Do Birds Know They Can Fly?

Walking down the street nowadays, two years into whatever we want to call this new era of humanity, we are constantly reminded to live in fear. Fear that a loved one may get sick, get you sick, or you get them sick. They say once infected you can’t help yourself, and your animal instincts take over, quite literally. The posters tell us to “Stay Safe, Get Checked Often”. You can be clear of symptoms for close to 3 days before anything noticeable pops up. Of course people will try and keep those hidden as long as they can. 

There’s one I saw on a subway platform, it was the silhouette of person, and roaring bear inside them, holding hands with another silhouette of a person but no animal and the text, “Be Responsible, Be Honest”. It’s funny, how we do that, hide stigmas even if that causes more harm. Such the ego on us. 

 Early this morning, I received a very insistent text message to meet from an “acquaintance “ I met a few nights ago. We had met randomly if you can believe, just two people at a bar, started talking, no phone or app necessary. She was a nice girl, Alison, she had strawberry blond air, and blue rimmed glasses around her brown eyes. I meant her no disrespect mind you, this was just what it was, a drunken hook up. No promises were made and what I was to understand was no heart was being broken.

Stepping up to Raymond’s Cafe a public service poster of a silhouette of a person with a smaller silhouette of a duck inside them and the words “Stay Safe…Know Your Status” emblazoned next to it, advocating for frequent testing. The general public at least is still in the dark on exactly where this came from or what is exactly causing it. But the world took a collective sigh of relief when they announced that it was not an airborne contagion, meaning just breathing was not killing us. Much like AIDS and HIV, it was contagious through fluids. That was enough for social lives to get back to normal though, bars and restaurants opened up. People tried to hide from the truth through false normalcy. 

Alison was waiting at a table towards the back of the cafe. She had her parka still on, even though it was crowded and the heat was clearly on. A cup of Lipton tea sat in front of her. A squeezed lemon lay next to pile of ripped napkin. I removed my Navy Peacoat and scarf and head towards the back. 

Raymond’s Cafe has been around for decades and the art deco backs up that claim. There is a counter on the right when you walk in and smaller cafe tables adjacent to that, through the back there are is a large space with booths around the edges and tables throughout the middle. Alison’s at a 2 top, her menu remains shut. Her eyes find me and she’s gives me the polite wave so that I see her. 

I sit down and the setup has me immediately running through every scenario that this could be. 

Pregnant? No, we used a condom.

Jealous Husband? Possibly, but that can’t be my problem.

STD? Hopefully no, and again condom. 

ZooMorph? I mean if you trust social media it’s always possible. I don’t feel sick but that’s what everyone says. Going with positive thinking on this one, I am clean, she’s clean, we’re both clean.

“Hi, Charlie, thanks for meeting me…”

“Oh yeah of course, sorry I ran out so early the other morning, you know i had an early meeting, and uh, I think I said something …but it was really fun the other night… anyway, its nice to see you again.” I fumbled through an ill prepared reply.

“Oh…oh, yeah it’s ok, I totally understand, and I had fun too, yeah…um but that’s not really why I called you down here…you see…”

She rips more of her napkin up before she can continue.

“I want to be honest with you, and it’s probably nothing since we just slept together once but I um…” She says exasperated by the energy she is building up in order to say the next sentence. 

But she doesn’t get the chance because a commotion comes from the front of the cafe. Gasps ring out an otherwise quiet dining room. 

A young man, maybe late 20s, erupts from his chair and grabbing his neck, his face is fright red and sweating. Eyes are bulging from his head, like they are trying to escape. His throat is becoming engorged and prying open his tight hands. The man appears to be choking but it’s something much much more. His cheeks swell and a discharge is dripping form his mouth. First clear, then white turning to yellow and finally a pale green. He’s s thrashing back and forth, this way and that. He falls to knees, the pressure in his face and around his eyes and mouth keeps building, his color in his changes from red to pale to green. His head pointed upwards, his arms fall from his throat, and his mouth bursts open with a eruption of green slime like vomit, followed up by a pink wet piece of flesh stretching from his mouth across the room and sticking to the mirrored wall. The wet pink flesh was a tongue. His tongue. And this young man - if he could even be called a ‘man’ at that moment, recoiled it back into his mouth, crumbled onto the floor and wept. The room fell silent. An older man, possibly a father, runs over to the frog-boy and puts a large coat over him and helps him up, they leave quickly out of the cafe. A faint, partly audible “..I’m sorr-RIBBIT…”could be heard coming from the boy. 

