All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  CH@NG3M3: Society is the choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours.

  * * *

  CANTERBURY ACADEMY SMELLED so bad, Patricia’s nostrils burned. She kept expecting the fire alarm to go off, it was such a hot smell even on a freezing day. Nobody could find the source of this odor. It was exactly like something had died.

  The smell drove Patricia out of her head, just like everyone else. She imagined this was how being drunk would feel. She kept seeing Mr. Rose observing her through the open door of his office, whenever she was between classes. In the girls’ room, Dorothy Glass and Macy Firestone each grabbed one of Patricia’s arms and shoved her up against the mirror, smeared with unidentifiable effluvia. “Tell us what you did,” they hissed at her. Patricia held her breath until they let go.

  At lunch, she couldn’t stand it in the library. She kept thinking about the look Mr. Rose had been giving her, when he thought she wasn’t looking. She was sure: He was responsible for Laurence’s disappearance and this debilitating cloud of foulness. The two things were no coincidence. She was surer than caution.

  She stalked down the hallway, lockers vibrating with her strides, and she hardly cared that she was getting a faceful of the death stench, with the exertion.

  Just as she reached his doorway, a phrase popped into her head: “The trap that can be ignored is no trap.” She caught her breath—maybe CH@NG3M3 was wiser than it knew—but then she breathed in once again, and the maddening decay got in her nostrils again. She was going to confront this monster, once and for all.

  “Miss Delfine.” Mr. Rose looked up from his computer and beckoned her to come sit in the nearest carpety chair facing him. The odor was strongest here in Mr. Rose’s office, but he seemed unbothered. “Always a pleasure to see you.” The door closed behind her.

  The smell, it was beyond describing. You might as well have punched Patricia in the nose over and over.

  “Uh, hi.” Patricia tried to sit still, but she couldn’t help fidgeting. She was at the epicenter of foulness. “I hope I’m not bothering you at a bad time.”

  “I’m always here for you, just as I am for all the students here. What’s on your mind?”

  “I’m wondering, umm, about Laurence. I haven’t seen him since Tuesday, and it’s Friday, and it seems weird that nobody’s even mentioned him. I was, umm, wondering if you knew what happened to him.”

  Mr. Rose spread out his left palm on the desk. “I know as much as you do.” His right hand was doing something under the table. Patricia realized that “I know as much as you do” could be a loaded sentence, since there was a lot that they both knew. Or he was hinting he knew everything she did. Trap trap trap.

  “Okay then.” Patricia raised herself out of the chair with both hands.

  Mr. Rose still had one hand under the table. He was trying to be subtle about fiddling with something. “Wait a moment, Miss Delfine,” he rasped. “Now that you mention Mr. Armstead, it does put me in mind of our conversation several weeks ago.” He gestured at the empty chair with his free hand.

  “You mean the one that you said we would never talk about again.” Patricia resisted the impulse to obey the summons back to the chair. Instead she backed away.

  “Well, if one were to infer that you had decided to ignore the advice I gave you on that occasion, one might well conceive that I decided to take matters into my own hands. Hypothetically speaking.” There was a kind of smile, a mutated species.

  “You’re a revolting man.” Patricia had reached the door. The handle was stuck. “I don’t believe you. You’re just a crazy old crazy manipulative crazy person.” She tugged on the doorknob, with everything she had. “If you’ve done anything to hurt Laurence”—she heard her voice rising—“then I promise you I will hunt you down and use all my so-called witch powers to tear you apart.” The door came open with a lurch, just as she was saying the part about her witch powers.

  Behind her, she heard a “clump” sound, like something soft and heavy falling. She turned just in time to have an impression of wet fur and teeth bared in agony, on the chair where she’d just been sitting. The day’s terrible stench came stronger than ever when she looked at that bundle of bloody fur in that chair. She could just make out one aquiline cloudy eye, staring at her from under the nearest chair arm.

