When she was just a week from hatching, she was taken to London to visit the Queen.
“Emu?”
“Ostrich?”
“Moa?”
Brows furrowed. Brains throbbed.
“Indeterminate!” came the cry, and so she was taken away and placed in a little straw-stuffed box with just that one word written on it and an exceptionally large and fat hen was applied to her.
One week later, the hen raised a godawful fuss in the middle of the morning and down came the tenders and the keepers and whoever was standing around at the moment, overcome with curiosity for the big bulky lump.
She was already half out of the shell by then, wheezing and snorting and blinking and grumbling. The hen lurked at the far end of the box, glaring at her as if this chick was a personal insult.
She gasped for air, sharp little teeth wet in the candlelight, and someone said “oh! What an ugly bird!”
She looked much prettier a few days later, after she was patted dry and named. And fed, very fed, very frequently.
“More meat for Jane.”
“Jane’s crying again.”
“Better feed Jane.”
So Jane got bigger and glossier and somewhat sleeker.
Still, she was a VERY ugly bird. No beak, just blunt snout, and her downy plumage refused to blossom into feathers.
The tail was the oddest though. A long and sturdy thing.
“Her mother was a crocodile, her father was an ostrich,” someone said, and the analogy stuck somewhat, even if the science was wild. “Poor plain Jane!” someone else said, and that stuck precisely.
Jane might have been plain, but she remained devoutly abnormal. At five years of age she was bigger than most of her keepers and still growing, steadily but surely, bite after bite.
She also had been put in a larger pen, which everyone refused to enter. Her appetite for meat had not dwindled, and all examination had to be done from a safe distance. Nobody was quite sure what they’d do if she got sick.
At seven she was moved to a yet larger pen, and again at ten. Each time this happened a fresh crowd gathered to see how much more the little monster had grown.
Then she turned thirteen, grew just a little faster than expected, and hopped the fence.
Oh goodness had Jane grown! About a ton, but so nimble! She ran as fast as a horse through the streets (the horses did NOT appreciate that, let me tell you) and snuck out of London in the dead of night. She left behind only a few scattered footprints, some traumatized drunks, and a bit of an unappreciative horse.
The forequarters, to be specific.
After that it was all smoke and mirrors. Who notices if a single sheep goes missing?
Or a single flock.
Or a single shepherd.
Well, more people than you’d think, but not when they go missing here and there and all over the place.
Still, she was a growing girl, and that was what caught her up in the end.
Jane didn’t plan to eat the Queen. The Queen didn’t plan to be eaten by Jane. Nobody else had any hand in this. It was just a thing that happened.
It started happening during a particularly miserable downpour. The kind of sky that makes you just want to lie down and wash away. The kind of rain that turns the air into an ocean all its own. The kind of damp that makes your marrow soggy.
The kind of awful that you carefully package up and tell your children about every year for the rest of their lives.
It was too wet out even for sheep, which was what was puzzling the hell out of their shepherd, who would prefer to be inside his cottage. They were huddled under the spindly little tree outside his cottage, and no matter what he did they refused, they refused, they absolutely refused to take one step further towards the nice dry (ish) barn he’d left open for them.
“’Gwan!” he yelled and swatted. “’Gwan!”
Silence. Not even a bleat. They stared at him as if he was speaking French. Then again, they’d never quite gotten the hang of English either.
Cursing, stomping, overflowing from boot and coat, he walked up to the barn and banged on the gate. “C’mere!”
Then he saw the sheep were staring past him and he turned around and looked Jane in the eye.
Jane’s eye was half-opened and lazy and tired. It was an eye that just wanted to be dry for six minutes more than anything in the world, which was why the shepherd made it the whole ways back to his cottage and then back into town without being chewed on or anything even a little.
The shepherd came back with the army, who arrived with chains, and that would’ve been that if one of the men (the report said it was a private, the company said it was the lieutenant) hadn’t sneezed.
Jane couldn’t run as fast as she had back in the day, but she could still get moving pretty quickly. Took a bit of the barn with her too, and was over the hill and through the dale before you could say ‘galoshes.’
Now, the good thing was that the men had brought horses, and a few of them were being ridden by lunatics brave enough to lend chase. The bad thing was that Jane knew she was being chased, and it took an uncomfortably long time for the cavalrymen to realize that they weren’t so much pursuing her as driving her.
About three seconds later one of them realized that they were specifically driving her right back into London, but it was hard to explain to his comrades through the wind and the rain and by then it was much, much, much, much, much too late.
Jane had lived a good while outside of the city, being very careful of being seen. Perhaps she had grown bolder as she grew larger. Perhaps she was too fearful from the hunt to take caution. Perhaps the weather was so horrible that she couldn’t tell she was running back towards her old home.
Whatever the reason, she made a godawful mess as she went through the streets. She stood over ten feet at the shoulder now and had picked up an extra ton somewhere. Her feet tore up the road, flattened dogs, and sent the few deep-sea-divers bold enough to travel outdoors scurrying for cover.
Now, all of this made a very complicated mess. A dark and rainy evening; a lot of confused shouting people; the last few persistent cavalry officers hard in pursuit; upturned carts, everything making noise and blocking the way and so on. So it wasn’t like it was planned for Jane to trample onto the garden of Buckingham Palace. It really wasn’t.
And it certainly wasn’t as if Jane knew what she was doing. She practically fell into the garden’s lake, poor thing, and that was through no grand scheme. The limp it gave her? Utter chance. The stumble that led her to put her weight onto the palace steps? Compound bad luck. As for the fall that sent her entire skull smashing through the nearest window, snout-first, well. Who could’ve thought that the Queen would be sitting there? Or that she might be so startled by Jane’s (again, quite unpredictable!) entrance as to jump up and turn her back and try to run?
Nobody! Nobody at all!
And so it was that on the one hand, the outcome of all of this was horribly predictable; and yet on the other, the blame for it was manifestly alien to all, quite unsupported.
It was just all tremendously awkward, especially after Jane made a nest in the summerhouse.