Hearing about what Zoomorphosis can do is one thing, but seeing it first hand is a tragedy. It’s like reading about war but never actually being in a foxhole, seeing the gore up close. Unfortunately this was not my first metamorphosis I’ve seen. My sister was the first, about a year ago. She turned into a badger. When it happened she clawed her fiancée across the face, and bit my mother’s nose off before running off. We haven’t seen her since. 

It takes a few moments for the shaken crowd to return to their natural states of quiet chatter over cafe brunch. Alison on the other hand remained shaken up. Naturally since we had recently been intimate, I felt it was my duty to console her. 

“Hey, now just breathe ok, everything’s going to be fine. We were definitely far enough away, I don’t think anything got on us. I know it’s rough, believe me, I watched my sister go through it. Was this your first, have you had anyone in your family been infected.” I say

She remains frozen put tears are coming down her face. She is staring right through me. Finally she says it.

“I have Theriomorphosis, I’m sorry.” She says through more tears. I knew she was serious because she used the doctor word for it. More commonly we say Zoomorphosis, or Zoomorph. But she’s using the doctor word for it, so this wasn’t some paranoid delusion.

“You ‘ve been tested, I take it, and you go the results? You know the strain?” I asked already knowing the answer.

“Yes, I took the test that afternoon I met you, and I went out for a couple of cocktails to calm myself down and I got carried away and then I met you, and I just wanted to have fun one last time and forget this fucking world exists and, and…I’m so sorry.” She exclaims, the incident before has excused the excessive amount of tears, thankfully we weren’t attracting attention. 

“Well it could be a false positive you know. And I was with you just once, that doesn’t mean anything.” 

Alison can sense the desperation of denial in my voice, she only needs to roll up her sleeve to show me the proof. The black rash. Those infected and in a state of active infection develop a black rash just under their skin. People say they can see it move. Or so I’ve heard. Her’s did not appear to be moving.

My head begins to spin and the room starts to go black. I can’t breathe. My mind thinks of death. Painful, forever, death. My heart wants to burst. I can hear everything and nothing all at once. I am in overload and unable to make the next decision on how to function. She speaks next.

“Look, just because I’m infected doesn’t guarantee you are… I mean you are probably right, we were only together once and it wasn’t that long, so there’s probably a good chance you’re clear.” She says doing her best to make me feel better. It works somewhat, it’s amazing the power of denial. I start to calm down a bit, center myself if you will. 

“But I did the responsible thing and told you, and it would probably be the smart thing for you to get tested. You know just to be sure.” 

The last of this rang in my head for the rest of the morning, until I found myself waiting in line for my test.

It was an outdoor testing site, a parking lot with a party tent setup. 20 long minutes, and a vial of blood kicks off 24 hour eternity of panic.

I get home and begin cleaning, rearranging, drinking, anything to keep my mind occupied. I think about Alison and how she was strong enough to be honest with me. I couldn’t be certain I would do the same. I’m too much of a coward.  

I find an indica vape in my nightstand, and lie down in bed. My mind plays back my life hitting all the highlights at first. I smile for the first time since before Raymonds, and Alison, and frog boy. After the fan favorites, my auto shuffle of a memory constructs a less than pleasing set of revisitations. Reflecting back on everything that led to this, and sure people are dying by the millions, but I can’t stop the thought, this is something I deserve. Like every fuck up, every failure, every hurdle I was up against, I chose the easy way around. It all leads to this untimely end. The mind drifts further until I am asleep. Nothing else can be done today. 

I wake up in pseudo-amnesiac state. I shuffle through morning rituals - teeth, shower, coffee, newsfeed - before my memory is jogged. 

The buzz of the phone is unmistakable. It’s on “silent mode” yet it cuts through the air from across the room. 

“Hello” I say

“Hello, is this Charles Forsyth?” An unassuming voice from the other side of the call. 

“Yes” I say

“Hello, Mr Forsyth, my name is Monica, and I calling from Granite Labs, we handle the tests from the ZM site you visited yesterday. I am sorry to say…”she continues but my brain stops processing. I know what is to follow, no one apologize before good news, unless they were playing a joke and I don’ think she’s the type to thrust a bit into her line of work. The rest of the explanation plays out like the teacher from Peanuts, 

“Whomp, whomp, whomp-whomp, Positive…whomp-whomp-whomp AVIAN, whomp-whomp, tell your family…”she may or may not have continued. I heard something about an email, I hung up. 

