The Strange Bird. Jeff VanderMeer

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      The Old Man’s Story

      The Old Man never opened the cell door but only slid the horrible food in through an opening that he closed with a nailed plank of wood. He seemed to know that the Strange Bird might be able to escape through such a space and into the room without hurting herself.

      As he shoved the food in, the Old Man always said, “You’re good, Isadora. You’re good, I can tell. You are beautiful and good.”

      But what was good and what was beautiful and why were these things important to the Old Man?

      Nothing in the laboratory had seemed good to her, and beautiful was form without function. Anything that might be beautiful about her had a purpose. Anything that was good about her had a purpose, too. And still the compass pulsed within her and at times drove her frantic with the need to escape and thoughts of the dark wings, how they had disbanded and pulled apart and yet come back together.

      The foxes had put the idea in her head—that she might escape by becoming a ghost. If she became a ghost, the Old Man could not see her and would think she had escaped and open the cell door so she could truly escape. The Strange Bird knew that the idea of ghost and ghosting meant something different to the foxes, but still she meant to try.

      So she lay in the darkness at the foot of the metal bench, where the glimmer of sunlight could not reach, and she would grow very still and those neurons of her brain that lived natural in her feathers would alter her camouflage, dull the iridescence, practice matching the exact hues and tones of the prison cell. Her natural camouflage was meant to show dark from above and light from below while flying, so it took conscious effort to do otherwise.

      All while the Old Man talked to her about his memories of people and places she did not know and did not care about, and eventually mention the gloom and put on more lights, which meant taking slow-writhing white grubs that glowed and shoving them into divots taken out of the ceiling. By how he still complained of the gloom the Strange Bird would count her progress in becoming less and less visible.

      “My eyes must be going bad,” the Old Man grumbled, but he could not afford to use more light, for the grubs would be food if the weasels grew more cunning, if his garden began to fail.

      Then he would continue his sermon, as if a broken-down version of the chaplain in the laboratory, who would spend so much time in senseless talking to the animals.

      “I am not the man I was. This place was different once. There are more people out there. All sorts of things out there. But I would not last without shelter. It takes someone younger, stronger. Someone who isn’t worn-out—and I know people will come here soon enough and wrest even this from me. And in the other direction there’s just desert and wasteland and nothing good. You should know—you came from there. And this was the town I grew up in, although none of it is left. They’re all dead now. Now it’s just me and the lizards and the weasels and a toad or two. And sometimes an intruder. And now you.”

      The Old Man could mumble like this for hours, sometimes rant and rave and become other than what Isadora thought he was. But even this the Strange Bird welcomed, for she understood him better and better through this repetition and she began to know not just his speech but his moods, to recognize the self-inflicted wound at the heart of him.

      A favorite subject was of the city that lurked so near beyond the dune. Whenever the Old Man spoke of the city, his tone would grow hushed and his aspect fearful and the Strange Bird would remember the shadow of the monsters she had sensed.

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