Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(60)
Kyow-kyow, comes from down in the gulley. My body trembles as I move over the edge, sliding through the scrub until I hit the base of a tree at the bottom. The ground is wet, and an acrid stench hangs in the thick, warm air. Through the undergrowth I see something red. I crawl forward, unable to make it out. A shadow moves across my line of sight and Blyth is there, skipping through the scrub to a mound of earth. I rub my eyes, open them, and see the small body curled in the dirt, a red cap over the head. Crawling over black feathers, I reach out and lift the cap. See the holes where eyes once were and the open wounds where the corvids have been feeding.
Chyak-chyak, says Blyth, hopping backwards up the slope.
“Is this why you brought me here? To show me this?” If Blyth is aware of my anger he doesn’t let on. He stands there, inscrutable.
“I don’t get it,” I cry out. “What is it I should know?”
He gives a piercing shriek and disappears. As I look up a larger figure looms over me and a powerful pain explodes in my skull.
When I come to, my vision is blurred and pain pulsates in my head. Something presses on my chest and I can barely breathe. I try to lift one arm but it feels weak and lifeless. I lay still, aware of a weird falling sensation that I can’t explain. After a while the pain eases a little and my eyes have adjusted to the darkness. I sense a more solid darkness a yard away. The dark mass moves, and in the moonlight I see a blue baseball hat, and then beneath it, the serene face of Edward Owens.
I try to speak but my lips won’t move. I try to sit up but a terrible weakness is upon me. I turn to one side and see an arm outstretched, blood draining from a wound that runs from wrist to elbow. I panic and try to grab the arm to stanch the flow of blood. Then I realise my other arm has been similarly cut.
Edward Owens leans over me. He rolls his head as though to work out a knot of tension. I want to ask him something but the thought slips from my mind before I can turn it into words. He shows me a knife, puts it in my hand, and closes the fingers about the shaft. I want to resist, but all I can do is stare at the empty space where he stood just a moment ago. A space filled now only with night and the stars.
I am not entirely alone. Blyth is perched in a branch close by. After a while, a rook settles beside him. Soon, other corvids arrive in the gully. I watch Blyth, staring at his moon-silver eyes. I understand the nature of his secret. As I lie there dying, I recognise the cold truth of his disinterest, his corvid indifference to my fate, or to any human endeavour. First Blyth, then the rooks, move closer.
The Fortune of Sparrows
USMAN T. MALIK
The courtyard of the orphanage was haunted by birds.
Songbirds, sparrows, gray hornbills, yellow-footed green pigeons, starlings, crows—every species ever glimpsed in Lahore. Twice or thrice a week they came in doles and murders and murmurations, swooping down and carpeting the roof and the walls. To this day I’ve not figured out where they came from in such large numbers or why they gravitated to the orphanage at peculiar intervals. Unsatisfactory theories involving magnetism and satisfactory gossip about corpses buried beneath the old housing were flung about, but no one could explain why on arrival these birds were so quiet—why they would neither cheep nor caw; nor a warbler warble. Hushed, they clung to the courtyard trees, congregated on high wires running parallel to the enclosure walls from one electric pylon to another. It was a sight that gave many a twilight visitor pause when they first glimpsed these silent sentinels. At least until the muezzin called the maghrib prayer and, suddenly, the courtyard came alive with the sound of bird music, the notes of the melodies in harmony with bird colors. The warbler, the cuckoo, the bulbul, the mynah—how they would sing!
For a long time now I have been afraid of birds.
But, then, living in the orphanage with my sisters, playing Ice Water when it drizzled, listening to the gurgle of water sluicing off rain gutters into the courtyard’s red earth, I was not. I liked them. All us girls did. We picked their feathers off the ground and made garlands out of them. We looked for bird nests in the courtyard trees and giggled when Mano stalked them, his mangled tail bristling, and, from hidden corners, sprang at the crows, parrots, and pigeons, making the creatures explode skyward in a flurry of black, blue, and green. The color specks circled the enclosure until night crept up from the horizon and took the birds with it.
Mano the wedding cat belonged to Bibi Soraiya, who managed the orphanage’s affairs. Mano was old and two-colored. Neha used to say that was why prescience boiled in his blood, that he was a creature fleshed from opposites and could glimpse things we could not. Angels, jinns, and the ghosts of martyrs walk among us, and everyone knows spirits are fond of cats. Who knew what they whispered in his ear when they floated past him or brushed his fur?
And when Mano settled down by the orphanage gate, licking his fur and purring, we knew the Rishtay Wali Aunty was to come for us that day or night.
The wedding cat was never wrong about the matchmaker’s arrival. That was why he was the wedding cat.
My sisters and I were fond of Mano—we fed him from our plate—but sometimes, when the wedding cat’s eyes gleamed in the darkness and he slid across the courtyard, back arched, the sounds from his throat indistinguishable from the rumble of a motor engine outside the orphanage door or the passage of something large and ponderous high above the clouds, we weren’t so fond of him.
Sometimes we wished Mano would run away and not come back.