Hollow Kingdom

by Kira Jane Buxton

  “Take a good look around you. In a teaspoon of soil there are more organisms than there were people on this planet. Creativity swims freely all around us, and beauty is everywhere. Look!” He gestured below to a herd of dogs, a gargantuan canine patchwork quilt billowing through the streets in a splendid blur of browns, silvers, ebony, and snow, big and small, running as one against the change. Cattle dogs, collies, shepherds, pointers, dogs with survival in their sinew. They were painting the earth with their success. Parading their freedom in a way only the once-enslaved can.

  “Don’t shackle yourself to an ideal. Always go with the tide; listen for guidance. Creativity is not a uniquely human trait. Creativity is everywhere, in the barb of every feather and each audacious sapling. To err is what’s human.”

  “To what?”

  “To err. Humans marked their distinction with their mistakes. A creature can be heartbreakingly powerful and loving while also being a destroyer of worlds. You are mistaken in thinking they are the only rational animals. What you are looking at is just a chapter in their story, one they narrated. Perhaps—” he paused as we soared over the silent bodies of two apartment complexes that had collapsed onto one another, their guts glistening and gray. “Perhaps there is still a whole book for us, many chapters ahead. You must evolve. Float with the tide. Trust that She knows what She is doing. We must listen to Her through Aura, Echo, and Web. Onida has spoken.”

  “If you think so much of Aura, how come you never spoke of it before?”

  “Shit Turd, the last time I saw you, you wouldn’t associate with other birds or be called a crow. Things change every second. Embrace it and know that it is always for the best,” he said with a wink. “For now, we must listen to what’s been on the voice of the wind and follow the lessons of who we have been summoned to see. Let us see what The One Who Keeps has to say.”

  “Ghubari,” I told him, as vulnerable as when my home was a rounded sweep of eggshell, “I am The One Who Keeps.”

  Ghubari’s lemony eyes filled with mirth as he let out a full-belly laugh. His wings flapped harder in delight. “Onida’s full of surprises. And a killer sense of humor.” Before I had a chance to digest the terror and uncertainty that pooled in my belly, the eagle started toward earth.

  She signaled her descent with a down-turned head, lowering in a smooth figure of eight. Still in miniature, a Caterpillar bulldozer and construction trailers slept on the sand mounds below. Tarp, brick, the skeletons of scaffolding, and orange cones that looked like candy corn from above all lay scattered. It was some sort of sports facility that the MoFos had been working on, a half-finished track and baseball fields exposing their guts, the snaking veins of electrical pipes spying from the sand’s surface. The crows must have chosen this spot, since construction sites are known meeting grounds for our kind. The crows appeared to have a lot of clout, and I liked it. We touched down onto the sand of the abandoned construction site with a careful landing, as if onto the top of a soufflé. I wobbled off the magnificent raptor’s back amid the deafening whooshing of wings as hundreds of birds descended, some perching on sleeping tractors and trucks, others dipping the webbing of their feet into the sand. The crows stood in the center, holding court, strutting proudly as only crows can with their casual, sauntering swagger.

  We were utterly surrounded. Plovers, kingfishers, ospreys, sapsuckers, larks, nightjars, shrikes, and buntings. I got starstruck at the site of a snowy owl, because, I mean, Harry Potter. I had never seen these birds except for in pixel form, and here they were, shiny eyed and ruffling their magnificence. Golden eagles and Steller’s sea eagles filled a crown with bodies, bodies so beautiful and majestic it was hard to look away from them. They kept their raptor glares on two MoFos who were hunched and staggering along the side of the town house, their heads stooped and fixated on their empty palms. In their current state of absorption they were harmless, but the giant birds kept watch, using eyes eight times as powerful as a MoFo’s. So very little can escape an eagle eye. Birds of the shore—the airborne voices of Echo—birds of the forest, even birds of the tropics like the tanagers and a marmalade-beaked toucan (presumably zoo renegades). There were migrators and nesters. Pillagers, thieves, nurturers, and sages. Bone-splintering talons, bright bursts of color, and camouflage quills. Urban birds and forest dwellers. Sun-loving birds and those who zigzagged the sky in the dead of night. Most had nothing in common, their only connection through Aura. They were all here for me? The One Who Keeps? What did that even mean? How did I get myself into this mess? I had none of Ghubari’s certainty as I realized—a sobering realization that felt like a belly full of ants—that they had made a mistake. Just as The One Who Opens Doors hadn’t been a savior, I was not who everyone thought I was. It just wasn’t possible. I was a silly bird with an identity crisis and a moderate-to-severe Cheeto® addiction, and it was all going to be exposed right here under the unblinking eyes of a thousand feathereds. I swallowed hard so as not to projectile yarf—that’s only acceptable for vultures. A single crow rattled. Otherwise, there was just uncanny silence.

