by Ray Cluley
As soon as it was open she heard shrieking, an endless series of short, sharp, stuttered cries, shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie, and she knew what had happened.
The eggs had hatched.
Cigarette in her mouth, Maggie put both hands to her ears as she nudged the door wider. The things weren’t loud, exactly, but shrill and constant, overlapping. Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!
She stepped out onto the roof with her eyes to the sky. She checked the park. A woman with a pram was walking through, that was all.
Eventually Maggie was able to look away and lower her hands, wincing at the din but knowing she’d get used to it. She could get used to anything. She dropped her cigarette, stepped it out, and approached the nest, careful to keep her distance. She only wanted to see them.
They were ugly little things. A shuffling mass of black, puffy with erratic plumage, they held their beaks up to shriek-shriek-shriek! at the sky. Pale grey eyelids clenched closed against what little sun there was, they beat at each other blindly with stubby wings as they fidgeted into new positions.
When a dark shape blurred into her peripheral vision Maggie screamed and crouched and covered her head with her arms. The thing dropped from a high position behind her, landing at the nest. It settled on the scaffold pole as Maggie scurried backwards towards the stairs in a crab position, hands and shoes slipping on the wet roof.
The bird was huge, even hunched over. As tall as her but more broad. Wings the size of ironing boards folded against its body. It was entirely black, so black that it gleamed, and the one glassy eye Maggie could see was so dark it absorbed all other colours. A hole’s shadow, dark as ink not written. In its beak, in its terrible split black beak, it held a giant snail.
The young in the nest jumped, jumped, knocked against each other, and beat their stumpy wings. They snapped at the air and set up a discordant chorus of shrill calling so intense it forced Maggie to stop fleeing just so she could cover her ears again. She still heard the crack, though, when the mother slammed its catch down against the roof wall. Crack! Crack-crack! A couple of those, then the bird held its catch on the wall, talons spread to grip it steady. The beak came down. Hard, quick, darting stabs. Crack! Crack-crack-crack! And Maggie realized at last that what she saw was not a snail. Of course it wasn’t a snail.
“Oh, Christ.”
Its beak withdrew from the motorcycle helmet with a string of something red and meaty. It tossed this to its nest. As the young fought over the flesh it pecked again at the hole it had made in the visor, scooping more from inside, nodding to throw more strips to its children. Maggie saw blood spill from the opening, a single thick line of it running down the helmet to drip into the nest where the three snapped at thrown morsels until the helmet was dropped for them to peck at. They rammed their beaks into whatever gap they could find, nudging and shrieking at each other in between.
Beyond them, visible now as they fed themselves, was the last egg. The one she’d touched had not hatched.
The young were quickly done. They craned their necks upwards, tipped their heads back, and held their beaks open for short pauses between squawks. The mother dipped to each in turn, opening its beak in theirs to regurgitate a previous meal. Perhaps the rest of the motorcyclist. Perhaps something else. Maggie tried not to think of the woman she’d seen in the park. The one with the pram.
“Oh fucking Christ.”
The bird looked up. It turned its head one way then the other, locking one dark eye at a time on Maggie. It shuffled sideways on its perch, as she’d seen it do on the climbing frame, then arched its body forwards with its beak open wide. A long bloody tongue uncurled from inside with a scream of vowels, accompanied by the spreading of wings. They unfolded like vast blankets.
Maggie scrambled in retreat until she felt the closed door press against her back. She slapped around for the handle.
The bird’s long call became a sharp sequence of noises like nails being wrenched from wood. It flapped its wings, leapt, and swooped at her.
Maggie yanked herself to her feet and the door open at the same time. She rolled around the frame, slammed the door shut behind her. Holding it closed, she braced herself for an impact that never came. When the automatic light in the stairwell finally registered her existence, it blinked and flickered a rhythm as quick as her breathing.
Another cry resounded off the walls, deafening in the confined space of the stairwell.
Maggie shoved herself away from the door and took the stairs down two at a time, chased by a long dark echo.