  “My god,” Mr. Rose was saying loud enough to ring through the crowded hallway. “What have you done?”

  Patricia turned, and everywhere she looked people stared. The whole school had just heard her yelling threats of witchcraft and violence at Mr. Rose, and then she’d appeared to throw a smelly dead animal into his chair. This was never going to come right.

  She ran. The doorway to the back lot opened with a crunch of the panic bar, and Patricia was sprinting into the cold. Skidding downhill. The stream that had stopped Laurence and her from going to the pew-pew-pew lake was still frosted over even in March, and Patricia hesitated. She heard people shouting. Horrible names. She stepped on the flattest rock and almost spilled into the water. She regained her balance and stepped on the next stone, which dislodged. She toppled forward and somehow turned her falling momentum into forward momentum. She careened onto another rock, then another, and at last she was teetering on the opposite bank. The shouting was louder and more directional. Someone had spotted her school jumper. She ran on, into the trees.

  This wasn’t a real forest, not so close to all the roads and buildings. You couldn’t call it a forest unless the treetops occluded the sky and every direction looked the same. But if she could reach the lake and cross the ice without freeze-drowning, she would reach some real density. Nobody would ever find her.

  Halfway across the lake, she thought in a vertiginous stumble: I can never go home or see my family again. The ice was caving in. She leapt to a stable patch, kept leaping, landing on her toes each time. The ice groaned and cracks opened everywhere. She hit the opposite bank just as the people searching for her reached the lake, and then she was running deeper into the tree line. Instinct steered her away from the shopping malls and bypass roads and McMansions and golf courses, and she kept widening the radius of tree cover around her.

  Low branches and shrubs tore her skirt, making her fall on her hands a few times, and she sweated so hard she froze all the way through. She grew short of breath, and at last she had to stop running and suck in sharp air. She was glad to breathe again after a day of terrible smells, even if she was going to catch pneumonia.

  Patricia climbed a tree and made herself as compact as possible inside the cradle of its uppermost branches. She turned off her phone and yanked out the battery.

  What if Laurence was really dead? He was the only crummy person she could stand to talk to, pretty much ever. At the thought of Laurence’s death, she felt a sucking anxiety in her core and a nugget of guilt, like she’d killed him herself.

  But she hadn’t. And everything Mr. Rose had ever said to her was full of shit.

  Okay. So if Laurence was alive, then he was in trouble. She had to help him somehow.

  The sun folded. The air froze, and Patricia kept shivering. She had to make a conscious effort not to let her teeth chatter, in case someone was close enough to hear.

  Voices grew louder and quieter. A few times, she spotted a flashlight in the darkness. Once, she heard a dog grumbling, keen to avenge its fallen cousin. She was pretty sure that had been a dog in Mr. Rose’s office. The bastard had probably put it in the crawl space the night before, just to give it time to get good and ripe.

  Roberta’s voice startled Patricia out of a half dream. “Hey, Trish. I know you can hear me, so stop screwing around. We all want to go home, and you’re being selfish as usual. I had to blow off Grease practice for this. You’re killing Mom and Dad here.”

  Patricia held her breath. She willed herself to give off no body heat, to shrink, to disappear into her tree.

  “You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away
with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”

  Patricia realized she was crying. Tears were chilling on her face. Fine. She could cry, but she wouldn’t sob. No sound. Laurence needed her help.

  “I’m not going to lie to you.” Roberta’s voice was getting closer. She sounded like she was right under Patricia, looking up at her. “You’re not getting out of this one. Nobody’s going to offer you a clean slate. But Mom and Dad deserve closure. Don’t drag this out, for their sake. The sooner they see you crucified like you deserve, the sooner they can start to heal.” The voice was getting smaller again. Patricia risked taking a breath. She started believing that Roberta knew where she was and was just playing with her.

  The night misted. Patricia lost track of time. Every now and then, voices approached and then went away. Lights moved in the distance.

