, is noticing the misspelling or any general weirdness. This is the internet, though, who knows if any of these people actually know what's going on outside. You're not exactly a shining example, holed up in this library and subsisting off tinned food.

Facebook was tolerable long enough to at least verify that existing images - the past - aren't changing. Then again, neither are people's reactions to such. You were lingering on a month-old photo of you and Hal in paired costume, he as the United States (Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit)and you as "Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins". You didn't notice the recent comment from your sister:

vcujteg pjioho!

You slammed your laptop closed, heart hammering, and haven't been able to stomach another look since.

---

Today's the day.

Grim and businesslike, you load up the Bad Blue Website and start downloading as many Facebook photos as you could to your computer. Friends. Family. Humans. You fixate upon the task, trudging methodically through profile after profile. Fresh photos, of passerines and waterfowl and god knows what else, intruding on news feeds.

You load everything up onto a USB, steeling yourself for the great and bird-infested outdoors. The library's copiers and printers all have some kind of swipecard, and you're not a student here. While you still feel uneasy about breaking a bunch of laws just to print off some personal reminders, there's a print shop a block or two away, though their business hours don't cater to nocturnal trespassers like yourself. You don coat, scarf, and gloves, double- and triple-checking that the thumbdrive is in your pocket.

Interrogation: avoided. A finch of some kind is minding the front desk when you leave, probably glaring at you judgmentally. It says nothing, so you pay it no heed. The library opens up to an open-plan rotten mistake that lets polar blasts come hurtling through - a handful of students are skittering about its periphery, with that illusory glide while their legs powerwalk furiously underneath. They're puffed up against the cold, in contrast with the jay-jocks monopolising the courtyard with their valiant attempts at no-arms frisbee.

University town, once you step out from under the old stone edifices of academia, lounges in a pall of cultivated bleakness, simultaneously in need of a sprucing-up and apathetic-resentful of change from without. You notice a cat. You've noticed a lot of cats, come to think of it. Stray dogs, too, no doubt agitated by the change in management back home.

This cat is a disreputable looking thing - lean, mostly white, dirt-colored patches on it that are probably actual dirt at this point. The both of you share a quiet moment before it skulks off deeper into Studentville, ears pinned back. Do you pursue?

yes

Definitely!

Celebrate your 100th post with a cat

hell yes.

Try to tail the cat unnoticed to wherever it's going.

The cat saunters down to the next street corner, before turning to see if you're still there. Is it wanting you to follow? You should've checked the print shop's hours before heading out - every day you put it off is another for a former photography major (sick of their opening shift) to migrate south for the winter.

Fuck it. You follow the cat. It pins its begrimed ears back and skulks off, a curtailed springiness to its paces all ready to run if you close the gap too much for its liking.

Studentville is a proto-suburbia repurposed, townhouses with bare yards like the 60's got tossed in the back of a truck before being sensibly arrnage on the university's doorstep. Dog-eared, and a little disreputable from its travels and travails. Dingy only when you skirt its edges, holding it up against the municipal lines and concerted urban planning of midtown or the campus apartments. Enter the warren like you're doing now, and things do settle into an aesthetic, however grunge-ironic.

Mix with this post-apocalyptic boneyard-idyll, and you can almost envision a band writing a neo-gothic soundcloud shoegaze tribute in any one of these curtainless living rooms. The white cat is still in view, more interested in another abandoned cat watching you both from across the street. It's black with white points, and lean and glossy and vulnerable as a sealion. Grimes lowers its hackles, then keeps going where it's going. You and Seal follow along, keeping a respectful distance.

Your destination is Palomer Close, a cul-de-sac studded with strays and beer bottles. A few of the cats edge up to you, giving white-and-dirt Grimes a berth properly accorded a clear Head Bitch In Charge, but peel away after a few chin-skritches once they figure you've got no food. You keep half an eye on Grimes, who heads up the driveway of Number 9, slipping between the house and the boundary fence. Upload that place onto Rooms To Let, and expect at least one dissatisfied punter at your take on "north-facing window".

You're busy disappointing a rotating cast of cats when a noise turns feline heads: an engine. The cats desert you in a furry shoal, streaming around the house and out of sight.

The engine cuts out. You shrug, and walk up to Number 9, Palomer Close...

palomer open

Pause and question if you're really going to do this, just long enough for outside events to force your hand. Wing. Talon? Whatever.

Check the mailbox/door/what-have-you for information.

These cats might know what's up, but your only primate pretext for trespassing is curiosity.

---

Hal's last words to you:

In the doorway, making futile motions for you to put down your bag and hug him properly, a joking reminder. "Behave yourself." It's a joke, like telling the sun to keep on shining.

The sensation of pinions on the back of your neck a tickling distraction from the ghost of Hal's non-kingfisher embrace. You couldn't tell from within your winter layers if that was a real, tangible trace of what he should've been, or a series of anticipatory reflexes on your end.

You haven't looted any stores yet, because it's only been four days, goddamnit. You're not some rugged urban survivalist - strolling round town, a chip on your shoulder and delusions in your head that an apocalypse is just the shake-up society needed to truly appreciate your profoundly misanthropic skillset. That isn't you.

