Nest of Soil

A circle of buzzards flew around the head of a woman invested deep in tomes stacked on her desk and around the corners of the room. She kept the lamp on but the electric radiance left the far walls darkened. Bars of street light from the blinds stamped pale patterns on the broen leak stains mapped across the ceiling. Her somach ached, and the walls around her drifted backwards, then came blasting forward back to where they started as she shook herself awake. She smoothed her remaining eyebrow fuzz, and took a pen from the jackdaw nest on far edge.

         Summers slipped whiskey in her coffee. She finished reading the essay, then poured more whiskey into the steaming mug. Maxim Lordstone wrote his name right, the rest looked to her like someone else's work glued together. Whoever caused the infringement even changed fonts, misspelled words new ways- It started reading about Napoleon looking for Egyption hieroglyphs and concluded that Ned Ludd started the Industrial Revolution. Her class was about Birds in Literature. It went on for fifty pages. She sipped her coffee. Her clock struck 7pm. The sun set without her.

        She flipped through the stack of essays and paused when she unburied her manuscript. Summers drank Irish Coffee until the sad feelings metamorphosed into good feelings. The aches on her hips from sitting too long faded and the hunched notches of her spine numbed, but her stomach twisted. She drank more, covered her mouth as gases escaped, then her guts warmed and calmed. She looked at her watched, and gave herself fifteen minutes before the aches re occured. She reached for her manuscript-

       The door jostled. She pulled herself together. A cave deep voice murmured, “Where am I?” before the door jostled again. “Never thought I’d have to do this again,” an older voice uttered. She recognized the voices from the radio. The hinges chimed, the doorstop snapped in half. There stood two mortal shadows. Lordstone dazed beyond the  corners of the room with one eye. His coach lingered into the room from behind him. The coach’s face burned like rouge. He crossed into the lamp light but took a breath, brushed his thighs and folded his hands.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Shouldn’t you be warding further head trauma?"
“Will you be at new stadium next November? Not even the plumbing in this hovel is up to code. Change his status.”

Lordstone rubbed his hands together like a child lost at the mall. His other eye floated like a dead fish.

“If anything happens to him, you will get fired too. Then what?”

“He’ll graduate once we win. Don’t make everyone go down because this guy fails, professor. We both knew this was it way it would go.”

          Summers started taking her things and putting them in a case, and smashed the lamp with her elbow. The lamp flashed both of them. Lordstone’s looked into it like an eclipse, both eyes focused on the lamp flash. Summers swept the light back to the desk and the bird feathers displayed on the wall.

“Cool birds,” Lordstone said. Summers saw a fresh bandage around his red, and raw apple throbbing from beneath.

       She took her valuables, and when she reached for her manuscript the coach held it into the light. He turned the pages, skimmed the middle, skipped to the end and broke in laughter. “These sources are from before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act- there’s no way it’s going anywhere.”

She groaned set her case down, and changed the grade.

“Let me make sure.”

Summers spun showed him a screen displaying the status.

“Where am I?” Lordstone asked again.

“Let’s get to the field. We have the championship to prepare for.”

“T-The championship? I’m going to be in the championship? It can’t be...”

          Their elation bounced down hallway. Summer vomited her coffee back up over her manuscript.  “North American Corvidae in Postmodern readings of late 20th century Romance.” She drew a jackdaw on the title page, sparing no ink, gutting the pages beneath. Ink seeped from the crevices if her fist. The drips of paper ran down the cover, bled through the paper and filled in the splintered surface of her desk. She hated birds. She decapitated the fowl she sketchec until the paper came in half.

            The first thing she saw when she woke up was the pet cemetary out the window. She recalled waking up at 5am every morning as a child to study, walking to school in the rain, turning in everything early no matter how much sleep she lost. Passing every test, perfecting every essay, earning every scholarship. Her feet still wore calluses from the crumbling shoes. Her body still rose at 5am, no matter when she fell asleep or intended to wake up. Summer Rubbed her forehead until memories emerged of coming home after school to see her mother on the floor lapping spilled wine until she passed out on the floor. Those days she liked the most- no fighting, no screaming, so she relaxed in her sanctuary, stuffed her head full of texts from the library, and watched her window for the black bird. It visited on every good day.

           When she went to school boys and girls bullied her for the habits she practiced, she lost hair, lost weight that never reaccumulated, and as years grew by she spent her vitality on the institution until one day she she noticed the color draining from her hair and the wild, sweet, magical, loving emotions that once touched her so vividly became mere mythos of human experience. Not even the old music she once loved inspired her blood to work as she once did. The corvidae that she watched from her bedroom window pecking at the pet graveyard in the back lawn. No matter what memories dissolved in the swamps of lost recollection- every morning the raven pecking at the dirt of her dead pets awoke with her.

             Summers drank more whiskey until the bottle crashed on the floor. The jackdaw on the page stretched its wings before her eyes and ripped free from the page. With its wings dripping ink it peel its head from the page and belted it back on with more ink. Summers collapsed back on her seat,  headlights along the walls, drew circles with the spinning shadow of dark birds around her desk. She heard the flocking of wings as the lights eclipsed. Around the shadows in the room appeared hundreds of beady eyes that started out black but glowed red like hot nail heads. In her light she saw each bird suffered from broken beaks, some with broken talons, even broken necks.