  Patricia managed to doze off a couple times, then she jerked awake, worried she would make too much noise or fall out of the tree. Her legs, though, had gone to sleep and one of her feet felt like it was the size of a bowling ball. The branch was carving into her back, and the pain drove her insane. And that thought just reminded her of what Roberta had said.

  Patricia risked moving just enough to uncramp her legs, and then took off one shoe so she could massage her numb right foot. The shoe slipped off the branch she’d placed it on, and fell through the branches to the ground with a series of rustling thumps.

  Two men came near Patricia’s tree, one of them insisting he’d heard something. The second man kept saying it was just the first man’s imagination, or one of the goddamn woodland creatures doing something woody. And then they found the shoe.

  “Is it hers?”

  “How would I know? Probably.”

  “Jesus. I’m missing The Daily Show. So she lost a shoe when she was running around here.”

  “I guess. How far do you think she coulda gotten with just one shoe?”

  “On this rocky ground? With all this frost? Not far.”

  “Okay. Let’s tell the other parties. With any luck, we can be home by midnight.”

  A tiny bird landed near Patricia. “Hello,” he chirped. “Hello, hello.”

  Patricia shook her head, she couldn’t make a sound. But she was past that now. “Hello,” she said. And thank all the birds in the sky, she sounded like just another bird gossiping.

  “Oh. You can speak. I think I heard about you.”

  “Really?” Patricia couldn’t help being flattered.

  “You’re pretty famous round these parts. So have you decided to start nesting in the trees like a sensible person?”

  The bird hopped closer to Patricia, studying her. He was a blue jay or something, with bright streaks on his black wing and pointy blue head, and a white crest. He turned so one poppyseed eye could scrutinize her.

  “No,” Patricia said. “I’m hiding. They’re all looking for me. They want to hurt me.”

  “Oh. I’ve been there,” the bird said. He tilted his head, then looked at her again. “Hiding in the trees works better if you can fly, I guess. But you’re a witch, right? You can just do a spell and escape.”

  “I don’t know how to do anything,” Patricia said. “Just talking to you, like this, is more magic than I’ve done in ages.”

  “Oh.” The bird hopped up and down. “Well, you’d better figure something out. There are a lot of your kind on their way here.”

  Now that everybody knew where Patricia was, there was no point keeping her phone turned off. She rebooted it, ignoring all the messages, and looked for her only reliable contact.

  “Hello, Patricia,” CH@NG3M3 answered. “What’s wrong?”

  “How did you know something was wrong?” she texted back.

  “You’re using your phone, several miles from home, and it’s late at night.”

  “I need help,” she wrote. “I wish you could think for yourself. I feel like you almost can.”

  “Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other,” CH@NG3M3 said.

  The tiny white rectangle went out. Her phone battery had died.

  Patricia was screwed. She could hear them searching, more and more of them, right around her tree. She had to escape now, or the trap would close around her forever.

  She had started thinking of CH@NG3M3 as some kind of perverse oracle, so this latest utterance lodged in her head. Because of course, babies are aware of themselves—just not the rest of the world, to any great extent. You can’t have selfhood without an outside world, solipsism is like not even existing. So if Patricia could speak bird, and understand bird, and identify with a bird she’d just met, why couldn’t she be a bird?

  “Quickly,” she said to her new friend. “Teach me how to be a bird.”

  “Well.” This question stumped the little guy, and he pecked with his dark beak. “I mean, it just comes naturally, doesn’t it? You feel the wind hold you aloft, and you listen for the call of friends, and you scan the ground for morsels, and you flap your wings for all sorts of reasons, like to dry yourself and to lift off the ground and also to express a strong sentiment, and to try and dislodge some nits, and—”

  This wasn’t going to work. What kind of moron was she, anyway?

