Afterward

I went outside, where I'd wanted to be all day. I could work there, I thought. I could split apart and reassemble a client story while breathing the real world of the air.

I had my head down. I heard a strangeness, a wild, unvoiced rustling in the trees. No calling, no mating, just the sound of wings in trees. I looked up, and all around me the branches had darkened with yellow-eyed, black-gilded birds. Unhappy-seeming birds. Aggressively unhappy. Birds on a hunt. Birds from a Hitchcock set.

There must have been hundreds. I'd say thousands, but you wouldn't believe me, so take the hundreds. There were at least that many.

I ran for my camera. I returned to the strange bird world, and the birds clapped off, rose up through the trees, chose new trees, scattered over neighbors' yards, and the sound was eerie, haunted, though the sun was shining, and I felt alone, though my husband was near, out in his studio, a window away. I wasn't in danger, but I didn't feel safe. Still the birds rose, fell, cluttered, scattered, refused my camera's eyes. I couldn't hold them. Not the look of them, not the sound of them.

But there was a mourning dove. A single one, perched on a wire. And even after all the black birds were gone, she stayed.

You and me both, I thought. You and me, on the edge.

Carol, the dear Bookluver, has posed this review of Undercover. She's an entirely sweet young lady, and I thank her.

http://bookluver-carol.blogspot.com/2008/08/undercover.html