The Gallery of Birds

Her white shadow overhead, like an angel across the canopy, Tyto Alba held the sky aloft on her wings. But here, in the gallery, she shared the air with a tired grey quail and a hoary flock of geese, all drawn up like puppets with string.

Still, her Barn Owl claws hooked in anticipation with a destination in her eye, she was a vision of myth, a teller of tales, and a bringer of storms.

From her last perch there were no fields to watch over or vibrations to eavesdrop on, only a new world of human encounters with whispers and secrets and sorry truths.

Lonely in her flight she still held her beauty and pith in balance. A museum piece now. A moment forever.

I brought my head down, back to the human eye line and steadied against the dizzy spell. Glancing down, there sat a solitary feather on the floor, swaying lightly in the draft. I bent and plucked it. In my hand it lay, so silky and snow coloured, so fragile, yet with a strong stem to keep it firmly devoted to its core. I curled my fingers in protection and stored the memory in my pocket.

Through the rotunda of birds, the next gallery over held children at play dressing in ancient armour and digging in dinosaur dust. I slowed to consider the room.

I could only guess she would be here, and devise her possible design through the little I knew. This cause of mine, this one who tore at my soft tendon, who plied my heart apart.

She had always been here, in this place I knew well, yet had remained a true riddle. She was a small, mysterious thing that had grown so large to me that she could no longer hide, even in the caverns of these spaces. And so through the exhibits, the costumes and teepee, past the silvered helmets and painted buffalo robe, I searched. Into the area of kept animals, woodland creatures, horns, tusks and antlers all. I knew the moose, I had made friends with the queen bee and was keeper of the secrets of the woods. Now I searched for something so far unseen.

Small and dark. Small and dark. Like a growing thought in my mind that came to be before me. And with a quick turn of the head, a recognition in an eye, not mine to her, but hers to mine, an eerie recognition occurred.

Did she sense my silent approach or hear a warning call? She spied me brightly and left her clutch of colleagues to cut off my path. With a swivel I approached. Then she was there, a real thing now, no imaginary beast.

A small speckled face, a tiny boned sparrow, but not a sparrow – no. A refocusing of my eyes saw that she was not that ancient Greek symbol of love, sacred bird of Aphrodite, but an imposter only. She was but a shrew, both timorous and skittish. Difficult to spy when moving frenetically for cover, but now in repose, an easy catch.

I grew tall and tempted her out of her den into the sunlight. She followed me through the galleries and spaces, let me lead the way, past pillars and tombs, statuary in stone, from the past into the present.

Outside on the street our heartbeats echoed across the concrete, and I saw her face in the sun now. Was this but the tiny and inoffensive creature of the meadow? Or was she more as Aristotle had recorded, an animal venomous with few cures for its bite.

She appeared stale and sad, yet I apprehended some beauty, some attraction in her eye. I fell into my imaginings of arrested love between them. The two together caught by my third. The two together as a match, mated.

The palisade of the vault witnessed us, perched together, speaking in search of each other. Hope happened upon me then, perhaps a reason, a rationale to help me solve the puzzle would be offered. What was the cause, what was the cure?

Then a change revealed itself, as she began to squeak and whistle and reveal more secrets toward her salvation. Her bite came fast, her tiny talons a revelation of true malice, and an inflammation then began to spread throughout my body, a burning fever filled me and corrupted me in doubt.

She may have feigned to be gentle and tame, but hid a cruel mind and desire to hurt beneath her scale.

In a capsize I caught another image of her. She was just as she appeared. In all truth, in smallness, poison and greed. A giant need, a sinkhole, a place that grew exponentially larger the closer one came.

And when he had found her, he gained her emptiness as something he might fill. Something which might fill him up in return. Her smallness needing protection, her fear needing a knight.

And my other? He was but a little wolf, a trickster true, being one thing to each of us, both shadow and light. The sheepskin slipped away and his myth appeared to me, a lover, magician, glutton, and charlatan. His own cleverness creating chaos.

I pictured his fang on her tail and my thoughts tortured my body, my own teeth feeling the instinct to chew. But I could not move or make any attack. For the stories tell how such a small thing was so faint that a clap of thunder may kill it, and I could not bring my hands together upon her.

I stood then, rising above her, and as I rose a clear vision of their hoax appeared to me, like mice under the snow, their small sounds loud in my excellent ear.

The melody of their movements fixed me in place, as the owl in the menagerie, forced to look upon what was forward with no ability to fly away.

So I watched their dance, a masquerade really, each hiding their truths from the other. They fell into balance, cadence, and rhythm even, yet in their frolic they became lost to the world around them. As each chased its prey they were unaware of the storm that grew. Their swirl and wind catching others in its siphon, bringing all to the ground in a hard fall. Some crashing, some bruised, some with broken wings.

Theirs was a chase without reward, a fleeting of feelings that melted like mud in the snow. A quest that left an etching deep into the soil that slowly filled with the wounded caught in their blight, from new babes to brood, the pile grew.

The falling had bled me deep, but instinct broke the spell and I found my body moving away. The small thing she was, was broken, and any interest I had to learn her had left me. She played a false note, she upturned to reveal her soft belly, and made a shrill note. I looked into her gaze once more and then swayed away. She had lay the trap and now was caught.

It would not be long, I knew, before a true predator came to watch. She would decompose in her own time, not taking any more of mine. I left her deceit, her poor odor and pointed nose in the breeze, looking up to the spire of the building I alighted myself anew.

Would my nest stay safe I could not know. But I had read this tale before, and it was ancient, as old as any in the museum. I decided that it would remain there with the unopened sarcophagi and sealed ceramic jars, unknown to me in any real way forever. Just as all the objects of the museum were, shadows really, outlines of another age or life, pages in the long book of time.

But I was not tethered, I was still a living thing, perched only for a moment, not an eternity.

And I still had my sight, my beauty and a strong quill in my hand to lead me forward in flight.