#i was a baby bird growing out my plumage all along

[hisohisoart]

i like eggs the food but not eggs the metaphor for being trans

[smiting-finger]

I tripped and I fell and this HP AU came out

So I was chatting to @silverink58​ about the beautiful original picture of Professor LWJ, and they were saying that when they picked up the prompt for the inktober exchange, they were hoping to read Hogwarts student!LWJ, 

And I thought “oh how delightful, maybe I’ll think about that idea later”, and then that “later” became “now” and what I’m saying is they shouldn’t have let me download the google docs app onto my phone, because I clearly cannot be trusted.

@silverink58​ this is for you, lol. Thanks for naming “Little Apple” :’D.

He almost doesn’t see it: a flutter of black fabric, the edge of a student robe before it slips away out of sight. But he catches the movement from the corner of his eye, and pure reflex has Lan Zhan drawing his wand to fire off a quick body-bind curse.

There's a muffled noise of surprise, abruptly cut off, and then the thump of a body hitting the floor.

When Lan Zhan turns the corner, it’s to the sight of Wei Wuxian, lying face-down on the ground.

“It’s after curfew,” Lan Zhan says, turning him over with a quick Levitation spell. “You should be inside your dormitory.”

Dark eyes glare indignantly up at him. Calmly holding Wei Wuxian’s gaze, Lan Zhan lifts the curse.

“Report for detention tomorrow,” he says, as Wei Wuxian sits up and pointedly rubs the small pink spot on his forehead.

“Lan Zhaaaan,” Wei Wuxian complains, giving the edge of Lan Zhan’s robe a beseeching tug. Lan Zhan feels his own lips thin at the over-familiarity of both the form of address and the physical contact. 

“Don’t be like that! Let me off just this once? Think of the five wonderful years we’ve spent together as potions partners!”

“Just last week, you exploded our cauldron,” Lan Zhan reminds him flatly, and Wei Wuxian grins.

“Oh come on! Let’s not harp on about petty things like that,” he says, pushing himself up onto his feet. He shakes out his robes. “You wanted to know what would happen if we added the xiezhi horn, too, just admit it.”

Lan Zhan doesn’t dignify this with a response, and simply meets Wei Wuxian’s gaze and holds it.

He is a Lan of Gusu.

He would never admit to such a thing.

Wei Wuxian pouts, reaches out a hand and uses two fingers to give Lan Zhan’s sleeve a pleading tug.

Lan Zhan sighs. 

After five years of being a detention hall regular, if Wei Wuxian was going to learn anything from writing lines, he would've done it already.

“Return to your dormitory,” he says, and Wei Wuxian smiles brightly.

“Yup, sure thing, absolutely,” he chirps, nodding in enthusiastic agreement.

He doesn’t move.

Lan Zhan looks at him expectantly.

Wei Wuxian blinks back at him with wide eyes.

Lan Zhan continues to wait.

It’s Wei Wuxian’s turn to sigh.

“Okay, fine,” he says, shoulders slumping in defeat as he turns back to his original direction and beckons for Lan Zhan to follow. 

“There’s just something I have to do first - I swear it’s important. You can come with me to see, if you want.”

-

It’s a … bird.

A hatchling, almost completely featherless, that Wei Wuxian has hidden in a corner of one of the lesser-used greenhouses, and has been coming to feed every four hours.

It’s also, Lan Zhan thinks, staring blankly at its oversized head, squat little body, gangly legs and stumpy wings, really-

“Don’t stare at it like that just because it’s ugly!” Wei Wuxian hisses, turning from pouring whatever paste he’s made down the bird’s throat to swat Lan Zhan admonishingly on the arm. “You’ll hurt its feelings!”

“You just called it ugly,” Lan Zhan feels the need to point out. “But I’m the one who’s hurting its feelings?”

“Well, it’s just a baby,” Wei Wuxian replies reasonably. “It doesn’t understand anything that’s not bird-language yet.”

