Tag: short story

Ornithoscillation

Pavowski5 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week:  The Opening Line Challenge.  I used the opening line posited by a member called, simply, Nikki.

This was a fun one, and not nearly so dark as some of my other flash fiction.  But still pretty weird.

1000 words exactly.  Enjoy!  As always, I welcome feedback and comments if you’re out there reading.

 

Ornithoscillation

There was a dead bird on the porch again.

When the first one had shown up, Gerald thought that the family tomcat had simply started bringing him gifts again.  Trouble was, the second day there was another, and the day after that there were two, and tubby little Snuggles had never been much of a hunter.

Flummoxed, Gerald had called Animal Control.  The man who answered the call had poked around the property for thirty minutes, inspected the crawl space, and stuck his nose under some of the bushes before telling him that he had no idea what was causing the deaths.

On the Monday that followed (and the eighth bird) Gerald had bagged a few of them up and taken them down to the University, where a raccoon-eyed grad student named Samir met him at the veterinary building and took them in for testing.  Tuesday arrived (birds nine and ten) and Samir called back to say that physically the birds showed no signs of illness or trauma.  They certainly hadn’t been killed by any cat.

Now, Wednesday.  Bird number eleven.  Burying them had gotten too tedious, not to mention all the unsightly little patches of dirt on his immaculate lawn in back of the house, so Gerald took a shovel and dumped it in the corrugated trash can next to five of its little feathered friends.

That night, in his dreams, Gerald heard the sound of a deep humming.  It penetrated the walls of his mind, it reverberated behind his eyes, it pulsed deep in the soft tissues of his brain.  He woke to a ringing in his ears.  The clock read 2:30.  A disoriented minute followed, in which he realized that the ringing was outside his head, not inside it.  He followed it, to the bedroom door, down the hallway, to his son’s room.  His son, twelve years old, fascinated with trains and clocks and electric things.  A dim light shone underneath the doorway, brilliant against the dark of the night.  Gerald cracked the door, making as little noise as he could, planned to see little Simon snoring away, tuck him in, and return to bed.  Instead, he saw Simon silhouetted against the tiny desk in the room, hunched over the makeshift desk of milk crates and plywood, earphones clamped to the sides of his head, scribbling madly on a notepad while he fiddled with the dial of a radio with the other, twisting it this way and that, a lunatic safecracker dialing until his fingers bled.

“Si,” Gerald whispered, but Simon did not waver in his work.  “Simon!”

Simon stopped, but not because he heard Gerald: the noise-canceling headphones made that nigh impossible.  No, he had stopped because he had heard something.  A phantom wavelength, a rogue echo of a noise which should not have been there.  It had only been there for a moment, an infinitesimal crackle of static in a sea of white noise, but it was there.  He stopped writing, craned his neck, and twisted the dial back in the other direction.  There, again, and gone, just as quickly.  He focused his entire being on the noise, gripped the dial as delicately as his clumsy adolescent fingers would allow, and ticked it by the tiniest of degrees back toward the noise.

Gerald had crept up behind Simon, his hand outstretched to shake his boy’s shoulder, when Simon found the frequency, and this time he held it, letting go of the dial as if it might shatter.  Behind him, his father clutched at his head as a lance of sound seared his ears and burned his vision hot-white.  He fell to his knees, and the noise was gone.  Simon, still oblivious, tapped and banged at his receiver, checked his notes and began to spin the dial again, chasing the lost frequency like a rabbit into the brush.

A thump at the front door.  Fatherly instinct pushed all else aside and Gerald dashed downstairs, stopping at the side door to the garage to grab a worn and polished Louisville Slugger off the wall.  He crept to the door and peered through the keyhole.  Nothing.  Flexing his fingers on the bat, he unlocked the door with his free hand, stepped back from it, and used the end of the bat to shove it open wide.  Nobody there.  He stepped out, in bare feet and boxer shorts, ready to swing for the fence at the sight of anything moving.

Squish.

He jumped back in horror.  Another goddamned bird.  This one had hit the door so hard its neck was bent in the wrong direction, as if it had been built of Legos and put together backwards.

Then it clicked.  Simon had brought his science project about radio frequencies home from school the night before the first bird showed up.  Something about how sound frequencies, properly amplified and directed, could alter living tissue.  Gerald hadn’t really paid it that much attention — it was a sixth grade science project, for god’s sake — but Simon had been engrossed.  Obsessed.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, Gerald ran back upstairs, taking them two at a time.  “Simon?” He called, rounding the corner into Simon’s room — where the boy jumped in circles, pumping his fist and shouting, the headphones still clamped to his ears.  Gerald yanked them off.  “Stop it!  You’ve killed them!”  And if the sound had killed all those birds…

But Gerald caught a glimpse of the radio equipment, as Simon stared at him, open-mouthed.  It wasn’t a receiver.  It was a transmitter.