S
Maggie’s father had died while she was on the roof. All those years she’d spent with him and she hadn’t been there when it happened. It didn’t seem fair.
At the cremation, people gave Maggie their condolences and platitudes, spoke of a tough man she didn’t recognize, spoke of mods and rockers but never explained how her father fit in. The man they knew had died long ago. The man in the photographs her sisters provided for the wake—Dad on his motorbike, Dad with his wife and girls—was a stranger to Maggie. The man she knew wore a faded grey dressing gown and had died with his eyes bulging and his hands twisted into claws that couldn’t get the mask from his face, couldn’t turn the oxygen dial. He’d wet himself, too. The small living room had been ripe with his odour.
Maggie spent the funeral thinking about a group of crows. Everyone in black. She thought of her father’s bulging eyes, his clawed hands, his stink, and found it hard to say she loved him. She let her sisters say it for her and thought of crows.
There had been few things to do afterwards. He only had a small selection of mismatched clothes to sort through. He’d left her with little more than his ashes. She had seen her sisters through their grief, but they didn’t stay long. They invited her to stay with them for a while, but they said it the same way Dad said a lot of things he didn’t mean. Within a fortnight of his passing, the house was finally empty and Maggie could do whatever she wanted. Hell, she could even smoke.
She went to the roof.
She tried to light a cigarette but her hands were shaking too much. She had to hold one with the other to keep the flame steady enough, puffing out quick breaths of relief before releasing a slower drag that calmed her. It would be her last one.
A chill breeze carried her smoke away and swept her hair into tangles. She zipped up her jacket to the sounds of them all screeching, hacking out their staccatos, calling her to their nest.
They were even uglier close up. The beaks seemed too wide for their feather-fluffed faces, and the eyes bulged beneath closed grey lids. Their squat heads were ruffled with a scruff of down that extended to the wattle of their throats. They were all elbows and claws, it seemed, feathers dark like tar, wafting their stench around as they shrie-shrie-shrie-shrie-shrieked!
Maggie dropped what was left of her cigarette and twisted her heel on it. “Stop it,” she said.
At the sound of her voice they became louder, scrabbling at the debris of their nest as they shoved each other, straining their heads and necks for their next meal.
“Stop it,” Maggie said, “stop it, stop it, stop it!”
She grabbed the nearest one under the foreshortened stubs of its arms or wings or whatever the hell they were and barely registered the weight of it. She scooped it up and cast it skyward, over the edge of the roof. It hung there for a moment, turning with the force of the throw, and faced her. It rawked and beat at the air, caught in the pause between up and down, flailing with limbs barely feathered. It had never seen another fly, not yet, but that didn’t matter. Seeing it done didn’t mean you could do it yourself.
Gravity snatched it away.
Maggie grabbed the next—it was warm in her hands, wriggling—and she turned on the spot to throw it harder, further. “Fly!” she said, and watched it drop.
The crash of the first one landing was followed
by the wailing repetition of a car alarm. She didn’t hear the second one.
Maggie put her hands on the third sibling, pinning its wings, and raised it to chest height. It snapped at her breasts and her head so she held it straight-armed and turned her face away from its beak. She walked it to the wall and let it go.
“There,” she said, facing the remaining egg. “Just us.” She stepped into the nest with all its filth. She crouched, put her palms on the egg, and caressed the smooth coolness of its shell. Nothing pulsed inside. Nothing moved. It was cold. It may as well have been stone for all the life it had. She tapped at it with her knuckles, “Hey!” then knocked her fist against it, “Wake up!” She held it by the top and rocked it to and fro, pulling the base free from a caked mound of bird shit. The broken pieces of her coffee mug lay nearby. She retrieved a section that was mostly handle, dirtied with smears of black and white, and tossed it aside. Another fragment, cleaner, was a sharp triangle of ceramic. It fit snug in her hand.
She drove it down hard against the egg.