“It doesn’t understand anything but bird-language,” Lan Zhan repeats disbelievingly, “but it’s offended by stares?” 

Wei Wuxian nods gravely. 

“Everyone knows that body language is universal,” he claims loftily and Lan Zhan suppresses the desire to roll his eyes.

-

“You can’t keep coming every four hours,” Lan Zhan says, after the bird curls up and goes to sleep underneath a heating charm and Wei Wuxian’s threadbare toy demiguise (“What? I didn’t know if Jiang Cheng and I were going to be in the same dorm, and I was scared of getting lonely at night! I was eleven!”).

“Well, I’m going to have to,” Wei Wuxian replies carelessly, and shrugs. “Or it’ll die.”

“Its parents?” Lan Zhan asks and Wei Wuxian shrugs again.

“Didn’t seem to have any,” he says, quietly getting up and beckoning wordlessly for Lan Zhan to follow. “I waited an hour to see if one of them would come back, but nothing did, and it was crying, so.”

The moon is full and bright, providing ample light to guide their way back to the dormitories even now that all the lights have been put out.

“I did some reading in the library,” Wei Wuxian says around a yawn. “As it gets bigger, feedings will get less frequent. I don’t know what kind of bird it is, but it should only be like this for a couple of weeks, at most.”

Even for a couple of weeks, it’s not sustainable, Lan Zhan thinks when Wei Wuxian begins to list into his shoulder as they walk. He’ll have to leave halfway through every meal and risk getting caught by the other Prefects at night. He won’t be able to get enough sleep, which will affect his classwork, and, in turn, his learning, his grades, his disciplinary record-

“You can’t keep this up for that long,” Lan Zhan states firmly.

Wuxian groans. “I told you, Lan Zhan, I can’t just let it-”

“I’ll help you,” he says.

“You’ll - wait, really?”

-

They name it Little Apple because Wuxian says he's no fun.

("We should call it Little Ginseng, because that's what it looks like - bald and lumpy."

"...No.")

When it gets big enough to have a personality beyond eating and sleeping, Little Apple is surprisingly sweet. It loves: cuddles, being hand-fed and chasing after a love-knot tassel that Wuxian charmed to dance around in front of it.

It hates: eating by itself, being left alone for too long, cats (after Headboy Jin Guangyao's familiar somehow gets into the greenhouse and they have a very near miss), and Lan Zhan and Wuxian arguing.

It absolutely refuses to go to bed without being personally tucked in.

Soon, it starts to grow feathers; brown and grey patches of down sprouting all over its body, enough that they can stop renewing the heating charm.

It doesn't get less ugly.

("As its mother, even I think it's hideous. We should've called it Little Dustball, but it's too late now ")

They do, however, become very fond of it nonetheless.

("Hey, Lan Zhan, look, we learned manners today!"

Wuxian bows to Little Apple, who bobs its head unsteadily in return.

"-Lan Zhan, what's happening to your face? Lan Zhan? Lan Zhan, is that a smile?!")

-

They get caught.

"Wei Wuxian I expected no better of," his uncle growls after the greenhouse doors fly open to reveal his thunderous expression. "But Wangji, you are a prefect. I am deeply disappointed in you, sneaking off to the greenhouses at night to-"

Little Apple squawks. 

(Although its adult plumage has started to come in, there is no colour pattern that Lan Zhan can see; it has three red feathers on this wing, two on that one, small tufts of white in a patch on its belly and a scattering of green along its back.

“It’s … really not going to get better, is it?” Wuxian asks, sounding like he doesn’t know if he should laugh or cry.)

Lan Qiren stares.

-

"It's so…" his uncle says, still staring down at Little Apple, who squawks again and stares right back. "Ug-"

“Don’t listen to him, Little Apple!” Wuxian cries, hastily covering Little Apple’s ears with his hands. “It’s what’s on the inside that counts!”

