Hannah was a morning person. She’d never said so, but she’d felt so for years. Like some flowers, she woke with sunlight. As a child, her mother had told her the crack of dawn was loud enough to wake her. She regularly beat the early bird to the worm.
And now, with the day fading into evening, she’d pulled into the driveway a little too quickly and beaten it to the ground, too.
Hannah pulled herself free of her seatbelt, cursing quietly in time with the angry treetop chattering of the bird’s mate. She’d never liked birds. The scaly-dry legs; the beady eyes; the ruffled, battered shapes of the feathers that covered and protected the pink, naked scrawniness underneath. But like them or not, it didn’t feel right to leave the corpse lying there. It’d give her the creeps, and attract cats, raccoons, or who-knew-whats.
So she took an old spade and ten minutes and pinned the little red bird under a foot and a half of cold, close-packed dirt and gravel.
Then she went to bed.
Dawn rose soft and rounded at the edges but sharp enough to cut; it was just past five when Hannah slid away the covers and yawned herself awake. She glanced out the window and a flash of red sped into her mind. She jumped – was it? No, a cat must’ve dug it – but no, no, another, longer look showed that she was wrong.
It was another bird, another red bird, not hers. The second half of the pair again? She couldn’t tell under all the feathers. It was nestled on the gravel mound down there, staring up at her window, but unhurt. Unwilling to move, mind – even when she started her car, not so much as a blink crossed the thing’s face as its feathers billowed in warm engine exhaust. It was still there when Hannah turned the corner out of sight.
It was still there when her car crunched into the driveway nine hours later, head full of fog and arms full of groceries. For all she could tell it hadn’t moved a muscle. Except its head. Its head followed him, towed by those giant, unblinking eyes, fixed tight in their sockets.
It didn’t scare her, mind you. Didn’t scare her at all.
But she took the stairs two at a time, and closed the screen door to the warm April night.
She woke up in a grey place and found her face pressed to her bedside window, as if her body was already preparing to ask the question at the back of her brain.
Clotted red bled through the morning haze by her car. It was still there. Amazing a cat hadn’t got it.
Breakfast was squishy, tasteless and rushed – anything to get her up and out the door faster, farther away from that endless glare. She approached her car from behind and fumbled a bit too quickly with the handle, swore as she shut the door on her coat, and spent all day at work full of dry lips and fast twitches.
She looked up red birds. Pictures of robins and cardinals and red-winged blackbirds filled her screens.
No. Not those, not those. She had a book at home. She’d find out at home.
The bird was still there that evening. If it weren’t for the tight, tense movements of its neck as it watched her go in, she’d have thought it was dead. It was those eyes. Those wide, bright eyes. They were meant for flies to crawl over, not madness.
Hannah found the book after a long search and a tasteless dinner – it was a dust-chewed old thing that weighed more than a bowling a ball – and found herself watching the bird as it watched her, flipping through pages and chewing at her hair.
Not a waterfowl. Not with that sharp-tipped beak. How had she missed that?
Not a songbird, not with it being bigger than a cat. How had she missed that?
Not a hawk or eagle, not with that drab, crusted-red spatter of colour over its wings and body.
She closed the book and returned it to its tomb, glanced out the window.
Still there. Still watching.
It took her longer to fall asleep that night. There was too much red in her dreams.
The next morning Hannah woke up saw the bird had breakfast got dressed went downstairs forgot her keys found her keys went outside and found it sitting on her car.
For a moment she just stood there in confusion. No wonder she hadn’t found it in the book, she thought. It was bigger than a turkey. How had she missed that? It must’ve escaped from a zoo. Or somewhere.
There was something else, something jangling at the edges of her nerves as time cramped and her eyes slid molasses-slow over the thing from its mad eyes to its long, scaly legs, claw-tipped, clutching. Tufts of fur and red matted them, calico and grey and white and
Oh, she thought. So the cats did find it. And she took a small step back when she knew this, and as she did that the bird let out a shriek that rattled the windows and launched at her.
