Birds!
Kia ora, friends!
First off, I want to apologise for not having anything for you last week - I had just had a hell of a few days and wasn’t in the right mind to write anything. Mental health is a bitch, right? Here’s hoping I won’t have too many more interruptions like that any time soon. But enough about that! Let’s get into this week’s stuff.
Now, if you know anything about me at this point, it probably won’t surprise you to know that a bunch of my writing prompts literally come from dreams I’ve had. I figure, if it worked for Stephenie Meyer, why not me, right? Not all of my dream ideas have been good ones, and often I don’t even remember them fully, but there’s a core idea that sticks in my brain. You might remember this post from a couple of weeks ago where I woke up to a text I’d sent myself that just said “New Bees”, and while I had no idea what I had meant by that, those two words still worked for me as a great prompt - and I was pretty happy with what I ended up with.
That brings me to today’s item: Bird After Bird. I’m hesitant to call this, in it’s current form at least, a story - it’s more a description of an occurrance, if that makes sense. This is probably not something I am going to revisit any time soon because the concept is so surreal and otherworldly to me right now, but it might come up again later if I add to it, or if I have the dream again and remember more of it. Now, I’ll get to what I’ve written in a sec, but I want to put a quick content warning here; this one contains some birds being killed, so if you’re not down with that, maybe skip this one. There’s nothing graphic or gory, but it is explicitly mentioned and described. Okay, now if you’re cool with that, let’s get into the… thing I wrote.
She was picking up bird after bird from the benchtop beside her, giving them a quick knock on the backs of their necks with the handle of a knife to instantly kill them, and then placing them in a bowl at her other side. The birds sat patiently there, awaiting their turn, chirping amongst themselves, as one after another met their end. I was confused, and concerned.
What was happening here? What is its purpose?
And she stood there, the scene practically silent, except for the soft chirping of the birds and the dull blow of the knife handle. I watched her, motionless. She knew I was there but did not acknowledge me. “I don’t know why, but there must be a reason,” I heard myself say, and it seemed to comfort her. She didn’t reply, she just kept picking up the birds, swiftly killing them, and placing them into the bowl.
We stood there for hours. The birds kept coming, she kept working, and the bowl… never seemed to get full. Time seemed to be standing still; the sun had not moved in the sky, and the wisps of cloud in front of it remained. The air was cool and crisp and still.
I felt that I loved her, and she loved me, but the birds kept lining up next to her, one after the other, offering themselves to her knife, to her bowl. What did it mean? I asked her, but again she didn’t respond. Whatever the purpose of this action was, it seemed to be beyond us both, maybe even the birds themselves.
“I don’t know why, but there must be a reason.”
And that’s it. I felt really weird writing this, like it’s a memory that doesn’t make sense? I hope you all liked this, or at least found it interesting. I might look at doing more writing like this at some point, so let me know if that’s something you’d like to see. As always you can hit me up at the links at the bottom of the page, and if you want to see some more of my writing you can check out my Letterboxd - I recently reviewed M3GAN and it seems like I liked it more than a lot of people! 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️
Thanks so much for reading, everyone. I’ll talk to you all again soon.
Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