My family, that had never crossed my mind, I would have to tell them wouldn’t I. Only 7 days left to live, I owe it to them. What do I say, how do I say it. They’re divorced so, do I have to do it twice? or can one just tell the other…is a group text thread too impersonal to tell your parents you’re dying.

Parents can wait, I will call them in soon enough. 

Now what, what do you do when you can almost count the hours you have left to live. A little too late to start a bucket list. 

A few hours went by before I moved. The sun moved though, across the floor and below the horizon. It was the realization of darkness that got me up. The lack of sunlight told me to its time to sleep.  

The next morning I wake up with noticeable discomfort. My throat feels like narrowed, clumps of hair fell out while I slept. The warmth of the sunlight out the window calls to me, and I am drawn to it more than ever before. A shower revealed a black blob of rash on the left side of my abdomen. I think it moved a little. 

Days go by before I notice any more recognizable changes. Discovering the rash placed me assuredly in the “depression” column of grief. I was on my way to acceptance but I had to stop off here for a while. I needed to feel sorry for myself for a little while.

It was within this state of things, and less than 3 days left on the clock. that I called my parents. My father was a quick call, we’ve never had a relationship based on emotion so there was little said. He told me how sorry he was, and that he loved me. He did say one other thing that stuck with me.

“Birds are majestic creatures depending on what type…Luckier than your sister, god knows what horrors she’s been living. Badgers are scavengers.” He says.

 My sister was always his favorite, and with everything in life I could never live up to her greatness. But somehow me turning into a bird, and her a badger moved me one notch above at the end. Small victories I guess.

The call to my mother was all tears. From both of us. She hadn’t yet gotten over my sister. Surprisingly, she said less than my father. Just crying, and blaming herself. She always blamed herself. A mother could always do more to protect her children she said. This destroyed her. I felt guilty myself, though it was mostly out of my control. But your mother crying and knowing you have even partially caused it can break a person. And it broke me. 

According to the calendar, I was coming up to my last day. The call to my parents took a day to recover from. I walked around as much as could. I will miss walking. I could be a flightless bird, that would make senses wouldn’t it. I turn into a bird but I can’t even fly. 

Will I still remember being a human? Will I be able to identify other birds that were once humans? Wouldn’t that be something, living in community of human-minded birds. Alison is probably fully turned at this point, I wonder if I will recognize her. 

Do I know how to fly? Will I know if I can fly or not? Is that something birds just know?

Sleep comes easier, my body has been deteriorating it seems in the last day or so. Once the sun goes down, my body just shuts off and wants to sleep. I know the big change is coming, the last one, the gruesome one. 

That time comes sooner than expected. I wake up in the middle of the night. My body forces itself out of my bed. I crawl to the living room. Pain shoots through my body, my bones feel like they are evaporating, they are becoming hollow. 

The fingers on my hands fuse together into one mass of flesh and bone. My skin erupts into small bumps for feathers to soon birth from. I can feel them push up, ripping the skin apart. I try to scream in pain but the sound is muffled and twisted into something shrill like. My face contorts and bulges forward aggressively. Teeth fall out and the skin on my face recedes back revealing a hardened bone material pushing its way forward. Coming to point at the end and curving down. My beak

My eyes are pulled away from each other to the sides of my head. I can see in 360 degrees and again I am gagging and dry heaving from the disorientation. 

Curled on the floor in a ball, my back arches up with my control, convulsions push a large plumage out. And convulsion from the chest follows with an equally colorful plume.

The sensation spreads out to my arms as they are thrust out to the sides and more feathers emerge. My wings. I flap without thinking, blasting down throughout the room. Again and again I flap with no regard, knocking over everything in my apartment. A floor lamp is knocked through one of the windows, letting the cool winter air to flush in.

Muscles on my legs tighten up and harden and my feet tortuously form into claws with sharp talons. 

I puff out my chest, let out a great shrill of a call, and leap to the sill of the broken window. I stick my head through, tasting the night air like never before. I wanted to leap, I needed to fly. No human thoughts to speak of, my bird brain launches me from the perch into the night sky. 

I sink and fall rapidly, the last of my human anxiety falls away faster, as my new instincts take hold. The sidewalk is coming up fast, no time left to think, just act. 

Wings spread, I arch my body upwards, and with my chest feathers barely scraping the asphalt, my bird body climbs up into the chilly air. Any last thoughts of a being human dissolved and my thoughts became simple and free.

I was flying.

I was a bird. 

A falcon. 

The skies were now mine. 

Freedom to fly far from the troubles of man.

Freedom to fly on and on, forever, and ever.