The egg cracked. Another hit, and a network of fissures flattened the crown. The cup shard broke its way inside. She pulled it out and threw it away, hooked her fingers into the egg, and pulled at the shell. It came away easily, a viscous fluid spilling over her hands and into her lap, releasing a stench as thick as the albumen or yolk or whatever it was that coated her, a bloody sepia slime that stank like snotty menses.
There was a dead bird inside.
It lay against a concave wall of shell as if sleeping, head burrowed into its partially feathered chest. Maggie cupped the beak under one hand and gently raised the face. It was mostly pink puckered skin, slick with fluid, a patch of feathers wet against its head. Its eyes were wide black domes without lids, sightless pupils dark as blindness. Dark like oil. Dark like tar. Maggie saw herself reflected there, distorted.
“Poor thing.”
She unzipped her jacket, took it off, and lay it on the ground. She slipped both hands into the remains of the egg and gently withdrew the bird from inside. It was much lighter than the others, all loose bone, sagging skin, and limp feathers. Its talons had been tucked beneath its body but now they dangled, flaccid grey-ringed toes curled with the weight of hard claws. Maggie lay the creature on her jacket and folded both halves over it, tucked in the top and bottom, made a neat parcel of what she’d found.
“You’ll be okay now.”
She took the cigarettes from the pocket of her jeans, withdrew the lighter, and lay them on top of the jacketed bird before settling herself into the nest. She fidgeted, clearing a space amongst the papers and food boxes. Flies buzzed at the motorcycle helmet but she kicked it away and the dark cloud dispersed after it, reforming once it had stopped rolling. Her backside slid on a cushion of thick droppings, and she put her hand down into something bloody, but she no longer cared about things like that.
She waited.
She didn’t have to wait long. The car alarm was still repeating, but over that came the whump! . . . whump! . . . whump! of beating wings. Maggie looked up and, yes, there it was, swooping down at her, bigger than before, diving with urgent speed and the scream of an eagle in descent, talons outstretched.
Maggie tipped her head back. She closed her eyes.
The claws did not come. She was buffeted by a wing-made wind, but not struck. She felt the nest-litter stir as the dark bird hovered, smelt the damp feathers beating near her face. She heard the scrape of metal on bricks and knew that it had settled upon its scaffold roost.
Maggie opened her mouth.
The bird screamed for her and thrust its beak in hard. The suddenness of it surprised her but her cry was strangled before it could become sound. She squeezed her eyes closed tighter and grabbed at the scruff of its feathers, all spiny and coarse and thick as starless night, impossible to wrench free no matter how hard she pulled in pain. And still the beak came, filling her throat, stretching her lips around it so that the corners of her mouth split. A mass of feathers smothered her as the point of its beak rooted deeper until finally it found what it wanted. Maggie opened her eyes then. Something inside was wrenched free and her eyes were suddenly wide, hands falling limp to her sides as she gagged around whatever it was that came up her throat, thick and moist and ravelling out of her. She convulsed, gasped, retched. With a flick of its head the bird tossed it aside and Maggie saw twin black sacks fold open like tiny wings before they fell away. When the bird’s beak entered her a second time, rummaging, she barely felt it. The third time she felt even less, saw all that was black and bloody coming out of her—black heart, black feathers—and was only dimly aware that the jacket beside her stirred. With her arms by her side, fists clenched, she leaned back as the dark bird emptied her, twitching like the jacket as the big bird broke her bones and scooped her hollow, scattering her insides like ashes to be borne on the wind.
When all that remained of her was a vacant sack of skin and clothes, Maggie collapsed in upon herself, mouth open as if hungry for all she had lost.
Her jacket burst open with a sudden flurry of fledgling energy, and a long shrill cry that might have been pain, might have been joy.
Pins and Needles
“Prick.”
James plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his coat as if he’d stepped aside voluntarily instead of being pushed from the queue. Others shouldered past him, knocking him with bags, and he had to duck quickly, sidestepping, when an elderly lady lowered her umbrella as she clambered onto the bus.
