Some Night Bird Cries

When we first hatched we were a clumsy two-headed thing, and it took all our parents' magic to split us imperfectly, irrevocably into two. On Sundays, the Ari-of-us likes to go dancing, and the Maia-of-us goes along out of love and necessity. We haunt Nero's place, which is all over the place. You can walk in the door in Vegas and walk out the same door in Cairo, if you know how. We usually don't, but we could. Nero's place is all stacked hallways and bars and casinos and arcades (for the kids), so you can wander for nearly forever and always have a place to buy a drink or a ticket to a show or some poker chips.

The first time we met Nero, we were nine but looked eighteen and we were sitting at a table on the fifth-floor Jazz bar. He walked up to us with his old money suit and his hair all slicked back and his Cheshire grin, and asked us how we were enjoying the band. The Ari-of-us, who's always been the talker, told him they were just fine, thank you, but we really weren't interested in men at the moment. We thought he was coming on to us. He laughed and asked if we were interested in employment, so the Maia-of-us, who's always been the pragmatist, told him no thank you, and even if we were it wouldn't be with him. His smile faded a bit, and he said something inappropriate which doesn't bear repeating. We knew better than to entertain him, so we simply cocked our heads and fixed him with our black crow-stare until he stalked off.

We stayed another hour before closing our tab with the dead-eyed bartender.

The following Sunday, Nero brought us complimentary passports and driver's licenses by way of apology and told us our business was always welcome in his establishment; he had heard through the grapevine that we were undocumented. This, we understood, did not mean he had changed in the slightest, but that he had realized we could not be taken advantage of and wanted into our good graces. This was acceptable to us, so we found it within our twin hearts to forgive him.

The driver's licenses said we were twenty-one, which we found amusing. We didn't bother asking how he'd gotten our photos. It didn't matter.

⸻

I think a lot of Nero's clientele just like knowing there are other people like them. They see us sitting across the way or they dance next to us and they know that there are other Folk around. Sometimes we see other crows, and they try to give us a knowing nod, which we insincerely return. Unfortunately, we cannot relate.

There is no one else like us.

There is a sort of cosmic anger young immortals feel regarding the change. The world was never ours but we were supposed to fly under the radar. Our forebears spent years traveling, migrating, seeing wonderful things. Untouched nature, strange lands, people who do not know the word preter, because it hasn't yet been coined. Enemies, of course, but ones without technology, without subterfuge, without numbers. We should have inherited that.

The two of us try not to mope, but the endeavor isn't helped by the old-timers we hang around. We sit and listen to Nero's older employees and clients reminisce about the good old days. So many people signed on to his staff just to feel secure. They knew they wouldn't be leaving. They didn't care.

The rest of the week we have a life. We pluck our feathers and smooth our talons and braid our hair. The Ari-of-us sits behind the counter of Art's Craft Store and makes small talk with regular humans while the Maia-of-us stocks shelves. 

We like to pretend we're happy.

It’s on one of these slow, unhappy days at Art’s that a little fox comes in. We can tell she’s a fox because of the way she moves, a kind of slow, smooth glide we would call “slinking”, the way she sniffs the air just a little bit more than a human girl would. We can tell she smells crow, because she perks up. It’s less a prey drive and more the sense that she is around people who are not human, and who might, for example, not call preter-security if she makes a wrong move, or forgets a detail. Lucky for her too, because we can see vulpine yellow eyes peeking over her cute little heart sunglasses. She doesn’t seem very good at controlling her appearance.

The girl approaches the Ari-of-us cautiously, glancing around for customers and seeing nobody but the Maia-of-us stocking shelves, identical in every way and so clearly another half of our whole that even she seems to notice we aren’t merely twins.

We get a good look at her, now. She has long, straight red hair falling down her back and framing her face like a waterfall, so bright that if we didn’t know better we’d say it came out of a bottle, and maybe wonder what kind of mother lets a seven-year-old girl dye her hair. Her skin is almost as pale as ours, and there’s a carefully controlled but not quite suppressed look of fear on her sharp face.

“Is this your shop?” She hisses, standing on her tippy toes to see over the counter. 

“No,” the Ari-of-us lies. “But our manager is out right now.”

Get her out, the Maia-of-us supplies from the back of the store, unheard. She’s clearly in trouble.

“What do you need?” the Ari-of-us asks, not unkindly.

“Can I use your phone?” she whispers.

Before the Ari-of-us can say yes, the Maia-of-us calls over to her. “Our phone is disconnected, kid.” We’re only twelve, of course, but we decided a long time ago that childhood was overrated.

“Oh.” she looks so small then that even the Maia-of-us feels a bit bad for her, but not bad enough to jeopardize the carefully constructed safety of our fake-human existence.

The bell on the door rings.

There’s a very tall woman standing in our shop now, who looks about as inhuman as one can get before humans start to pick up on something amiss. She has dark, unnaturally smooth skin, the muscles of an elite swimmer, and strangely yellow eyes. Her hair is cut short in a military style, and her face looks as though it's been chiseled out of stone by an expert craftsman, beautiful but unfeeling.

