All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,40
off the branch she’d placed it on, and fell through the branches to the ground with a series of rustling thumps.
Two men came near Patricia’s tree, one of them insisting he’d heard something. The second man kept saying it was just the first man’s imagination, or one of the goddamn woodland creatures doing something woody. And then they found the shoe.
“Is it hers?”
“How would I know? Probably.”
“Jesus. I’m missing The Daily Show. So she lost a shoe when she was running around here.”
“I guess. How far do you think she coulda gotten with just one shoe?”
“On this rocky ground? With all this frost? Not far.”
“Okay. Let’s tell the other parties. With any luck, we can be home by midnight.”
A tiny bird landed near Patricia. “Hello,” he chirped. “Hello, hello.”
Patricia shook her head, she couldn’t make a sound. But she was past that now. “Hello,” she said. And thank all the birds in the sky, she sounded like just another bird gossiping.
“Oh. You can speak. I think I heard about you.”
“Really?” Patricia couldn’t help being flattered.
“You’re pretty famous round these parts. So have you decided to start nesting in the trees like a sensible person?”
The bird hopped closer to Patricia, studying her. He was a blue jay or something, with bright streaks on his black wing and pointy blue head, and a white crest. He turned so one poppyseed eye could scrutinize her.
“No,” Patricia said. “I’m hiding. They’re all looking for me. They want to hurt me.”
“Oh. I’ve been there,” the bird said. He tilted his head, then looked at her again. “Hiding in the trees works better if you can fly, I guess. But you’re a witch, right? You can just do a spell and escape.”
“I don’t know how to do anything,” Patricia said. “Just talking to you, like this, is more magic than I’ve done in ages.”
“Oh.” The bird hopped up and down. “Well, you’d better figure something out. There are a lot of your kind on their way here.”
Now that everybody knew where Patricia was, there was no point keeping her phone turned off. She rebooted it, ignoring all the messages, and looked for her only reliable contact.
“How did you know something was wrong?” she texted back.
“You’re using your phone, several miles from home, and it’s late at night.”
“I need help,” she wrote. “I wish you could think for yourself. I feel like you almost can.”
“Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other,” CHNG3M3 said.
The tiny white rectangle went out. Her phone battery had died.
Patricia was screwed. She could hear them searching, more and more of them, right around her tree. She had to escape now, or the trap would close around her forever.
She had started thinking of CHNG3M3 as some kind of perverse oracle, so this latest utterance lodged in her head. Because of course, babies are aware of themselves—just not the rest of the world, to any great extent. You can’t have selfhood without an outside world, solipsism is like not even existing. So if Patricia could speak bird, and understand bird, and identify with a bird she’d just met, why couldn’t she be a bird?
“Quickly,” she said to her new friend. “Teach me how to be a bird.”
“Well.” This question stumped the little guy, and he pecked with his dark beak. “I mean, it just comes naturally, doesn’t it? You feel the wind hold you aloft, and you listen for the call of friends, and you scan the ground for morsels, and you flap your wings for all sorts of reasons, like to dry yourself and to lift off the ground and also to express a strong sentiment, and to try and dislodge some nits, and—”
This wasn’t going to work. What kind of moron was she, anyway?
But Patricia pushed the negative thoughts down and just lost herself in listening to the jay free-associate about a bird’s life. She pictured it in her mind’s eye and let it inside her, so it became like her own experience. Soon she was talking along with the bird, the two of them in near unison, speaking a bird body into existence. She could imagine her feet shrinking and becoming three-toed and her hips vanishing, her budding breasts melting, her arms folding in, her skin growing a layer of feathers.
“I found her!” someone shouted.
“About fucking time,” someone else replied.
“Where? Where?”
“Up there. In that tree. Oh wait. That’s just her clothing.”
“That’s a Canterbury uniform, all right. She ditched her clothes. What the hell?”