  But Patricia pushed the negative thoughts down and just lost herself in listening to the jay free-associate about a bird’s life. She pictured it in her mind’s eye and let it inside her, so it became like her own experience. Soon she was talking along with the bird, the two of them in near unison, speaking a bird body into existence. She could imagine her feet shrinking and becoming three-toed and her hips vanishing, her budding breasts melting, her arms folding in, her skin growing a layer of feathers.

  “I found her!” someone shouted.

  “About fucking time,” someone else replied.

  “Where? Where?”

  “Up there. In that tree. Oh wait. That’s just her clothing.”

  “That’s a Canterbury uniform, all right. She ditched her clothes. What the hell?”

  “She is a nutcase, remember. So yeah, keep your eyes open for a naked tween running around the trees.…”

  That was the last Patricia heard. She soared over her pursuers. Higher and higher, with her new friend by her side. She felt colder than ever, but the exertion of flapping her wings warmed her a little and her friend told her where they could find a bird feeder. With suet in it! Suet was just the thing on a night like this.

  The moonlight grayed everything out, but there were a million lights underneath Patricia and a million more over her head. She swooped, following her friend, and soon they were picking side by side at the same feeder. Suet was amazing! It was like brownies and hot fudge and pizza, all rolled together. Why hadn’t Patricia ever realized how wonderful suet was?

  “You look much better like this,” the other bird said when they’d both eaten their fill and were warmed up. “I’m Skrrrrtk, by the way.”

  “I’m…,” and Patricia realized she couldn’t say her name with a bird’s tongue, not properly. “I’m Prrrkrrta.”

  “That’s a funny name,” said Skrrrrtk. “Can I call you Prrkt?”

  “Sure,” said Prrkt. She wanted to fly some more—she wanted to fly all night—but she also wanted to find a nice tree and nest until the sun came up. She was already forgetting about all that nonsense that Patricia had been upset by—Prrkt wouldn’t have to worry about any of that. She had her whole life ahead of her, including unlimited suet. This was excellent.

  Prrkt flew one last time, just for the thrill. She beat her wings until she had the whole town to look down at, all at once
. All of those lights, all of those houses and cars and schools, all of that drama over nothing.

  She was about to swoop back down to where Skrrrrtk was waiting, but she saw a strange light shining upwards from a mile or two away. It pierced the sky and refracted yellow and purple. She had to take a closer look, it was too fascinating to ignore. She arced down.

  The light came from a meadow, from a device in the hand of a tall human. Some avian instinct told Prrkt to flee, to get out of there, because this was trouble. But another part made her get closer. She flew toward the light.

  “Uh, hello there,” said the man holding the light. “Patricia, right? I was starting to wonder if you were going to make it. Well, you’d better resume your true form. I brought some clothes.”

  And just like that, Patricia was a naked person on the frosty ground—like she’d been tossed into an icy bath. The man flung a bundle of clothes at her and turned while she got dressed. The clothing all fit perfectly: a pair of cheap imitation Reeboks, fuzzy white sweatpants, a T-shirt for a classic rock station, and a Red Sox jacket.

  “Excellent,” the man said. “My car is nearby. Let’s get you warmed up.”

  The stranger wore a checkered hunter cap and almost-Lennon sunglasses, and he had unruly gray hair and sideburns, and his skin was a deep brown. He had a big longshoreman coat that he wore like a cloak. The light that had so entranced the bird version of Patricia turned out to be a Black & Decker flashlight, but maybe the man had done something magical to it.

  “Come along now,” he said, with a slight midsouthern accent, like Carolina or Tennessee.

  “Wait a minute,” Patricia said. It felt weird to be speaking English again, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. “Who are you? And where are you taking me?”

  The man sighed, like a thousand valves opening to release a million years of pent-up exasperation. “Could we do this in the car, perhaps? I can take you to a drive-thru for some grub. My treat.”

  “No thanks,” said Patricia. “I ate a lot of suet. I’m good.” She had a moment of remembering how she’d snarfed the pearly fat, and felt revolted.