Until further evidence bid you reconsider, the party line would be that normal services were disrupted. Functionally identical in the interim to normal services straight up not existing anymore, but you'd take comfort in it while there was nobody to argue the distinction. It's a covenant, Something Important to uphold, until you get a sign from above that your self-righteous efforts are needed elsewhere.

Disrepair, neglect; depressing, but depressing you can handle. You ease into it all like a forgotten, much-loved, emphasis-the-d piece of clothing. It's drab, but it's comforting if you can look past that. Forgive an old friend. Ascribe "forgiven" as easily and ephermially as you ascribe "friend" to inanimate objects.

---

Grimes meows at you, distinctly judgemental. It's returned to the strip of dirt and plastic planters passed off as a front yard. You're startled, almost to anger, but you feel the emotions welling up and cut them off. You maintain eye contact, at least, as you chew the cat out.

"I- I've got principles. Soon as I start breaking into people's places, that's it. That's the apocalypse."

Grimes gives you a look like "Bro. Call it what you like, but only one of us is sporting tin-opening privilege here. Also, fuck your humansplaining. I'm a cat. I'm the earthly manifestation of not giving a fuck."

You're probably just projecting. Grimes struts away to the back of the property again. Its tail says "whatever" as clearly as if you'd tied a lit sparkler to it and let the afterimages burn your retinas.

It... wouldn't hurt if you go knock on the door, right? You could make something up about seeing their cat across campus and... bringing it back? You consider the idea until it shrivels up in your head from the embarassment of your scrutiny. A notion so terrible it wished it had never been born. Typical.

You're still rooted by the mailbox. It's a generic Home Depot affair, flanked on its flat faces by lashed-on corrugated cardboard that's been cut out to resemble some kind of video game monster with an insatiable appetite for bills and coupons. One of the old Nintendo ones? It's slightly off-kilter, bolted to a vertical post on a peeling fence that's being shoved aside by poor choices in landscape design.

Then the front door opens, and a woman steps out.

"Are you coming in or not?"

"nah"

Is she... you know...?

Oh god oh god oh god human contact human contact

being inside a house seems like a good idea right now.

You see something you never expected to see.

Also yeah go in.

Oh, she's human, no question - plumage notwithstanding. Deep purple headscarf, sandy regularscarf, embroidered tunic, loose chevron leggings cut from a flowing sort of fabric which makes the pattern hard to look at. Combat boots (handpainted with flowers, huh) and a thick bomber jacket with leather gloves poking out of the pocket imply she's the motorcyclist. The gloves are a reminder, a visual cue. You're disappointed at how unremarkable actual human contact is to you. Four measly days, says a feeling in your chest that is less sinking and more pre-emptively subterranean.

"Is this your house?" you blurt out. Grimes has followed its master back through the house, sits primly on the porch.

She stiffens, and you still avoid meeting her gaze, scared of reality failing you and rendering something raptorial. She follows where your eyes are leading, down to the entranceway and the shoes scattered around her.

"Oh jeez, boots! Ugh! I knew that you take them off inside, you mentioned, and I knew this, and I go stomping around your house in these things."

She thinks this is your house. Filled with an immediate and singular determination to not associate with any kind of apocalypse-appropriate miscreant, even the personable cat-feeding kind, you turn tail and march out of the cul-de-sac. She calls out:

"Tahlass! Holy shit!"

You break into a run, not keen to find out what kind of ill-will that invective portended. Awareness retracts to the bare essentials as you flee, waiting for the sound of a motorbike in pursuit. You take a few corners at random, stop for a breather, then near jump out of your skin as that mangy white cat scrambles atop the fence behind you.

"Oh my god," exclaims Grimes, with the lady's voice. "Stop running! You're not Tahlass, are you?"

---

"So... you're not Tal. And you're definitely not 923 or Kine."

You're sitting at a kitchen table that definitely doesn't belong to Lock (you're pretty sure that's what she called herself), sipping the freshly-spilt blood of the covenant against acknowledging the end of days. The metaphorical blood is non-metaphorical tea, and its pleasant smell is a stark contrast to your scalded tastebuds and your subsequent inability to taste the barely-leafwater.

You distantly doubt that the tea belongs to Lock, but simply evaluating everything else worth flipping a shit over is enough to distract you from actually flipping any shits. Grimes is sitting sphinx-like by the kitchen door, barring entry via the wash house cat flap to the throng of hungry strays in the back yard.

Lock's hunkered into her bomber jacket now, a suburb's worth of concentrated cat purring a weird substitute for an air raid siren. Situation normal all flocked up. "You don't even know who Cat is."

You point at Grimes questioningly, and Lock shakes her head. She yanks her scarf up over her mouth, muttering what you assume are Arabic profanities.

"... Can I leave?"

"Drink your tea," demands Lock, but she seems to instantly regret it. "We wait for Tallah- Tal."

Grimes says nothing, because he's a cat and you're probably losing your goddamn mind. "Do you know nothing about what's happened?"

Well, do you?