-

And then one day Lan Zhan walks into the greenhouse and realises that Little Apple is ugly no longer.

Its wings are in fact red and black; red coverts edged with a line of striking black primaries and secondaries. A small plume of blue curls back off its forehead in a proud crest. The feathers on its back and shoulders are a shimmering emerald green, in some areas even tipped with gold, its belly is a soft pearlescent white, and its tail feathers are starting to lengthen into an impressive train.

Beside him, Wei Ying gasps and places a hand against his mouth, evidently coming to the same realisation. 

“Lan Zhan,” he says, deeply moved. “Our son is beautiful.”

-

It still can’t fly, though.

“I wonder if I should get my sword,” Wei Ying says, after an afternoon of running around flapping his arms has yielded no results beyond Little Apple having the time of its life chasing a new, human-sized tassel around the grounds like a particularly speedy chicken. 

He flops backwards onto the grass. Little Apple promptly jumps on top of his chest and starts to preen his hair.

"Or what if I flapped my arms and you Levitated me," Wei Ying wonders, squinting thoughtfully. With a lazy wave of his wand, he Levitates Little Apple, who squawks angrily in protest until it's brought back within range of his ponytail.

Lan Zhan takes the opportunity to re-tie the bandage on his wrist, and can’t help but hiss slightly when he has to unstick it from his burnt skin. It’s not a serious injury - a small graze from a ricocheted spell he’d been hit with between classes, while stopping an altercation in the hallway - but he hasn’t had the time to visit the infirmary to have it healed yet.

When he looks up, Little Apple is right in front of him, staring up with glistening eyes.

“Aw,” Wei Ying says, propping himself up on one elbow and looking enchanted.  “Look, Lan Zhan, he’s sad that his daddy’s hurt!”

Little Apple rests his face on Lan Zhan’s wrist for a moment, then sits back up and gives a self-satisfied squawk.

Lan Zhan looks down and finds that his wrist is fully healed.

“Huh,” Wei Ying says.

-

It turns out that they don’t need to worry about the flying, because the following week, Little Apple, eye caught by a firefly, simply spreads its wings, pushes off Wei Ying’s arm and takes off after it.

“Well,” Wei Ying begins after a moment of stunned silence. “I-”

Then Little Apple’s tail promptly bursts into flames and blazes a bright trail across the night sky.

“LAN ZHAN,” Wei Ying screeches, grabbing hold of Lan Zhan’s arm and shaking it. 

“LAN ZHAN, OUR SON IS A PHOENIX!”

-

There’s no keeping Little Apple in the greenhouse after that. It comes and goes as it pleases with the blessing of even Lan Zhan’s uncle, who is kept mollified by the fact that Little Apple is a phoenix, as well as the steady supply of tears and feathers for the school. 

Both Lan Zhan and Wei Ying take to leaving their bedroom windows ajar so that Little Apple can come in to roost at night when it returns, which it always does.

Until, one day, it doesn’t.

-

The next month, the Ministry announces that the Wizarding world is at war.

(And then, on a random morning after WWX comes back, there’s a tapping at the window of their shared bedroom, Lan Zhan gets up to investigate, and----!)

[makaylajadewrites]

Muted Blue Chapter 1

Here is the first chapter for Muted Blue. It is already up on AO3 here in its entirety, but I will also be posting the chapters here

Pairing: Derek Morgan/Spencer Reid

Summary: Homo ave sapiens was the term, wise man birds, a species on the cusp of endangerment due to trafficking on the black market. Meeting one wasn’t all that uncommon, and in truth, the only difference between humans and home ave sapiens (or avians, as they often preferred), were the feathered appendages growing from their backs.

“Hey there… I’m going to get you out of here,” Morgan said in a hushed voice, crouching down in front of the figure. Those elegant wings lowered to reveal a mop of chestnut curls and a pale face, and Morgan swore he never saw anything more beautiful. Hazel eyes peered up at him fearfully, glowing in the darkness, and had he not known any better, he would think he were in the presence of an angel.