The jackdaw swelled past the page, shoving notebooks and codex’s to the floor with its wings, talons bolted to the edge. Its wiped milky fluid deluging from its eyes with the twitch of its nape. “Grawk… grawk...” it growled with each breath.

             Summers kicked her seat back, and hit the cold glass. The blinds snapped from the ceiling and tangled onto her. Someone bricked off the window.

              Her eyes dilated as the room darkened around her. The hush of falling snow and burning consumed the depths of the room. The digital appliances sparked and projectiled chips and wires to the stacks of unread books that ignited like oil soaked rags. Flames climbed the material. The bird remained perched as the odor of burning meat flooded the space. The reeking smoke thickened until Summers saw only saw the Jackdaw’s heaving outline/ They chirped with malnourished craving as the flames reached under her desk. The melting rubber on the soles burned away the calluses. The manuscript lit up like dry grass.

The jackdaw plucked a feather from its wing and stuck it in her curls. Some cold ink ran down her face, and down her neck. She felt no pain, nor cold- nothing at all. Her fingers  felt around her head, tracing roots sprouting across her scalp into her eye sockets. When she reached to pluck the intrusion, her hands and arms chilled, her shoulders relaxed. She twisted around looking for her her arms. When she looked down she saw them smoking on the floor. Instead she rose long vectors with comb thin bones hanging down connected by a layer of cartilage riveted lifted from her shoulders. Her jaw and nose grew cold next ,then a beak the size of a pickaxe head protruded at the bottom of her vision.

        The jacksaw rubbed the liquid from its eyes. Smoke filled the room, and the by the time the fires died  the next morning all emergency services found  uncovered was a smoldering heap.

         The night before the championship Lordstone didn’t sleep. Not only because the prostitutes sent to him in a brand new car kept him awake with cocaine and sexual advances, nor the ringing that drove spikes into his brain under every bright light, but because his dreams came close to being fulfilled. He fantasized about this day since boyhood crushing skulls in the playground much to his parents adornment.

          The bus ride to Orlando came like a dream. He sealed in all his excitement and hid behind oversized headphones and listened. But he played no music. No one bothered him or disturbed the rhythm of birds chanting to him over rainfall. The way he liked it.

They crossed the Missouri river and went through the hills of Arkansas then across the swamps of Louisiana to the marshes of the deep south, then at last they crossed into the jungle of Florida. A road block took them across a bridge. The bird calls grinded with the sand like scratches. He removed the gear from his head, but he still heard the scratching, and pecking. Strobes of paine shot down his ears to the back of his head wings battered, and beat. He rapsed his ears until his ear drums went numb- but the stinging didn’t migrate, nor did the rustling splatter of untame fowl sirening within his skull. Stinging escalated to aches. He grinded his teeth. One front tooth chipped. Drool dripped down his lips. He held his ears certain he’d see blood and pus ran between his fingers if he took his hands away.

          Stonelord called for the trainer. Heads turned around. The trainer stood up and took the isle. He checked shined a light down his ears and nose and grew pale at what he saw- but under the coach’s supervision, he deemed Stonelord healthy. despite the cries to stop the bus. Agony pressed against both his temples and the back of his eyes. The coach asked for someone to administer a shot. The staff looked through a case of syringes and vials. Stonelord ran his head against the window until hands took hold of him and for a moment he calmed until a brush of wet feather ejected from his nostrils. His companions drew their hands away, their eyes isolated on the convulsing stock, his arms trembling like the tendons being peeled from his forearms. A bloodless crevice pulled apart his flesh and spread from each ear over his scalp, like an opening eye.

         Stonelord kept screaming until talon nails pierced his throat and dug towards the terrified passengers. A beak shaped like a fountain pen popped out from behind his eye. Wings rose from the splitting halves and showered the window fog with steaming carnage.  It took flight across the bus, slammed into the windshield and kicked away into the driver's lap, flapping and squawking as the hornet beak struck his hand between two fingers.

The bus crossed onto a narrow bridge, and swerved through the barrier. It spun twice before landing upside down into the river filled with dumped sewage. The bus bobbed up and down before filling with stinking dark water and plummeting to the river floor. Bubbles followed the sinking machine  and burst at the surface.

The ripples shockwaved to the shore, strobing slower and slower, until peace fell across the current. Then up the surface broke again as the coach reached out with lost luggage, and paddled to the rocky shore where he gasped for breath like he hadn’t breathed in forty years. He groaned and wept as he saw floating jerseys dance in the water. Then he heard something that made his blood vessels curl. “Grawk… grawk….” he turned around to see a large bird perched on bending branch. It fluttered its wings and landed before him. It reeked like skunk and milk. It wiped liquid from its bead smooth eyes, growling with each approaching step of its killer talons, drinking the drenched expression of absent penance like summer wine. He tried to back away but the rocks compressed around his rings of fat. The bird dove its beak into his face and tore out both eyes. The coach screamed and bled on the rocks as he listened to its juicy gnashing. The shore of putrid water rose around him. He felt sharp hooks take his shoulders, and the weight of his body lift from the wet rocks.