Night birds come and go without sound. That’s why no one knows about them. The sky being dark, they move unseen, undetected. Unknown. Of course, the moon and the stars are in on the game. Night birds cast no shadow. The celestial bodies, which get off on painting midnight with strange gilts and uneven films of violet silvers and dusty golds, they ignore these birds. It’s another tale altogether, of course, but for the sake of our thing here let’s just reveal that it’s all the direct result of an ancient pact in which the night birds are allowed undetected passage between any and all natural light shafts. In return, the birds themselves must give over the impossible gossamer and the translucent skin wrapping their potato chip bones.
The night birds are the wee-est of creatures to the night in question when the time comes. Their lives are plunged in mystery, their deaths even more so.
You ask good questions. I admire your wild curiosity.
How do they know when the time comes?, you say.
No one knows, is all I can tell you. Because in truth, I do not know. No one can say. It is a matter solely settled between the night birds and the night skies. This is a dance of nature that has been going on since long before recorded history.
On the old cave walls in France/ beneath sunbaked rocks in hottest Africa/ dead poets called them angels/ living ones call them ghosts/ but no matter who you are or where you roam, one thing remains as certain as time itself. Night birds are living out their existence in utter anonymity, just feet away, just mere inches away, I tell you, from the eyes of we humans who believe we run the world.
Which we don’t, by the way.
As I will soon reveal.
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Oh, and one last point I feel bears mentioning.
If you were, in fact, to ever catch a glimpse of a night bird: say, out of the corner of your eye, by some rarest of chance, as you drag the trash cans to the curb some summer evening/ or perhaps: tilting your head back to polish off the last slicks of backwash from a hollow beer can/ your eyes might slip out of the camp fire’s eerie glow/ up, up, up into the wistful endless firmament/ everything unfolding in such a way that you somehow manage to witness a thing you oughtn’t had.
The swift slip of a night bird passing. Her silence possessing you/ her scent: the smell of iced guns. Your weary eyes mixing with the flit of a flung bijou. The cosmos shifting, uncomfortable and sad.
For now, I am afraid, you must die. After nine days past, upon the ninth night standing, as the antique decree comes down, you will perish from this life in noticeable fashion. Or, rather, you would if you saw the nightbird. Nine days later, on the eve of the ninth night after a person sees the elusive night bird with their own eyes, they die. This is how things are. Please don’t kill the messenger. Life is never black and white.
Everything, it seems to me, is grey.
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Which brings us, inevitably, to me. As I am wont to do here in these spaces. For indeed, just the other night, two nights ago to be exact, I was walking from my car in the heavy rain to our back door when something in the sky by the white pine caught my attention.
Immediately, I was taken aback. And seconds later, what I had seen plundering across my consciousness with the roar of 10,000 Vikings burning me down, I felt a fear so stunning and vast in its scope that it served to belittle any and all scares I had ever known before up to that point.
The bird had been brazen, I argue. Perhaps inspired by such a dreary night, it likely swooped away from the heritage of caution propping up its very system and, foolishly, haphazardly, came darting around above my head in some certain way that ensured it was witnessed by yours truly in a moment of absolute innocence on my part.
My heart stopped then. I felt the mercury flying off the poison, circling my beats like bats. I heard the cries of the children singing back behind the creek, the tender haunted hush songs of the dead announcing what was suddenly unfolding. My impending demise, it turns out, is big news in these local woods, down in the weeds along the water. The bird I’d seen, I saw it no more. Only a flash, a rush, a streak of something flying is all it takes. A challenge to your existence is just as easy as that. And then there is the rain that followed/ bashing harder than all day long/ pinning me with slivered ice darts/ louder and louder and louder and louder!/ there came a sense of tent-like encapsulation/ a feeling of warmth from the hissing downpour/ beneath my boots I could feel white pine cones like squishable stones, like dead wet mice/ and this, I figured, was nature’s way of allowing me to grieve myself in the moments before the panic set in, should it set like it should.
Plucked from the sea, a single unfortunate sand crab of no account and no true worth, I had been wrestled from my rainy evening and thrust into a nine day unwritten drama in which no scenes had been written, no dialogue scripted, no actors guaranteed work, and no plot what-so-ever short of this one heavy elevator pitch.
Mister average greatness middle aged American dad guy had just seen a night bird on a stormy Saturday night.
And that, as we are understanding, is not fucking good.
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