  Kraai, his chest shimmering black and purple, addressed the crowd. “Sentinels Of The Sky, we here—all of us—are the overseers. The eyes in the clouds. We have talked of this gathering for some time. We know that The Unbroken are coming, baring their teeth with an unparalleled hunger. We know they are encroaching and claiming our territory, snatching our bodies in their mouths, and swallowing our eggs. But this is our land and so a Great War has begun. We must remember the words of Onida, passed on to us by the groan of a great oak: “When the grass fights the concrete, She shall usher in a new era.” The domestics are dying. We have been called upon to help them, and in turn they will rise against The Unbroken, driving them back to the mountains. We will claim the territories for ourselves. Access will be granted to the food in the Hollow homes, the shelters, the materials to build strong nests and fortify our own. Since The Hollows are vanishing, what was theirs is now ours. Onida said that The One Who Keeps will lead the way, and now finally, Sky Sentinels, The One Who Keeps is among us and our time has come. I know it in the part of me the butterflies speak to, the part that is tugged by the stars. We must act quickly because every minute they draw nearer. It is known. This,” he stepped aside way too dramatically, thrusting his damned perfect beak toward my noggin, “is The One Who Keeps.”

  Hundreds of bird eyes, keen eyes that can spot a baby field mouse from the clouds and read the diaphanous dance of ultraviolet light, burned into me.

  “He is going to teach us how to touch through the glass so that we may claim the homes of The Hollows and defend ourselves against The Unbroken. Onida has spoken.”

  A chicken lost its composure and clucked. They all waited for my sage counsel. My heart raced, the pressure unbearable. I opened my beak and nothing came out. I tried to say something and a sort of “heeeee” came out that sounded like a dying blow-up doll. Luckily, someone’s question filled the air before I passed out.

  “Um, excuse me, but, wait. Uh…uh…are all domestics our allies?” came a frail voice from a bushtit whose name roughly translates as Gary.

  “During this War, they are all our allies. We will work together,” said Kraai.

  “Not cats though, right?” asked a yellow-breasted western meadowlark.

  Kraai gave his measured answer: “Not every cat is bad.”

  Mutters of disbelief rose like bubbles. Gary the bushtit, shifting his balance, lifted up his sad twig of a leg stump as a silent rebuttal.

  “You’re right, Gary. Cats can’t be trusted. But everything else.”

  “But—” Here came the stentorian cries of a northern goshawk, urgent beeps of an alarm: “We don’t stand a chance against The One Who Spits and The One Who Conquers. I have watched their devastation.”

  There was a collective gasp, several shrieks at the mere mention of those names. Great, I thought. The One Who Conquers, another predator I’d yet to meet.

  “We will spread word thro
ugh Aura and all will know of our War,” said Kraai. “Crows live by the code of murder. What has worked for the few will work for the many. We are stronger in great numbers and that will be our advantage, our only way to win. When we band together, we will be victorious.”

  “Birds of a feather!” I squawked. All eyes shot my way, regarding me as if I was something that a gull regurgitated. Apparently, no one had heard this expression so I was left standing there like a blue-footed booby, utterly lost in translation. I briefly contemplated sticking my head in the sand in solidarity for the ostriches not represented here. But no, I’d come this far. This was a chance for the domestics who deserved a shot at life in the New World, a chance for Dennis and me to do something good.

  “Kraai is right, we must free the domestics,” I said, a shake in my throat as I addressed a million feathereds, a club I’d never felt welcomed to. “They deserve a chance at life in this New World, as much as we do, and we can help one another.” But I didn’t really have to tell them about the value of every life. Those who burst from shell know the gladiator’s fight for survival. A bird recognizes that every life that surpasses a first breath is a miracle.

