Stone Cold
By N.L. Sweeney
She watched the construction from above, a silent observer from the trees. The automatons seemed sluggish and awkward, like young things learning to move their limbs, but the men inside tore through the earth and shaped it to their will. The last machine to come was the hulking metal talon. It lowered the final pieces of the bridge into place.
When the men left, the cars came, their round black legs eating up the road. Rain fell. The roar of engines filled her home. The sun set. The overpass remained.
She watched until she couldn’t watch any longer and hunger tightened her muscles. Seven moons had risen and still the structure stood.
With a click of her beak, she leapt from her perch and let the wind fill her wings. A soft spray of rain formed beads on her feathers, and the forest drew its silence around her. She drifted between the stalks of trees, swooping between clambering branches and stray needles.
Memory guided her. Her tree waited for her. It stood in the center of a patch of tall pines, so that only its peak was speckled with green. The wood was dry and crackled whenever she shifted her weight.
She came to the place it should have been and stopped, beating her wings to stay aloft. Missing. Gone.
She settled herself on a lower branch of one of the taller trees and tucked her wings in at her sides. Shaking off some of the droplets, she sank into herself, tucking her head into her downy neck feathers.
Her eyes caught the flick of a field mouse’s wormy tail slipping beneath a rotten trunk, and realization crystalized. Her tree had fallen. It had carved a path of destruction through the undergrowth, crushing branches and saplings on its way. Snapped wood fanned out from it. The wilted husks of strangled geraniums splayed out from the site. Azalea petals rotted from magenta to the color of mud. None of the larger trees had been affected. They loomed above, frozen witnesses.
Her wings had tasted their first fill of wind from that tree. She’d sunk her talons into her first kill at the base of its trunk, a baby squirrel, tough and bony and hers. Her gaze sought out the branches where her nest had been, but only splinters and pine needles remained.
Her wings shivered and her head shrank down deeper. What had been crisp wood was now sodden. The heart of her tree had dissolved into pale strips and chunks. The termites and ants had wasted little time coming to their feast.
A little way along, the field mouse that had caught her attention lifted its black snout into the air, sniffing before it ducked its head to the mulchy wood. It lifted its head once more, a fat ant wriggling into its mouth.
She tensed on the branch, but no hunger widened the pit of her gut. The mouse slipped back beneath the log and into the earth, and she remained where she was.
She looked up at the giant pines. Their thick trunks towered above her.
They, too, would fall. They, too, would crumble into chips of rotten wood. Her mother had died in the mouth of an owl, beating her wings on the unyielding clamp on her throat. Perhaps she would one day do the same. She would shrivel into a mound of dry feathers and bones, and even her bones would become indistinguishable from the black soil. Her beak clamped tight, and she shuffled closer to the trunk.
The branches of the trees quivered. Ants twitched their antennae. Field mice sniffed the air. She swung her head to take it in. The sound of the overpass hummed through the trees. Maybe it didn’t have to end.
She flapped into the air. Her wings carried her across the river where she settled down, staring up at the thick pillar that held up the overpass. Rain dusted her back, and still the pillar stood. She cocked her head, tilting the world. Unflinching, motionless grey.
Cars drove above, but the pillar did not bend. It did not sway. It did not shift beneath its burden. Her cowl of feathers wrapped themselves around her. Stillness. That was all it took to remain. She just had to be still.
The river scrolled past. Its motion was slow on top, the way resin dripped down the side of a trunk. Ripples punctured the surface, fracturing the glassy sheen. She steadied the nervous clawing of her talons. Her heart tapped its rhythm on her ribs. She breathed. Like the pillar. Like the bridge. Still.
There came a time when the rain stopped. Night curled its chill around her. She remained, unmoving. Days passed. And nights. Her crop yawned wide enough to engulf her. Claws of pain sank themselves into her legs and lower back, twisting and knotting inside of her. She drew her eyes closed so she could no longer track the movement of the river.
There came a time when she stopped feeling; the gnaw of her insides, the aches, and the scratch of her gullet quieted. Her feathers began to fall. The first blew off beneath a sudden gust of wind.
More fell from her. She felt each one breaking away, falling. A second. Another. She could feel them piling around her. In places, rain dripped on bare skin.
The numbness spread out from her crest. It supported her legs and eased any remaining pain. She sank deeper into the earth. It crept over what feathers she had left, and her wings hung lower. Feathers continued to fall.
There came a time when she stopped making herself stand and stood. Her wings pressed themselves against her sides, though she no longer felt them. She was aware of them the way she was aware of her body when she slept. There, but separate from her, removed. She quieted her relief because relief was movement. And at last her mind fell still.
N.L. Sweeney is a writer of queer, feminist speculative fiction and a graduate of the University of Washington Bothell Creative Writing MFA. They have been writing stories since they were old enough to spell (badly) and are interested in writing fiction that explores loss, identity and transformation. Some of their works have appeared in Unbound III: Goodbye Earth, Twisted, Jeopardy, Flash Fiction Online and Clamor. When not writing, they keep busy by escaping into video games, brewing cups of tea and asking if they can pet strangers’ dogs.