Tws: Human trafficking, mentions of slavery/sex slavery. Nothing graphic

Word count: 9010

--

"Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.

-Emily Dickinson

~

The elevator doors dinged upon the arrival to his destined floor, and with a certain heaviness in his step only sleepiness could cause, Derek Morgan stepped off and headed to the roundtable room. To be called in at such an hour could only mean one thing: Something important was going on and needed their immediate attention. He only wondered why this couldn’t have waited until a more reasonable hour, but clearly, criminals didn’t care about his sleep schedule. The bullpen was completely empty, and it was still dim from the night, but even through the blinds, he could see that the lights were on in the roundtable room. Begrudgingly, he entered, and saw that everyone was already inside and settled, all except Hotch and JJ who had yet to emerge from his office where they were most likely discussing the case at hand. This had to be a bad one.

“Alright everyone, please take a seat,” Hotch said just as Morgan was sitting himself down between Prentiss and Garcia, both of whom held a grim expression on their faces - Garcia’s of course more noticeable than the ever compartmentalizing Emily Prentiss. JJ obviously wasn’t going to be presenting this case, because as soon as she passed out the case files, she was sitting next to Rossi who was already examining the files with extreme interest yet with surprise, almost disbelief lingering on his wrinkled face. Morgan instantly understood why.

“Tonight, we were notified that Andi Swann’s unit has located a branch of a… human trafficking ring operating just outside of Las Vegas,” Hotch began, putting emphasis on the word ‘human’ for unknown reasons. With a click of the remote, the monitor turned on to reveal a few of the rescued victims, and immediately the team noticed that they were not human as Hotch had previously stated. Homo ave sapiens was the term, wise man birds, a human-related species on the cusp of endangerment due to trafficking on the black market. Meeting one wasn’t all that uncommon, and in truth, the only difference between humans and home ave sapiens (or avians, as they often preferred), were the feathered appendages growing from their backs. They behaved just as humans behaved, talked like them, lived like them… Yet they were discriminated against and faced many complications, residing alongside humanity.

They demanded for equal riots, and Morgan vividly remembered the Avian Riots of 1999, when he was still a novice in the FBI. Avians marched and protested across D.C., and after several isolated incidents of looting and pillaging, the national guard fired into crowds as if it were open season. In total, over eighty avians were killed that day, and from then on, the government took special interest in protecting avian rights. But it was clear that they weren’t doing enough, with incidents like this and the continued maltreatment of avians and discrimination against them.

“Oh, my god…” Garcia breathed, her eyes impossibly wide as her hand shot out to find stability on Morgan’s forearm, and he too was as surprised as she was. The rescued victims were severely malnourished, practically just skin and bones, and their wings were very crudely clipped and mangled from years of neglect and obvious abuse. Unlike humans, however, feathers danced across their chests and along their shoulders and backs, the plumage sprinkling downwards to the sprout of their wings. The only male had feathers freckling his cheeks. It was clear they once had been so beautiful, but now, these poor creatures were far from pleasant to look at. Despite himself, Morgan felt a discomfort building in his stomach, his throat clenching. It would forever baffle him to know that people thought it was alright to treat any creature like this.

“From left to right, we have Liam Donaldson, twenty-three, Jamie Frost, twenty-four, and Renee Grayson, also twenty-four,” JJ jumped in, “All have been claimed by their families and we’ve been asked for help in interviewing the victims and their families.”

“Agent Swann has reason to believe that this group is still holding more avians, though exact numbers are unknown. They bounce back and forth between several major locations, and we have been asked to assist in the raids at all three locations,” Hotch continued, clicking onto the next screen where surveillance pictures showed hooded figures congregating outside of a large van, and it was clear that these were their suspects. A mugshot of a man popped up on the screen next.

