Barn owl is a misnomer

Barn owl is a misnomer. Barn owls like me, we don’t flock to barns that still breathe life into newborn animals, barns that do not waver and heave in the north wind, with their fresh red paint and white trim.

In fact, we don’t flock at all. We are creatures of solitude and desolation. I prefer abandoned barns and church steeples of old; buildings whose stones were laid by masons from the old country, freshly arrived in a new land. Their great great grandchildren named, Mason and Garrett, the connection forgotten. Only the granite stones remember their faces.

Our kind doesn’t screech, like the winter storm as it rattles the pine timbers of the ramshackle barn where I roost. We are somber and ever-watching, or rather ever-listening for the movement of prey. The slight ticking and pattering of a mouse as it brushes through the alfalfa, lodged in the field below. The mouse feels a false sense of security, beneath the woven flowers, and columns of green. Rather, we barn owls are silent-hunters, loners, and travellers.

But with all gifts, there comes a price for near perfect hearing. I wouldn’t say it’s a near-perfect knowledge. But I’d say it’s a stream of consciousness and observation, that never truly falls dormant, even when the cheers of the meadowlark and the buzz of some far away tractor lolls me into a restless and fleeting slumber. It was during one such sleep that I first saw the girl. Her dark brows and flax coloured eyes staring back at my own, but with a flap of my wings she had disappeared and the smell of heavy dew had sunk from the aether into the prairie fields, escaping the evening night, billowing out as far as one’s wings could take you, the night spreading out before me like sheets hung to dry, in the day’s earlier heat.

Some cultures believe that owls are witches. I won’t tell you which ones for fear that I may prove that I am one such creature. Perhaps our knowledge is why we’re such outcasts and pariahs in the first place, the silent owl is no match for the songbird. I heard a rustle and looked behind me, the tail of a mouse hanging from my crooked beak.

I had set out early for the night when I first saw her in the human flesh. She was on a bicycle; it appeared to be a laborious effort to push herself up the hill in the dim evening. Her tires were half flat, and the road was sand. The sand seemed to want to swallow the rubber tires whole, like the snaking mouth of a serpent, dropped to the prairies from the talons of some celestial great-owl soaring across the sky.

The girl was about eight. Her face was not yet etched with the lines or depth that make women beautiful. She had a faded pink backpack strapped to her back with some toy woodland creature sticking out from the backpack. I dipped closer to the girl to see what kind of fake-prey the girl claimed possession of. But the quick little human girl saw me, and cried out in glee, “An owl!!!!”. If being spotted by such an unexperienced hunter was not enough, the small human proceeded to hoot at me, which caused me to fly due North, away from such chaos. But as my wings pushed my body away from the setting sun, I couldn’t help but think to myself – the small fool doesn’t even know that bar owls don’t screech.

During one of my evening promenades across the sky, I found the little fool’s home, which I would return to many times again after my discovery. Although nearly dark, she was out in trees surrounding the small crumbling farmyard, alone, building a human nest. Why would such a small human build a nest when she had one with bright lights, I did not know, maybe she too preferred the solitude of the darkness I reasoned.

I became concerned when she again pulled her vermin toy from her backpack, pressing it tightly against her breast. While still holding her ridiculous rabbit, she reached deeper into the bag and pulled out a small quilt which she wrapped around herself. I had always liked human quilts because they reminded me of the view of the prairies from high above. The joy came from knowing humans did not have such a view, so they were reduced to sewing pieces of misplaced fabric together, in hopes of creating beauty. I laughed to myself on the realization that this was probably the same process God had followed, when she had made the prairies, and cast all the lonely creatures out to fill her lands. After watching the little girl child huddled in her small human nest, sourced with branches and not enough fluff, my thoughts were interrupted by the booming slur of a man’s voice, “Laaaaayla, get inside you little shit”. The man seemed mean, and unconcerned that the human child had chosen to make her own nest, rather than stay in the nest he had seemingly made for her.

As the years passed, I learned that the child’s name was not Laaaaaayla, but rather Layla. This brought me happiness as the anagram of Layla, Allya, means sky and the heavens in Arabic, and in Hebrew it refers to ascension. The child and I were connected through my domain of the sky, and her earthly confines.

The child grew strong, and in the summers, as I watched over her, I saw that her spirit was true. She often did not know I was there, but I always was. As the same age that brought weight to my wings, breathed life and strength into her bones, I came to know her well. Hunting did not bring me the same joy, as seeing the child find freedom. She hated the nest, that much I knew. But she drove the tractors, and planted the garden, and during the nights when her father was gone drinking, I saw her dance in the kitchen.

Layla no longer rode her flimsy bicycle on the sinking road. She ran full speed in the evenings, her strong body carrying her long distances for a human. A short distance for an owl, but a long distance for a human. Perhaps the ability to soar across the heavens, is the toll the ancient owls paid to the goddess, to live one tenth of the life the humans were gifted. The beads of sweat glistened around Layla’s neck like delicate pearls as she ran onwards across the soft road in the pale summer light. I knew she was destined to be greater than the small farmyard, with the man who didn’t do much else except drink. She didn’t yet know what else was out there, she’d never been much further than the sunken riverbed valley in which she lived. I didn’t even know if she had the knowledge that so much existed beyond her small valley.

Then one day, a boy in a rusty red Chevrolet pulled into Layla’s yard. The man had left drinking the night before, and it was unlikely that he’d return from the City for a few more days.

She was standing on the crumbling concrete step, wearing her pink backpack, with a bag full of clothes in her other hand. She was all the beauty this god-forsaken land possessed, all in one. She was every heavenly snowfall I’d ever flown through, she was the exhilaration of every plunging dive from the sky I’d ever made. I saw the scar on her left shoulder, and I knew how she had got it. I had been flying high-above in the azure summer skies when she had become entangled in the barbed wire. She knew nobody would find her, and she had carefully saved herself. I saw the freckles of her summer skin, sprawled like constellations across her face, and I saw the fire that burned around her while she slammed the passenger side of the Chevy shut. Layla never looked back so I never had the chance to see the sparkle in her eye one last time.

My wings are heavy now, and my hearing isn’t sharp. Sometimes I hear things that aren’t even there, sometimes I hear Layla’s laughter on the wind, blowing from the South. I know someday soon I will return to the dust that blows across the prairies on drought years. And when I find eternal slumber alone in some ancient barn, nobody will find me, I am just a barn owl after all, solitude is my home. Loneliness is my keeper.