  “So, what are we waiting for? If we’re in such a hurry, tell us!” chirped a snow bunting, bobbing its head up and down.

  “Well, it’s…I should start by…the first thing you’ll need to do is, assuming there is no way to jimmy the window...” I was struggling, floundering. How to explain all the variables of breaking glass? The glass breaking I’d done so far had been a cobbled blend of on-the-spot deductions and a few Hail Marys. How to translate the actions of a MoFo, the cool reasoning, to all these feathereds?

  A cockatoo, naked as the German Big Boobs Calendar’s October MoFo, chimed in. “Show us! Show us how you did it! I escaped through an air vent. Show us how you break the glass!” The cockatoo’s bumpy, gray skin told a story of stress and anguish. She had overplucked, her body suffering the same fate as Tiffany S.’s eyebrows. And yet, here she was, exposed to the elements, as vulnerable as it gets. Here she was, speaking up without armor or protection. It bolstered me.

  “Show us! Show us!” birds began to sing, screech, trill, and warble. I turned to Kraai and he nodded. A great stirring of the air signaled the bald eagle’s landing by my side. She trilled that lovely scattering of elevated notes and lowered her back for me. I hopped on as a Monster Truck Show’s worth of birds watched in fascination. She lifted those archangel wings and suddenly we were taking flight to the rhythm of a thousand pinions whipping the air. The evening tasted green and clean. I leaned forward and whispered where we needed to go, the place that hadn’t left my mind since we’d first been there and probably never would. The tiny sparrow darted through a sky of birds and was suddenly hurtling alongside the eagle and me.

  “Don’t worry,” he said in a jittery whisper. “I believe in you.” They were tiny words from a tiny bird, but perhaps sometimes all you need is a speck of encouragement, an acorn of belief.

  The sparrow perched in a stunning Sitka spruce that sat on familiar territory. The tree limbs filled up with black birds and the bald eagle gently touched down on the grass with a brisk flapping of her wondrous wings. The air suffered a storm born of feathers, by the flogging wings of thousands of landing birds. I hopped to the grass, cool and damp on my feet. Darting my head, I searched for Cinnamon, the tiny ginger form I hadn’t wanted to leave behind. But there was nothing left; something had taken all of her. Perhaps the same something had ravaged the body of the African painted dog that lay nearby, its tissues stretched over the gleaming rib cage. And you couldn’t hate it. You had nothing or no one to be angry at. Everyone had been a victim. Turkey vultures huddled around the carcass, admiring the pearlescent beauty of it.

  Kraai dropped down in front of me, his head cocked. Black eyes peered at me from everywhere with a weighted expectancy. The pressure bore down on my plumage. I looked up at the townhomes, and a spark of hope zapped my insides. Eyes in yellows, blacks, browns, oranges, burned into me. If I fucked this up, then what? Dennis and I wouldn’t be long for this world. They’d catch up to us. We’d be tracked down and taken by a trio of brotherly stripes.

  I hopped over to the sparrow’s former prison, vaulting to the planter box of decaying plants and demonstrating how I had wedged my beak into the crack in the window and pushed it open farther. The sparrow hopped up and down, ecstatic in his bones, reliving his moment of release. But a cold murmuring bounced among the crows. Cackles ripped through the leaves. They were unimpressed.

  “The window was already open!” came a rattling heckle.

  I looked at Kraai. His head was still cocked. He did not address the heckler, which pecked at my panic. What if I couldn’t find the things I needed? They were doubting me. Worse still, I was doubting myself.

  “How do you touch through the glass with no opening?” came a jeering voice from the leaves. I sidled up to Kraai.

  “I’m going to need a couple of things,” I told him. He nodded and I whispered them to him. With Kraai’s throaty rattle, four crows fluttered down to join him on the grass. Once they’d received instruction, they took flight, disappearing into the distance. The next minutes were tense. I could feel that I wasn’t yet fully accepted by this murder, wasn’t even accepted as a crow yet. What would they do to me if I didn’t deliver?

  A black-headed grosbeak, sensing the tension, broke into a warble. The song was his father’s father’s father’s song, unrepeatable by any other living being. It was a song about kindness, a unique and casual caroling. It was soothing and leisurely and all his to share with the hundreds of beings around him. Nearby, a female grosbeak cocked her head in rapt attention and I wondered if this was the beginning of a new chapter for them, whether on another page further along in the book, an egg would hatch with this very song in the lining of its shell. It made me wonder if Ghubari was right, if maybe the most beautiful things were still all around us.

