The Isle of Youth

“You’ve come a long way, human.”

“I could say the same for you.”

The owl sits perched in the branches of a pine, staring with its massive eyes at the man standing across from it on the dirt path. The last hours of sunlight filtering through the clouds dust the edges of green trees, of brown skin, of amber feathers, with silvers and golds. Its gaze drifts out past him to the sea, down the forested hillside and into the waves of blue.

“Do you remember the sea?”

“I remember crossing the Gulf of Mexico to g—”

“Not that sea,” interjects the owl dryly. “I suppose it’s different for creatures like you. Memory lives in the blood, so they say; your kind have forgotten what it means to bleed.

“For a moment, I thought that we'd become separated," begins the owl with a faraway look. "Until I saw you on your way here, I didn't know that I'd be able to find you again."

"Find me?" he asks phlegmatically. The owl fluffs its feathers.

"Find you, find you all, find your kin," lilts the owl like it's a nursery rhyme. "Try to keep up. The blood runs a little differently through your veins—thicker, like sap—but I can tell part of it is hers."

"Hers?"

"We'll get there," says the owl softly, extending a wing, preening its feathers delicately. "There's a mother in between you and the last one. She spent a long time someplace I couldn't follow."

"St. Petersburg?"

"I tend not to keep track of the names humans use for themselves, let alone their names for the places they dwell," it replies. "There was a shroud separating us like a mist creeping out from a forest. My eyes are good, but they couldn't see through that. I only knew that it was cold wherever she'd gone, bitterly cold.”

"You…." He took a moment to think. "You followed my grandmother from Cuba to Russia?"

"'Followed' is an imprecise wording," remarks the owl. "It imparts both movement and purpose. Suffice it to say I was there with her until I wasn't. I was at her side on the island, and on the island before that, until the island gave way to ocean and lands much larger, to cities and plains and mountains; and finally to places unknown. She passed into mist, and I was with her no longer.

"Your line has traveled far. Farther than you know, I think. My kind knows this world nearly from end to end; your family tree fills in the few gaps we leave behind. For every sky that those of my feather have flown, your people have walked the earth below.

"We don't pay much mind to your names for one another, but we learn well your names for us. Tell me, what names for the owlfolk do you know?"

"A few. I forget what you're called in Garifuna—it's something like dunúru—but I know búho in Spanish, and for you…."

Here he takes in the snowy feathers dotted with brown like a regal stole; the black talons curved around the branch; the white face like the severest Sister of an austere convent; the looming eyes which seem to drink in light and let none escape.

"....you're lechuza."

"Bringer of milk to children in the night," agrees the owl; its eyes widen in something resembling a smile. "That's a nice one. Not entirely sure where you got that idea, but it's certainly not as damning as the notion of us sucking blood or disemboweling. Where oddity turned to monstrosity…well, suffice it to say we exercised caution in places where humans would 'beware of the bloodthirsty strix!'

"The name I have in mind, however, goes back much farther for your people, far distant in both place and time." It screeches softly and cocks its head to the side. "Māotóuyīng. Miau têu diau. Do these mean anything to you?"

He shakes his head slowly, regretfully, contemplating the shifting tones of the syllables like a half-sung melody. "Can't say they do."

"That stands to reason. Your last ancestor who spoke them lived and died an ocean ago, a hundred winters away. The wording varies, but the meaning is 'bird with the head of a cat.'"

He narrows his eyes and smirks. "Yeah, that suits you."

"It should well suit me," the owl mutters shakily, shifting its weight on the branch, "because it's true."

"W...what do you….?" The question fails to form on his lips.

Its gaze hardens like ice, then thaws. It utters a soft, low screech like a whistle; a sigh, perhaps. "I suppose I forget that your kind dwells in day. The only times we share are dawn and dusk; apart from that, we're—"

"—passing ships in the night?" he cuts in.

Another low whistle. "I've watched eight generations of your family board those floating giants and drift away to far-flung reaches of the world. You have no idea just how true those words are.

"The first time I crossed paths with your bloodline, the grandmother of the grandmother of your grandmother's grandmother huddled aboard a ship unlike any I've seen since, a ship with one great ribbed wing like a bat’s. She was running away from something—from what, I don't think I'll ever know, but I know fear when I see it; and the blood of those who flee screams unmistakably through the veins like a rabbit clutched in talons.

"It was this grandmother of a grandmother who saw me and named me 'miau têu diau'—a title usually reserved for a different bird, but it was the closest name she had for something like me. She crossed into my haunt from skies to which I dared not return; that's when our lines intertwined, I think.

“I don't know what your ancestor was escaping, but I myself had fled her land countless winters before. I don't pay your human histories much mind—not out of whimsy or spite, but because I have a past of my own to consider, stories which unfurled far beyond any human concept of time, debts which exceed any human understanding of payment."

The owl looks back to the sea, fixing on the hazy horizon where blue bleeds into blue. It listens to the waves a long while before it speaks.

“The sun was fading. The cat was trotting back to the tree line. I hadn’t had anything to eat that day, but the cat…the cat was fat and happy. It was carrying something feathery in its mouth. I figured if the cat could steal from us, we could steal from the cat.

“I wasn’t the only bird to take a cat's head for my own, but I was the first. Back in those days, food was scarce—in the daylight hours, anyway. But seek your quarry at night, and…well, you had a bounty on your hands. I figured I was just…leveling the playing field.