“This is Jonathon Martin, and he is in charge of this specific operation. We have yet to identify anyone else affiliated with this branch. Garcia, I want you with us for this, so grab a go-bag. Wheels up in twenty.” With that, the team rose from where they sat and dispersed to get ready for travel. Garcia looked worriedly to Morgan, and all he could do was offer a small smile in her direction, his arm wrapping around her shoulders.

“Promise me we’ll get them out of there, Derek,” Garcia said in an oddly somber tone. Morgan just sighed and squeezed her shoulder as they followed suit, walking out of the room.

“We’ll get ‘em, baby. Don’t worry your pretty little head.” Although, he only hoped that he could fulfill that promise, for the sake of Garcia and those innocent people.

Upon arriving in Las Vegas five hours later, they were greeted by the one and only Andi Swann, and despite the circumstances she kept a small smile on her face, remembering each and every member of Aaron’s team from previous encounters. She met them at the airstrip, shaking their hands and clearly pleased to have the best team possible helping with such a key operation — a breakthrough in one of their largest avian trafficking rings.

“Once we get to the precinct, we can use the information we have gathered so far to plan our infiltration,” Swann said as they piled into the SUVs made available for them, and soon, they were on their way. The precinct was just as any other; alpha males all around, a conference room made available with three boards filled with information, including that which pertained to their suspected leader and the few victims that had been saved. A map was pinned up on one, with three separate locations circled, all within a twenty mile radius of one another. In one of the interview rooms, a pretty robin was perched in a chair, her legs bouncing nervously while she looked around constantly, clearly paranoid. Avians were often distrusting of authority figures after the riots, and it was clear that this one was no different.

“We’ve brought in Macy Donaldson, Liam Donaldson’s sister. Apparently, she hasn’t seen her brother in over two years, and we wanted your help in preparing her to see him again,” Swann continued on, and Hotch nodded, glancing in Prentiss's direction who instantly nodded and separated from the group to talk to the robin. Morgan crossed his arms over his chest, approaching one of the boards and looking over pictures of the victims, their before and after pictures a true vision of despair. They all had been incredibly beautiful before their disappearances, and now that they were found, they looked like they had been treated as livestock. He had met avians over his lifetime, never really anything more than a brief interaction here or there because of his work as a police officer and eventually an agent.

“We’ve been tracking their movements for the past three months. We want to infiltrate tonight, before they change locations again,” Swann informed, and Hotch seemed a bit taken aback by this revelation. But, if it was possible to save these poor people before they were sold off, then they had no choice but to intervene. Morgan let his eyes linger over another victim, Victoria Pruest, and he felt his heart break at the sight of her mangled wings. How terrible it was, to be given wings yet have the glory of flying stripped away.

“Then we infiltrate tonight,” Morgan said quietly, turning to look at Swann and Hotch with a sharpened look in his dark eyes, “to keep these people from suffering any longer.”

~

The night came sooner than expected. Outside of a seemingly abandoned factory, the team grouped with SWAT, instructing them of their tactics and strategy. A soft entry was best, since they didn’t want to risk the lives of any avians or have them caught in the crossfire. They were already weakened as it was, so most of them probably wouldn’t survive any harm that came their way. With Morgan taking point, SWAT and the rest of the BAU followed behind and split into three different groups to cover the dark facility. Flashlight beams flickered across the walls, and soon, gunfire was exchanged between them and the workers of the trafficking ring. The ringleader was nowhere to be found, and they soon realized that he must have evaded as soon as he heard the gunfire. They continued to comb the facility for the remaining avians, despite the fact that he had gotten away, because lives still needed to be saved.

