Half as Crooked as a Flounder

As you probe for the lock’s combination, remember to be like a barn owl, not a dolphin or a bat. You will live in a world of sound, you will know and map all things through sound, but must never dream of being so crass as to produce any of your own. This isn’t echolocation: it isn’t shrieking in the dark and forcing every fiber in your vicinity to echo back your cry, betraying its position. No: there will be better uses for shrieking, later. What you are doing is pure listening, passive, waiting for each separate thing to reveal itself to you through the quiet sounds of its own existence. Like a barn owl sensing the heartbeat of a distant vole, you must let each diminutive click of your work slide across your cheekbone to your ear, engraving its secrets in a line below your eye. Then, when the right secret has been whispered to you, you must pounce. Click on one. Six is binding. Click. Click. Open.

And you are through the door. Assess, like a maiden owl sizing up a nesting cavity selected by a potential mate. Inside this chamber, you must find the space for your dreams to grow, mature, and fledge. You must find the soft, forgiving substrate that will sop up the foulness that you and yours will soon drop upon it. Above all, you must find cover–be a barn owl, seeking blessed dry shelter from the horrific, debilitating rain.

You have felt that rain before, haven’t you? Those twining rivulets of frigid winter, creeping across the defenseless skin of your soul, moment by moment robbing you of the heat that is your life. The plumage that you fledged into grants the gift of utterly soundless, ethereal moonlit gliding, but you purchased your own silence at a ruinous price. Why, why must you be like a barn owl? Other birds bedight their wings in oil, blessed oil that sloughs the killing rain. You too, you could have bathed yourself in that wondrous elixir and made yourself impervious to the world’s insults. Like Achilles, you could have been dipped in a balm that let you carelessly shed each danger that flew against you. You could have anointed yourself in the myrrh that flows from the uropygial gland nestled against your soul’s cloaca. But you didn’t do that, did you now? You longed so much to hover in silent flight in the moonlight, and oiled feathers cannot be silent. And therefore, you have felt the rain. Those down feathers that keep you warm when dry, that puff you up and make you seem so big, have been transformed to wretched wet clumps that cling to a body suddenly revealed to be so very small, so delicate. So fragile. That has happened before. You remember it. I saw it, and I couldn’t bear to see it again.

So you damn well better make sure that you stay dry this time, alright? This isn’t a fucking joke. You’re here with a goal, and you had better fucking accomplish it. You’re in the building, right? You see those stairs in the back? Start climbing. The world is full of juicy voles, my friend, and it’s high time you grabbed a few and feasted. Snap their stupid necks, and gobble them right down, headfirst, unchewed. There’s nothing complicated here. If, God forbid, something doesn’t suit your delicate little stomach, well, you’re well equipped to encapsulate those bones in fur, and vomit them right up again.

KEEP CLIMBING THOSE STAIRS, DAMN IT! Yeah, I know you’re not some sky-addled eagle. I know you have no taste for soaring. I know you long to ooze luxuriantly just above the landscape’s nape, flying slower than any other bird can fly. Well, tough shit. Today, we’re going high. Forget those tunneling voles you love so much: right now we’re hunting bats and tree-bound squirrels. You have to admit, they make for a nice change of pace. A change of pace is good, sometimes. Especially when you’ve spent weeks brooding, brooding, and hatched out nothing but a hissing, twitching mass of pink self-pity.

—Right. No, take your time. You’re right. You’re right: that was completely, completely uncalled for. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. ….I got impatient, and I pushed. I’m not like you, you know. I trust you, but I’m not like you. I’m no barn owl, no ambush hunter perched firm on some oak-branch grown from faith and patience, abiding and serenely abiding until the world provides my quarry, and I strike. It’s beautiful to watch you doing what you do, to see the simple, masterful efficiency that guides your flight, the way you waste not one jot of motion. It’s just that it’s hard for me to do the same. I fidget, you know, and I’m constantly afraid that that fidgeting will scare you off. I try so hard to match your still serenity, but my twitchiness betrays me, and sometimes I irrationally blame you for that betrayal. That’s why the world can be so cruel to owls. It’s why Italian peasants seize you, kill you, and nail you to door frames to scare off lightning. We see you sitting there with your big, wise eyes, and you look so similar to us that we fool ourselves into believing that we can be like you, but we can’t. We can’t. We can’t, and it gets frustrating sometimes, you know? So anyway, take your time. We’ll continue when you’re ready.

So. So, we’re doing this? Are you sure? Alright. We’re at the top of the stairs. I’ll rely on you to suss out the situation. Weave and bob that great head of yours, and listen for the world to tell you its secrets. You’re half as crooked as a flounder, and as your findings creep into your asymmetric ears, their source and origin will be perfectly revealed through your face's inherent skewness. I’ll just be sitting here, helplessly waiting for your report, like all the animals in that old Muskogee myth, the animals who waited for the owl to bring back fire after lightning struck that ancient oak on that distant, mythic island.

OK, so that’s the situation. Now we know. You just need to go down that hallway and jigger open that moonlight-drenched door, and then we can both enter and do what we need to do. Those bastards should have known better than to have messed with a barn owl. Crows might mob you, but you shrug them off. Hawks and eagles attack you, but they forget that they’re the newcomers at this raptor game. You’ve been at it much, much longer than them, and half the time it’s you who winds up swallowing their presumptuous flesh in gobs. Have they forgotten that you’re kissing cousins with Ornimegalonix, the prehistoric 4-foot flightless owl that strode its way across Cuba, eating everything in its path? Don't they know that Mongols keep you by sick children's bedsides, knowing you're so frightful that death itself would hesitate to visit? There’s a reason you barn owls have spread across all continents, that hardly any nation can sleep through the night ignorant of your shrieking call. Those assholes relied on daylight to blind you, but they forgot that you can see right through the blackness of their hearts.

They are God-damn nest-raiding eagles, or fucking furtive brutish Tawny owls. As featherless hatchlings, they pecked at the crop of siblicide: they only survived to adulthood by killing their own kin. There’s nothing sacred in their nests, so they believed they did you no affront when they defiled yours. They did not know or care that barn owls are different. They did not know that barn owls love each other. They have thrown their own sisters from the nest in order that their own insatiable hunger could be better sated by their busy parents. They have never seen a barn owl nestling gently dismember a vole carcass and–miracle of miracles–joyfully present the precious morsels to their younger nestmates. And so, they did not know what their nest-raid would do to you, or what it would drive you to do to them.

After you open the door, we’ll do what we’ll do, and then we’ll be off, hunting fat voles through glorious tangled brambles forever.

Before you open the door, though, you might want to look out of the window facing it across the hall. Look across the dark vole-strewn lawn, and into the shadowed branches of that lichen-clad tree. Do you see the barn owl in the branches, its facial disc reflecting back the moon’s borrowed light? Do you remember how, when I was reminding you not to echolocate, I said there would be a better use for shrieking, later? Now’s the time to shriek.