By Izz Murphy
Someone is here. He holds my hand and he’s warm and has a pulse and I love him. He’s tall and his bones are hollow and he can fly. He says he’ll take me with him. He tells me how he pierces the sky, wings spread, wind holding him high. The wind is cold and the view is so beautiful.
He found me on a flight. In the gaps of the treetops, he saw me. I looked so small from so far up. He says I’m small up close too. There were leaves in my hair and dirt on my knees and he helped me to my shaky feet and I picked a bit of mouse fur from his beak.
His call is kind. It’s shrill and wakes me in the morning, just in time to watch the sun rise. So I watch it rise and I watch him rise higher, up and out of sight. He brings me gifts. I have so many twigs now. I don’t have wings and I only have so much room in my arms, so I climbed up a tree. Now I have somewhere to keep all of my gifts. I dust the dirt from the twigs and stack them nice and tall. I think he likes it that way.
When he speaks, his voice is high and fragile, but it never shakes. He chirps when he is happy. He chirps when I stack the twigs and wipe the dirt from my face. Sometimes, he screeches. His screech is loud and it tears my skin. The blood is hot and drips onto the tree bark. The blood reminds me I’m not alone.
He visits me sometimes. He used to come more, to bring me more twigs, but he says he’s proud of my collection. The walls are tall and the floor is thick and he calls it a nest. I didn’t know I could build anything, but it is strong and holds me almost as sweetly as he does.
I do love him. His feathers are wispy and their fibers get caught in my teeth, but it doesn’t bother me too much. His legs are tall and skinny and slow him down, so he prefers to fly. I don’t mind. He soars straight to the sun and I stay in our nest, keeping it tidy so he’ll chirp when he returns. He used to chirp more.
He brings me food when he catches it. The prey is twitching, half-dead, but he’s too busy to kill it, so I have to kill it after his visit ends. I’m still small, so I just wait and give it time to die. It’s bloody and it cries and cries and half of me wants to help it and the other half wants it to die faster so I can eat dinner. I don’t like the cries, but the only walls the nest has are the ones that keep me safe inside. There is no separation. There is nowhere quiet, so I sit as far away from it as I can and cover my ears. It doesn’t help, but one day it might.
Sometimes, I think about making a wall to keep out the cries and a ceiling to block out the early sunrise, but he won’t bring me any more twigs. I can’t reach any from our nest. I ask him for more when he brings me food but he screeches and I bleed next to his prey. Sometimes there is so much blood that I can’t tell which is from me and which is from the sorry beast whimpering in front of me. I ask him to just finish the job and he coos, asking which beast I should kill.
There are eggs here now. I don’t know where they came from but they are large and freeze each night and I am still too small to warm them all. I tried to hug each one but they all get too cold, so I picked one. I hold it each night. I tipped it on it’s side so I can hold it in both arms. I try to rock it but I only have so much room in my arms.
The other eggs are broken and dead, but my egg is warm and it’s starting to crack. Something is cooing inside and I am so, so happy.
It has a beak. I tried to teach it to speak but it won’t. I wonder if it cannot hear me, so I yell, but it just starts screeching and I bleed. It is quivering and hungry, but it has no teeth to chew.
He still brings us food. His daughter looks just like him, but she has my eyes. She is hideous but she still must eat. He doesn’t say anything when he drops his prey at my feet and just like always, it is crying. I ask him to stay, just for the night. I tell him his daughter needs him. He looks at me and I know he’s about to screech so I stop talking. I don’t speak again.
The prey is nearly dead and the baby is mewling and it is just the three of us in the nest. I look at them both. The prey is wheezing its last breaths, so I wait, but the baby cannot wait. She is so small and she is so hungry and I don’t know if she can last the night. I need to keep her alive.
I set her down on the floor, facing the wall. I pick up a shard of broken egg shell and raise it up towards the sky. Moonlight glints from the pale surface as I bring it down with all my might. I drive it into the beast’s neck. It screams and begs me to try again, to bring it’s life to it’s bitter, bloody end. I thinks it’s a mouse. It looks into my eyes. It sees me and it’s hurting and I am covered in it’s blood. It is about to die and I am angry because I am helping it. I need to chew it up to spit it into the baby’s beak. I cannot eat.
I remember seeing him fly for the first time. He was so beautiful and I had the whole forest floor to run across to follow him through the sky. He told me he’d take me with him. I’ve been waiting to fly for so long.
The baby and the mouse are loud and I don’t know whose blood is on my face. I gave the nest all I had and I am empty now. There is nothing feeding me.
The twigs supported me as I climbed to the top of the nest’s walls. I stood on its top as the beasts screamed beneath me. The blood was hot, but the wind was cold and the view was so beautiful.
I took flight. I did not think twice before I leapt. I didn’t have wings and I fell far and hard, but for just a moment, I flew.
Izz Murphy is a writer based in New York. They primarily write horror, fantasy and science fiction, the genres they've loved since childhood. As an openly queer and trans artist, lots of their work is influenced by queer culture and experiences.They were the recipient of the 2021 Tomaselli Award for Fiction at their alma mater, The State University of New York at New Paltz. Their work has been published in Stonesthrow Review, as well as Reedsy.com.