It was so fast, so fast. Barely a blink and now wings were around her, feathers in her mouth, cold grips at her shoulders and a sharp stabbing pain in her scalp and an all-engulfing scream so loud that she couldn’t tell if it was her or the bird. Her arms were useless flapping things pinned down and trailing but her legs were thundering up her steps and it wobbled for a second, just a second and that was enough, just enough for her to shed her skin and blunder through the door, coatless and crying.
Blood was in her eyes. Germs too, probably. And her phone was on the porch, in her pocket. And just as she thought that, she heard the scrabble and thud and clank of what only yesterday she would’ve called a raccoon on the roof.
She locked the back door and all the windows before she went to her computer and saw the flash of red at the corner of her eye, the screen.
No connection.
The line was out.
It was strange to see morning this way, not from a bed as a fresh start but as a change in the air, a glow that grey in the sky by inches.
Hannah wasn’t sure she liked it. She wasn’t sure of anything by now. And she couldn’t see the bird.
Empty grey gravel in the driveway. A spade-width, maybe a little more. She pictured her shovel, pictured the little dead thing she’d buried, pictured the animal that had torn at her head.
How?
She looked and looked and saw no answers, and no bird, and then she thought of her coat and her phone. Maybe it was too far to her car, but if it was still on the porch…
It was. Top of the steps, a stride and a half from the door at most, and mostly undamaged beyond twin tufts of down lining at the shoulders, blowing in the cool air like wings.
Hannah stood with her hand on the door, screaming at herself to take action. And when that didn’t work she swore at herself aloud, and when that didn’t work she thought of how she’d never get help without leaving the damned house anyways, and when that didn’t work and she finally had to admit that the hairs on the back of her neck weren’t coming down she gave in and went upstairs and fetched the very small mirror from her cosmetics kit and held against the just-opened crack of the door, biting her lip as it tilted along the side of the house from sky to trees to paint to brick.
To red, rust, blood red. And an eye.
She dropped the mirror. It broke against the porch with a soft crack and something leaped past the window in a feathered blur at eye-height.
That night Hannah stayed up and counted cans in the kitchen until the early morning faded away her fingers. Sooner or later, someone would come. Sooner or later. She was grounded, and she was bleeding, but she was alive.
She woke to the sound of splintering wood and silence.
Eyes widened, fingers tightening on cold metal, small and hard and the only weapon to hand. Canned chicken. Who would eat canned chicken? From the back of the cupboard, from school?
Standing up took an eternity of dying muscles and groaning floorboards, ears wide for anything from the front hall.
Quiet. The kind of quiet that watches you.
Three awful, noisy steps to the knife drawer. A long, slow creak and a half-foot of precious, stainless steel.
Quiet. Maliciously, perfectly quiet.
And then, wishing in every bone and muscle and nerve that she still had her mirror, Hannah leaned around the corner.
Early light seeped through the front door. Its window was smashed. Its panels bulged. Its rubbing lining spilled onto the carpet like dried intestines. But it stood.
She sighed with the sob of the death row paroled, cheek to the wall, and turned around to see the rust-red fade to light crimson under the morning sun as it stood in her kitchen, head cocked, eyes mad. The feathers ruffled in the breeze from the gaping back door behind it, splinters still stuck in its scaly three-toed feet. It was taller than she was, and smelled of mist and must. Dew sparkled on its claws, the feathers pluming its stiff tail, the teeth in its just-open muzzle as it peered at her.
And then it leaped.
They arrived two days later and found it empty and torn and abandoned. And in all the fuss over what they found in the kitchen, barely any notice was taken of the little pit in the driveway, barely wider than a spade. A tiny, bright red feather in it spoke of a lost songbird.
Maybe a cat got it, they said, and returned to the business of the strange prints by the back door.
And the soft dawn wind plucked at the feather and carried it away over the trees and through the mist into the early morning of the world.