“The first owls did well for ourselves. We took to the night with our new cat’s eyes and feasted on mice and rabbits to our hearts’ content; in time, we became as fat and happy as the cats had been.

“Then some of our number began to disappear. We found them out by the edge of the forest. At first we thought they’d been attacked by a tiger or a leopard, but when we saw that their heads had been ripped clean off, we realized the culprit.

“I had already considered leaving when I was attacked. The thing couldn’t quite get a hold of me—its paws were slippery with blood—but it managed to tear off my ears before I got away. I only got a glimpse of it before I fled. The headless cat stood there, watching me. How it could watch me without eyes, I don’t know; but I could feel them burning into me.

“Some of the others decided to stay behind and mark out a territory for themselves; not me. I’ve gone everywhere, anywhere else in the world. The cat doesn’t care for water. Crossing the seas seemed the wisest; islands seemed the safest. That led me here.”

“To Isla de La Juventud,” remarks the young man at long last.

“I leave such human matters to you,” reiterates the owl. “Whatever the name of this land might be, it provides me refuge. Or at least, it has. The ravages of your kind have laid bare the forests of our ancestors and left us with little to run to. You call us 'barn owl'; did you ever stop to think why it was that we roosted on barns and not boughs?"

"I know what we've done," he begins solemnly, "and I know that no apology will suffice—"

"Nor is it requested," urges the owl gently. "We're no simple beasts. A predator knows strategy, how to plot a course; and the curse of cleverness is to know when another scheme has bested your own. Had we hands and not talons, we might've sculpted the world to our bidding as well."

"Careful what you wish for," replies the man with a small, sad smile. "We're paying the price for that now. Humans might not have a home either in the years to come."

"I told you," states the owl, rearing up to its full height, "the price has been paid; no apology needed."

A strangled, gurgling yowl resounds through the cooling air of evening; the sun has receded far beyond the trees, escaping silently and suddenly beyond sight. The man and the owl look instinctively down the path.

"It's coming," whispers the owl.

The man nods. "I can feel it."

"Will you…." The owl pauses, clicks its beak. "Will you stay with me? I...I don't…." Another pause, click. "I'd like the company."

The man gives the owl a hard look, muscles drawn taut. He heaves a sigh, allowing his edges to soften.

"All right."

The owl withdraws within itself and seems smaller yet; its voice shrinks to match.

"Thank you."

The steps precede the arrival, falling with a weight greater than the body they carry. It comes into view slowly, disappearing now and then behind the bends and rises in the path. Amid the stark silhouettes of dusk, it flashes a luminous green as it approaches. Only a few paces off can the man make out what the owl has known all along, by sight and by memory: four striped legs, a twitching tail, a skinny, furry lump of a body; and a ragged, bloody stump at the end of a long and graceful neck. The red of the gore, still fresh, steaming into the chill, almost glows with the last few rays of sunlight; and through the rising vapor, the man can just make out the triangular points of hovering, twitching ears.

The owl flaps down from its perch to the dirt path. The creature slows its sauntering gait to a halt, sitting back on its haunches. The owl speaks, stammering at first. The creature responds steadily, sibilantly; and in time, the owl matches pace. The two converse in words and in sounds; nos reunimos and wahal and jīhuāng scattered amongst wind rustling through leaves and raindrops thrumming against stone and the creaking of felled timber. The man waits quietly as they communicate a cacophony of ideas, sounds within sounds spinning around one another to weave rhythms and rhymes he can hardly describe, let alone understand.

Finally, the owl breathes a long sigh and spreads its wings like a semaphore, releasing a sound like the sheet of ice on a lake cracking with the coming spring. The creature responds with the demolition of a city block, the crowing of a rooster, and shì. The owl nods slowly, closing its eyes.

With a wet, thick sound like boots churning through muck, a circle of sharp white points begins to rise from the stump, lining the circumference of the neck. The creature flexes its toothy maw before rising to its feet and closing the gap between itself and the owl, whose eyes remain closed.

In one movement, the creature lunges for the owl, sucking its head down into its throat. Wings flap inertly, talons curl and flail instinctively, as the creature swallows more and more of the owl down its gullet, heaving, spasming, a regurgitation in reverse. Finally, the creature twists away, and with a squelching snap, the owl's body falls away, motionless, headless; bloodless.

The creature swells, bloated by the devoured head; and then it bears down, extends its claws, arches its back. Muscle and bone, nerve and sinew boil within the creature's throat, rotating rapidly, and then extrude slowly into shapes which form and reform themselves. The skull condenses and elongates, no longer hollow and spindly, and muscles crowd around to anchor themselves and stretch over newly forged bone. Skin slides over muscle, bumps flattening as it stretches into place; then feathers erupt through the pores of the taut flesh, unraveling into loose fibers and knitting themselves in intricate patterns through the hide, leaving striped fur and whiskers projecting from the snout. The ears settle into place. The creature opens its eyes.

The twin voids of blackness loom in the night, catching a wayward beam of light and flashing a brilliant green; the light calms and fades into the edges of the eyes, encircling black. The cat stares at the man and meows; he nods back at it stiffly. The cat rolls onto its back, stretching its paws as far as they'll go, squirming in the dirt. The man blinks and chuckles softly.

The cat rises, looks at the man again, meows. It stoops low, grabs hold of the remains of the owl with its teeth, and stalks off into the night.

The man's gaze falls heavy on the spot in the trees where the cat disappeared, and back on the spot along the path where the owl lay. Slowly, with that same heaviness, he makes his way down the slope, back to the shore, listening for the tide.