We don’t usually feel fear.

“Excuse me miss. I’m afraid my niece…” she trails off when she sees the expressions on our faces, takes in our uncanny identicality, our pitch-black irises. “Ah.”

The Ari-of-us dives under the counter as the Enemy heaves a bolt of solid light towards her. A beautiful display of colorful fabric bursts into flame. 

The little fox yelps, and scrambles to hide behind a shelf. The two of us push out feathers and wings. Get out, we shriek to each other, although it doesn’t exactly need to be articulated.

Every bird instinct is screaming at us to fly away, but the stupid ceiling…so instead we scramble on frustratingly humanoid feet and hands towards the back door, crouching behind shelves. The Maia-of-us is already there and throws it open when the Ari-of-us spots the little fox, shaking, frozen in fear. The Enemy doesn’t care who she gets first, and we’re the bigger targets right now, but if we get out of the building, she’ll go for the easier prey.

No. The Maia-of-us says, but the Ari-of-us has already vaulted over the shelf. 

There’s a burst of light, and suddenly her head is on fire. She frantically stifles burning feathers. It just grazed her, and her burned scalp is already scabbing over and growing new skin and feathers, but the pain is still very real. 

The two of us double over in sync, struggling to stifle a cry. Despite it all, the Ari-of-us manages to collect herself, grab the paralyzed kid, and begin dragging her towards the back of the store.

The kid snaps back to reality and begins to run.

We fly through the back room and burst into the alley out back, right next to the dumpster overflowing with empty cardboard boxes and our dreams of the future.

The Ari-of-us pulls her keys out and locks the door with a ka-chunk. The Maia-of-us is already shrinking, pushing out more feathers, preparing to fly off.

Out! she screams Away!

The fox! The Ari-of-us screams back, but then we realize she's gone, having ducked out of the alley and left us behind.

The Maia-of-us is already in the air, the Ari-of-us is transforming when the back of our shop explodes in a burst of golden plasma and vaporizes my sister instantly.

I don't remember the next few minutes. Then I'm flying, then I'm crash landing in a field, half bird still, wailing and screaming. I don't care if preter-security comes. I don't care if the Enemy has followed. Everything is over.

A long time passes and I realize Everything has continued.

I pull myself to a sitting position, mud streaking my feathers and the exposed skin and hair which are starting to assert themselves again. Then I sit there and try to think, but I can’t because half of my brain is gone. So I sit for even longer and try to figure out how to think as just myself, and eventually I decide to go to Nero’s, rent a room, and sit there until I turn to dust and am vacuumed up by some poor underpaid cleaner.

It is dark so I don’t have to think too hard about seeing with only one pair of eyes. There’s a lack of definition to the darkness, like I’m seeing it from fewer dimensions. Some night bird cries, but it sounds far away, harder to pin down than I’m used to.

I put all of my bird features away so that if a passing motorist sees me in the glow of their headlights, they won’t know that I am a monster.

I walk towards the abandoned barn down the road, cursing the fox kit whose name I don’t know and the Enemy and every human who’s ever come through Ari and my shop which will now be occupied by preter-security officers who will take the twin falsified passports and enter the pictures Nero printed with his magic into their database so that I will never be anonymous or safe again.

I see my mother in the pitch blackness, her serrated beak and cruel eyes, and my half-blind, raving father, and I shudder to think of Ari with them. 

What will she say to them?

What is there to say?

There is straw under my feet now. I push open the barn door whose chain falls away from the inside before reknitting itself behind me. Then the door that would lead to the toolshed but instead opens into one of Nero’s lobbies. 

“Room,” I say to the mouse at the desk. The book next to her flips open to Ari and my tab, which is paid in full, and she fumbles for a stamp somewhere below the surface of the table and carefully presses it onto the page.

She hands me a key. “Fifth floor. Enjoy your—” she pauses, perhaps fully registering my mud and tear-soaked face for the first time. “Um. Enjoy your stay.”  

⸻

Ari and I were six once. The two of us were sitting in the apartment above the shop, my mother braiding Ari’s hair in the style she and I would keep for the next half of her life. Father was away, he was often away, but Mother cared about the two of us, once, for a short while. Ari and I saw out of four eyes, two twin pairs. She and I were an even number, and she did not believe she or I would ever die, in spite of my reservations on the topic.

“Can we work in the shop tomorrow?” Ari had asked.

You just want to run your hands over the fabric, I informed her with a sneer.

You like to feel the textures too.

Ari and I could not hide anything from each other. It was almost a joke.

“No,” said Mother, “but you can help me stock before opening.”

Her black crow eyes gleamed.

“Where do we go?” I asked.

“When?”

“When we die.”

“Back home,” Mother said as she tied the braid off.

⸻

Now I am lying here, in bed. I was just born, because I did not exist before tonight. I want nothing more than to return home.