“Dad,” Simon said, tugging at his sleeve, “I’m not killing them.  I’m saving them.”  Simon pointed to the window.

With trepidation, Gerald peered out the window.  Something had set off the motion sensor in the driveway.  The light was on; he saw a cloud of birds spilling from the trash can and from his lawn like swarming bees, twisting and writhing as one like some great dark winged beast, spiraling out of the light and ascending into the darkness.

One Award

Pavowski4 Comments

This week’s challenge from Chuck:  Five Words.  In short, write a short story of under 1000 words using 5 words out of a list of 10.  I used just over 800, but managed to squeeze in six of the words.
I started this one out intending to write something a little happier.  WHY CAN’T I WRITE A HAPPY SHORT STORY.
Anyway, here goes.
One Award
A light glinted in the hermit’s cave atop the cliff, hazy in the mist of the salt spray off the ocean. It was the third time Henry had seen the light this week.  His bedroom window, at the back of his house just across the inlet from Marbler’s Bluff, afforded him a perfect line of sight on the nook: a craggy opening carved into the side of the cliff face a hundred feet below the trail that led to the peak, and a hundred feet above the sharktooth rocks pulverizing the surf.

Henry had visited the cave again and again as a child, leading secret adventures up there.  He’d follow the nigh-invisible dental floss path down to the cave and pretend to be a pirate or a bandit while his lazy hound dog watched with weary eyes.  He chuckled to himself; he had probably left a stash of lollipops in the box he’d buried in the back.

And now, there was a light twinkling up there.  Almost like a flashlight winking at him from a neighbor’s window in secret code, but there was no message hidden in its luminous semaphore.  At least not one that he could decipher.  He wondered if anybody else even knew about the cave at all.  It didn’t seem likely.

His parents had bought the house just before he’d been born, an enviable little split-level right on the waterfront, with nothing around it for a mile.  There had been other houses, once, but their supports were cracked and sagging and one by one they had tumbled to the earth.  This house, too, would not last long — it already had deep fissures in the foundation, caused by shifting topsoil or something like that, they’d said — but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it.  He’d inherited the house when his parents had heart attacks within two years of one another, leaving him alone at the age of twenty-three.  Jobless and broke, it had seemed to him a fortuitous misfortune, and he had moved back to his childhood home after only five years away.  For twenty years since, he’d stayed here, never thinking of leaving.  The town was nice enough; sleepy, dull, safe.  Just what he’d needed after his years in the field.

As the sun descended, the flashing of the light grew less frequent and finally stopped altogether.  Perhaps he’d only imagined it.  He made his rounds of the house, checked all the doors and windows, and let himself drop off to sleep.

Next day, his thoughts wandered up to the cave once more, to the times he’d used it to hide from bullies, to hide from his parents, to hide from his friends.  In retrospect, it was easy to see how the troubles he’d hidden from were no different from anybody else’s, but like they do for all kids, the troubles had seemed all encompassing to him at the time.  That cave had been his sanctuary, his hideout, his refuge.
At twilight, the twinkling started again, beckoning, signaling, like runway lights on a starless night.

At daybreak, he packed a bag for a hike and set off for the old cave.  The whooshing crash of the waves on the rocks accompanied him all the way to the summit, and the old familiar vertigo seized him as he wended his way down the craggy path to the cave.  It was deserted, of course.  No sign of anybody having been there in years.  Just some old brittle bits of driftwood, bleached as whalebone, littering the craggy recesses.  Henry collected a few twigs and lit a fire, felt the warmth seep into his face and his hands as he traveled back in his mind to a time before he’d known about evil, before he’d known about death and guns and landmines and night attacks and suicide bombers and the horror of making a five year old into an orphan right in his own living room.  Before he’d forgotten how to smile.  He exhaled thickly, the chemicals swirling as they always would in his lungs.  He massaged the shrapnel scar in his side.

He left his pack and walked to the mouth of the cave.  There, to the right of his shoulder — about as high as he would have been able to reach at the age of 11 — hanging on a tiny outcrop, was the medal he’d won for “Outstanding Performance” in his youth league soccer team, the only award he’d ever received.  Somehow it had remained shielded from the elements and, in the last moments before sundown, reflected a tiny beam of light down toward his window.

In the distance, he could see his house, the orange glow of flames behind the downstairs windows, fingers of smoke prying their way out around the panes.  Henry took off his shoes and his shirt and stood with his toes hanging out over the sharks’ teeth a hundred feet below.  They had never looked so inviting.  The sun’s light mingled with the mist collecting on his face, warming and cooling him in the same instant.  He smiled.