“Guys, in here!” Prentiss called for them, and immediately they followed her into a cramped corridor, a total of four cells with bars from floor to ceiling on either side. A chorus of gasps greeted their entry, avian eyes shining through the darkness as wings fluttered and hands grasped at cold bars. After all, it was the middle of January, and most of these poor people had less than scraps on their bodies if not completely naked. A key from the office-like room was passed into them and the cell doors were opened up. Three of the four cells had two or three avians inside, and JJ, Prentiss, and Rossi handled those. But the cell that Morgan was left with only had one individual inside. The avian was balled up in the corner with mangled, owlish wings curling around themselves protectively. The sound of their rapid breathing was somewhat concerning, yet also relieving since it reminded Morgan that they were thankfully alive.

As Morgan slowly approached, he was careful to take light steps, but his approach was enough to elicit a gasp from the avian. He stopped in his place, lowering himself down to a crouch so as to avoid intimidating the abused creature, and he slid his gun back to its rightful place in the holster on his hip.

“Hey there… I’m going to get you out of here,” Morgan said in a hushed voice, wanting to reach forward and touch the avian but he resisted since that could come with dire consequences. Those elegant wings lowered at the sound of his voice to reveal a mop of chestnut curls and a thin, pale face, and Morgan swore he never saw anything more beautiful. Hazel eyes peered up at him fearfully, glowing in the darkness, and had he not known any better, he would think he were in the presence of an angel. Pale feathers sprouted across his cheeks up into his hairline, and along his bare chest and over his shoulders, down to the curve of his neglected wings.

“That’s it, Pretty Boy… I’m here to help,” Derek continued on as those wings slowly lowered further, and as soon as he realized that the boy was naked, he pulled off his FBI jacket and draped it over the boy’s front. The avian instantly clutched to it with shaking hands, his slender fingers burying themselves in the warm fabric.

“I can go home?…” the boy whispered his question, his eyes watering like fountains as tears fell down his face. His hands trembled horribly, lips parting as he searched for more to say, and as much as Derek wanted to just hold him in his arms and never let him go, he resisted the urge to touch him still and continued on as if he were any other victim. But despite himself, Morgan knew this boy was different, and the way his heart throbbed in his chest was a reminder of that fact.

“My name is Derek, and I’m with the FBI,” Morgan gently said to him, “What’s your name?”

“M-My name?… Sp-Spencer. Spencer Reid,” the avian said in response, sitting up slowly on his knees. Morgan realized this boy probably hadn’t been called by his name in years, and again, his chest seemed to tighten up.

“Can you stand on your own, Spencer?”

“I-I don’t… I don’t know. I can try,” Spencer mumbled weakly, and while one hand kept the jacket clutched to his body, he slowly rose to wobbly knees. He only lasted a few seconds, and as he began to crumble, Derek gathered him in his arms. Hoisting him up carefully against his chest, one arm under his long legs while the other held him up under his upper torso, just below his wings. Spencer looked up at him with such wonder in his eyes, the tear tracks still evident on his dirtied face. Even covered in dirt and grime, he still looked like the image of perfection, an angel fit only for the prettiest of skies.

Morgan needed to get his head out of the clouds and focus.

He carried him out of that wretched cell, and swore to himself that he would never let Spencer wind up like that again. The boy seemed breathless from the sudden movements, and an expression of such trust lingered on his face. One hand remained over the FBI jacket, and the other clutched to the front of Derek’s long sleeve shirt. As he was brought out of the facility and into the open air, a soft whimper passed the boy’s cracked lips.

Derek looked down, alarmed and worried he had inadvertently hurt him, but the moment he saw tears trekking down his feathered cheeks once more, he realized why. Spencer’s eyes were caught on the starry night sky above, the moon reflecting in his dark pupils. It had probably been years since the boy saw the living world, and he was filled with such an immense amount of grief for the life Spencer had lost. He had experienced such a tragedy, and although he didn’t know for sure how long Spencer had been enmeshed in the trafficking ring, he knew that he would never be the same person he was before all of this. But then again could anybody, regardless of species?

EMTs began to gather the avians by having them lay on gurneys and pushed into the backs of ambulances, and Derek looked down as Spencer became more aware of the situation. Spencer looked scared, and his eyes fell from the sky to instead focus on the couple of people approaching them with a gurney rolling along between them.