“You coming on, mate?” the driver called out to him.
James shook his head—the bus was too crowded—and the doors closed with a stuttered cough. With a tired exhalation of exhaust the vehicle merged slowly with the rest of the traffic, leaving James behind at the bus shelter.
“Prick!” he said again, louder this time. An elderly man seating himself on the narrow beam of a bench looked up with a scowl then busied himself rearranging the shopping in his carrier bags.
James pulled up the hood of his grubby anorak and zipped it so the matted fur of its trim hid all but his eyes and forehead. He headed out into the drizzle. He’d walk to the cinema now that his bus journey had been ruined.
With his hands in his pockets the coat was pulled down tight. He could feel the reassuring bulge of what was stowed in the inside pocket as it pressed against his chest. Squashed ball of Blu-Tack. Curled tube of superglue. Folded card sleeve of sewing needles, thread long since discarded. Small plastic box of drawing pins. He’d used a few so his walk was accompanied by a metallic ch-ch-ch as they shook, a quiet echo of each step that only James could hear. The hobby knife with its retractable blade took up the most room. He kept it in the packaging in case he was ever stopped by a policeman. “I just bought it,” would be his excuse. “I make models.” He knew he looked the sort.
The cinema was one of the last of the flea-pit varieties, somehow managing to stay open despite the nearby multi-screen haven with its wall of pick-n-mix and staff who looked too young to see half the films they screened. James would have preferred the multi-screen but he was banned, and though he could sometimes get in anyway—there was always someone new taking tickets—he didn’t want to risk another disappointment today.
“One, please.”
The machine in front of the woman ejected his ticket and sliced it neatly, only for the man a few paces away to tear it in half before gesturing James inside. He picked up some popcorn first. Stale, salted, the only kind on offer. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t eat it.
The screen was still dark and a soft music played, soundtrack scores rendered banal by popularity. There were a half dozen people seated already. Two couples sat together near the back. One person sat near the front looking up at the black screen, waiting for its light and pictures. Another sat near the aisle as if eager to leave immediately should the film be bad. James thought it probably wo
uld be. Reel Films only showed arty films or foreign films. Or arty foreign films.
He took a seat in the middle of a row near the back. People liked this sort of position, he knew. He just hoped the shitty weather was enough to lure more people inside.
Not yet, though.
He put his popcorn on the floor and unzipped his coat. The plastic blister of the knife packaging was only gummed down lightly to the cardboard, a job he’d done himself before coming out, and he carefully peeled it away to release the knife. He used it to make small incisions in the fabric of two seats to the left. Next he pulled two small balls of Blu-Tack from the fistful in his pocket and pushed these into the openings he’d made, squashing them down against the base of the seat. Finally, with the speed of practice and the assurance—even in the dark—of familiarity, he pressed two of the longer needles into the Blu-Tack. Then he shuffled along as if he didn’t like his original seat and repeated the process.
His work done, he got up and moved a few rows back, first taking care to spill popcorn over the seats in front and behind.
He settled down and waited for the show.
S
James left the cinema smiling. It had been better than he’d dared hope, and afterwards the film hadn’t been too bad either. The French girl in it had been beautiful and naked a lot. The young woman with the kids wouldn’t have liked that, had she stayed, even if there wasn’t any sex. So really, James had saved her some embarrassment, and this way she probably got a refund too, which she wouldn’t have done if she’d left because of a French girl’s tits and pert perfect bottom.
James was still smiling when he arrived home. The rusty front gate screeched his arrival and next door’s cat fled from beneath the hedgerow. James had once turned a foam ball into a sea urchin for that cat but the results had not been satisfying.
“I’m home,” James said, closing the door behind him. Nobody lived with him anymore but he liked to say it anyway. He took the things from his pocket and lay them out on the kitchen table, hung his coat on the back of a chair. He took a Coke from the fridge and sat down to check his new model. The boosters were dry. He’d assemble the weapon deck tonight and apply the transfers to the main body of the craft while the glue set.