Exceptional

There must have been more birds in the backyard than all the trees surrounding their village combined, Mouse would have bet her fingers and toes on it. More than usual. A wall of noise slammed into her as soon as she slid open the rickety window at the back of her uncle’s house to let some air in. The squawks and cries and trills and calls of so many different species crashed together in a cacophony of sound. The rest of the village that would have been behind the birds was obscured by the thick fog left behind from monsoon season. It clung to the air, pushing the scent of wet green grass up her nose.

It wasn’t until the hair on her arms shot up with a shiver that she realised she was almost soaked to the bone. The raindrops were so light that she could barely see them as they fell to the ground nor feel them prick her skin. With no wind, they came straight down like pins. She left the window open and pulled her upper body back into the house. A couple of red-winged blackbirds slashed through the newly made opening. She ducked out of their path as they chased each other into the hallway.

“How do you live like this, Aku?” she remembered asking her uncle as a teenager.

“You get used to it,” he had said.

She didn’t know how. If she had had his ears instead of her quiet feet, the birds in this house would have driven her to madness a long time ago. Aku had exceptional hearing. He could pinpoint the exact location a bird’s call of distress was coming from all while lounging in his armchair within the comfort of his own home. However, he could hear everything else as well, things that had made him stop going outside decades ago.

Already, the dust that had assaulted her upon entering the house seemed not as severe now that cool air kissed her back. Rubbing her nose, Mouse returned to the box of photos at the centre of the wooden floorboards that she had been rifling through. Each step echoed a creak through the room, probably from disuse. It had never used to do that.

Though her uncle’s house was on the opposite side of the village, it was a straight line to her own where she lived with her mother. She used to walk that road almost every night after dinner, her uncle ready to meet her with a bowl of silken tofu in sweet syrup, her favourite, payment for the task he would be giving her after she finished eating. Before closing the door, he would lift his hand in a blind wave. While he couldn’t see her mother from so far away, they both knew she could see them. She had exceptional vision.

Most of the photos from the box had been taken in this very house. It was a wonder she had never seen them before. They had all happened before her very eyes. In her hand, her uncle was in the kitchen, a line of kinglets watching him shake out some dried grasshoppers onto the bench. Each bird was missing something or other: a leg, an eye, half a beak. Mouse imagined the scene that followed, a scene she had witnessed a hundred times. When Aku folded the packet back up, the kinglets would hop closer and begin to have their lunch as best they could with their afflictions.

Everyone called him the village nurse. It wasn’t because he had a degree—not many people around here did—nor did it make much sense. His patients were only of the avian kind. Birds had a habit of showing up, quite literally, on his doorstep as if they had whispered to each other about the man who seemed to collect lost and injured things and had tried to build a house for them in the tree in his backyard. He had never been able to finish it. If they were unable to come to him, he would send Mouse to rescue them once she’d had her dessert. They would always be exactly where he’d said they would be. Mouse was sure he had patched up so many birds over the course of his life that he had more knowledge and experience than even the best veterinarian in the next city over.

Aku had never gone into detail about why he did what he did. Only that a bird had saved his life once and he had been trying to repay the debt ever since.

The next time Mouse lifted her head, the fog had thinned and inky night blanketed the outside. Though she wasn’t hungry, it was dinner time. She hadn’t thought of buying groceries so the only thing stocked in the kitchen that wasn’t a variation of bird food was apples, as well as two white-throated sparrows loitering on the bench that she hadn’t heard arriving. She brought out a knife and chopping board, nudging the wood across the bench into the sparrows’ territory. They tweeted in mild inconvenience but moved a few steps away to make room for her. When the apple was sliced in half, two seeds stared at her from the core under the point where the curves of the fruit met. When she looked up, the same face was watching her from the window sill.

“Eyes in the sky,” she cursed, hand on her wild heartbeat.

The barn owl tilted its head.

Fingers crawled down her spine. Sometimes, she tried looking at birds in the eye to see what her uncle saw in them, what connected him to them so inextricably that he had dedicated his life in service to them, but she never found anything more than empty marbles staring back at her—except when she looked at the barn owl. It seemed alive in a way that was different to the others. It was also always on its own. Family and friends of the injured her uncle was taking care of used to circle the house overhead or linger in nearby greenery, but Mouse had never seen another owl anywhere in the entire village.

Her uncle had kept his doors and windows open for every bird, but this one in particular had been a fixture of the house from when she was a child. Mouse had felt the same about it then as she did now. It unnerved her. If her uncle hadn’t been the only person on earth who was able to hear her footsteps, exceptionally silent as they were, she wouldn’t have made as much of an effort braving the owl to visit him. Unfortunately, she and her uncle shared a connection she wasn’t willing to break over a bird.