  The crows returned. Fluttering a foot from the ground, they released the items in their clutches. A black eye shadow palette. A TV remote sans batteries. A lump of metal. A severed tailpipe. As my stomach sank, my heart rose into my throat.

  “I can’t…these aren’t the right things…I can’t break through glass with these objects, they’re not what I asked for.” As I expressed this, I realized how much it sounded like I was bowing out. Like a TV evangelist whose paralyzed parishioner is refusing to walk again.

  “This crow is a phony!” honked a tundra swan. “He sounds strange because he is an imposter! He is not The One Who Keeps!”

  A Steller’s jay puffed his chest and hopped toward me. I felt the bodies closing in, the sky falling down. Kraai placed himself between me and the encroaching mass of birds, some of whom had talons designed for dismemberment. Suddenly, cool, booming laughter rained from above, lifting the heads of the masses. A gray silhouette was framed by clouds. An African gray opened its feet and released a cell phone that dropped onto the grass. He touched down gently. Ghubari looked at me, his face bright and cheerful, full of a hope I thought had been long extinct in our world. He had saved me.

  “Watch what I do closely,” I told hundreds of eyes. “This will all happen very fast.” My pulse was quicker than the sparrow’s as I hopped with the cell phone toward the town house window. It took an uncoordinated leap to hoist myself to the window’s ledge. I took in a deep breath, making a small prayer to the Gods of Samsung, as I pushed my twiggy black foot onto the power button. One second, two seconds, three. This was do-or-die. Everything riding on the hopes of a charge, that at some point, a MoFo had plugged in—

  The Samsung cell phone screen surged into an electric glow. Two MoFos, listless and lumbering at the side of the town house, cracked their necks toward me, eyes radiating focus. Two jaws dropped, expelling a bloodcurdling, rage-powered roar. They broke into that twisted horror-show run. Birds screamed from the crowns of trees—screeches, caws, shrieks, squeals. I had seconds to get it right. I grasped t
he cell phone in my jittering feet and lifted it, perched next to the window, on the splintery sill. The MoFos clambered, running on all fours, heads elongated—too long to be MoFo, an animal’s run—and then they were leaping into the air, careening toward me. I released the phone, barely missing the dislocated jaw of a sick MoFo, as they shattered the glass window, breaking through. The impact shot me sideways, thrusting me onto the ground beside the window with a series of painful rolls. Breakthrough. Relieved, I finally inhaled.

  Alarm barks sounded from the bowels of the town house.

  “Help me!” I cried, belatedly realizing that in opening the gates to the town house, I’d unleashed terror onto a mother dog who would now do everything she could to protect her dying babies. Five red-tailed hawks swooped in through the jagged frame of the broken window with tight screams, fearlessly mobbing the MoFos. They screeched at The Changed Ones, who screeched back, more feral, wild-eyed like desperate underground things. As the MoFo holding the cell phone swiped at a mobbing hawk, another bird snatched the phone from its thick, yellowed fingernails, darting back through the window, Team Hawk in tow. The MoFos galloped after like broken hyenas, howling at the sky. The cell phone started to sing a song, a stark contrast to the melodic ditty of a black-headed grosbeak. Its tinny call, the sound of violence, haunted us as it dissipated in the shadows of the town house of horrors.

  It was done. The glass had been touched through. I shook crystal shards from my feathers and sidled up to the window, waiting for signs of life within the building. Then I felt a presence behind me and spun round to my very worst waking nightmare. A waddle of Humboldt penguins—the zoo penguins—those shit-beaked Spam-gremlins were inches from me. I braced myself, trying to snatch one of a million insults that swirled in my head. And then, right there, in front of everyone, they bowed to me. One of them, with a sugary pink spill around its almond eye, doubled over and yarfed up a fishy mound of mostly-digested paste. Minuscule bones and the odor of a SeaWorld dumpster confirmed they were once sardines. It was an honor the likes of which I had never experienced. Like well-dressed butlers, they sidled away, beacons of manners and respect. Everything I’d thought about them, everything Big Jim had told me, had been utterly wrong. Penguins, it turns out, are pretty fucking delightful.