The barn owl didn’t come any closer but Mouse’s eyes refused to fall down to the apple she still had to cut into slices. She still wasn’t hungry. The owl parted its beak. A thin, keen screech pierced straight through the window and into her chest. The sound was much too human.

Jerked into action, she grabbed the newspaper lying in front of the main door. Her feet were reluctant to take her back to the window, closer to the owl, but she pushed against them to come face to face with it. It blinked at her.

“Back!” She gave a violent shoo with her hand.

The bird remained unfazed.

She inched her fingers toward it, keeping eye contact, then snatched at the window pane and threw it shut. The owl let out another shriek. The sound hit the glass and Mouse jumped back. She picked up the newspaper that had dropped to her feet, peeling a spread from the rest of the pages and slapping it flat onto the window. Each corner was laid down with some tape until the barn owl was hidden from view.

A breath trembled out of her.

She studied the newspaper in her hands, her eyes finding the date in the top right corner printed with smudged, black ink. It was from a day a few months ago. The last day she had seen her uncle. They should have known that things hadn’t been right when her mother caught him leaving his house for the first time in years. They had thought it was a good sign. Instead, he had walked to the river bordering their village and drowned himself.

Being able to hear every single whisper, every single word, every single thing that happened in the village and probably beyond, maybe he had finally been driven to madness, just like Mouse had feared.

The phone rang, scaring her nearly as much as the owl. She didn’t want to answer it—even though this was her house now, it was still her uncle’s phone number—but it kept ringing, longer than any ordinary person would be willing to wait on the line, which told her who it must have been.

“Yeah?” she answered.

“You okay?” her mother asked.

Mouse looked up to see if she was in front of another window. For anyone else, Mouse would have appeared to be a speck, but as long as nothing obstructed her view, her mother could see every detail on and on into the horizon. It was why she allowed Mouse to walk the street to her uncle’s by herself at night; she would lean against the door and monitor Mouse until she was safe inside.

Mouse had never considered her quiet feet to be anything exceptional, not in the way her mother’s eyes and her uncle’s ears could be used for the good of others. She had been scolded many times by many people not to sneak up on them lest she give everyone a heart attack. It was just her luck that she would one day, which was why seeing her uncle opening his door for her before she had even neared his house had always made her smile. She would shed the weight on her shoulders, piece by piece, as she walked down that road towards him every night.

She didn’t know what she was going to do now.

Mouse turned away from the front window to wipe at her wet cheeks. “I’m fine. It’s just that stupid owl.”

Her mother’s snort was fuzzy through the phone. “Your uncle loved that damn owl.”

“No idea why,” Mouse muttered. She glanced over her shoulder. With the moonlight behind it, the owl cast a stark figure on the other side of the newspaper. She couldn’t see its eyes but she could feel its stare raising goosebumps across her arms.

For a moment, her mother didn’t say anything.

“It reminded him of you, of course.”

“Me?” Mouse was almost offended. She sent the front window a look in case her mother was still watching.

“When you were a baby, you screamed like a banshee whenever you wanted something but, otherwise, you were as quiet as a mouse. Where do you think you got your nickname?”

Her vision grew glassy with tears again. “What does that have to do with anything?” she mumbled, digging the heel of her palm into her eyes. She never cried, especially not in front of anyone, even if it was her own mother.

“You were his refuge,” her mother murmured, “from all the noise.”

A sob burst out of her. “Then why did he leave?”

“There are some things in this world we can never truly know, Mouse.”

The newspaper was still in her lap, recounting the summer festival on the front page. Mouse had assumed it would be one of those nights for Aku, where he would draw a hot bath and lock himself inside so the steam was almost suffocating and all he could focus on was the water around him amplifying his own heartbeat. However, he had surprised her.

“There’s nothing like hearing everyone in the village gather together to enjoy themselves for a night,” he’d said, then returned to napping on his armchair while Mouse sat on the living room floor, keeping a watchful eye over an abandoned chick they had found.

Again, Mouse looked over her shoulder. The shadow of the owl no longer appeared so ominous. For once, it seemed sad. Lonely.

She sighed.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? I’ll be fine,” she told her mother.

The floor moaned under her feet as if telling her she didn’t need to be so quiet anymore with Aku gone. She stripped the window of its newspaper covering, the owl’s image springing out at her through the glass. Though it sent a spike to her heart, she swallowed her fear down and unlatched the lock.

“Move, please,” she said, gesturing with her hand.

The owl glanced down at her sweeping fingers and ruffled its feathers before following the motion, hobbling foot by foot to the opposite corner of the sill so that Mouse could open the window for it. She stepped back and watched it. It watched her, then made the first step across the threshold into the house.

When she lifted her arm, it flew to land in the crook of her elbow. Mouse held in her gasp and dug her feet into the ground to balance the both of them, eyeing her companion’s apple-shaped face.

“Welcome home,” she whispered.

The barn owl didn’t say anything back, but it didn’t need to.