“Derek?...” He whispered in confusion as he was laid down on it, his hands continuing to clutch to that jacket, his knuckles white from his death grip. His breathing was erratic again, and Derek felt himself crumble just a little bit on the inside. Spencer had already imprinted himself onto Morgan and viewed him as a savior — how good of a person would he be to leave the avian all alone as he had been before?

“These people are going to bring you to a hospital where they can help you, Spencer,” Derek said as if that would make him feel better, but Spencer was clearly having none of that. He was abused, not stupid, and Derek needed to remember that in the future. Spencer desperately shook his head, while a flutter of protests erupted from him in the form of sobs as the EMTs began to roll the gurney back towards an ambulance An EMT attempted to slip a blood pressure cuff around his arm on the way, but Spencer shrieked as if in pain and jerked away violently. His wings fluttered, the sheets ruffling up under him, and it pained Morgan to see this poor creature acting on pure instinct alone, as if his wings could really carry him in their decrepit state.

“No, Derek, please don’t leave me…!” He cried out in a shrill voice that pierced through Morgan’s very being, reaching a hand out towards the other man. Derek was by his side in an instant, his hands grasping onto Spencer’s smaller, bonier one. The EMTs stopped just outside of the ambulance, hoping that Morgan could get the poor boy to calm down.

“Calm down, Pretty Boy, I’ll be right here, okay?” He cooed softly, and Spencer whimpered once more, a coo of his own humming in his throat. Avians weren’t necessarily animalistic in nature, but like humans, they had noises they used to soothe themselves or each other. Like whispering or humming, avians had chirping, singing, cooing. It was all instinctual, really. An avian mother would coo to her baby, or avians would greet each other with happy chirps in the mornings, just as humans would do. Derek only wished he could understand more of how Spencer was feeling, to help him get through this smoothly.

“Don’t leave me,” Spencer repeated firmly, and Derek hated how tears seemed to be a constant presence on his face. He reached a hand up, his thumb gently swiping under his eye, being careful of the feathers tracing over his high cheekbones.

“I won’t,” Morgan said instantly. He rode in the back of the ambulance due to Spencer’s insistence, but when the EMTs began to administer tests and take his vitals, Spencer was clearly uncomfortable. However, it wasn’t until they attempted to draw blood that Spencer began to freak out and panic. His limbs flailed and his wings flapped wildly, his hand even striking an EMT across the face. When it was apparent that not even Derek was going to calm him down from this, they sedated him, and soon enough, he was fast asleep. Derek looked at the creature with such pity, his chest tight. He didn’t know who Spencer had been before this, but he could only hope that he could grow past this horrific experience.

At the hospital, Derek eventually met up with the rest of his team where they gathered in the waiting room. All of the rescued avians were eventually identified, either of their own doing or through Garcia’s research. Loved ones were contacted and several were quick to arrive while others had to travel to get there. But when he realized that Spencer had no one capable of seeing him, Morgan soon returned to Spencer’s room, wanting to be there when the young man woke up so that he wasn’t alone anymore. He felt such a desire to keep the other safe from danger, to protect him from all harm with ever fiber of his being.

“Tell me about Spencer, Mama,” Morgan said into the phone from where he sat next to Spencer’s hospital bed, his foot tapping on the ground as he leaned forward over his legs, his elbows perched on his knees. Garcia hummed idly to let him know she heard him, and after a bit of rapid typing, she responded.

“Doctor Spencer Reid, a twenty-one year old barn owl avian and Las Vegas native. He was reported missing by his coworkers at Caltech where he worked as a teacher’s assistant… Wow, he is one smart cookie. He has PhDs in math, chemistry, and engineering as well as BAs in psychology and sociology, all obtained before he turned twenty. He was working on his BA in philosophy before he disappeared. Oh my… He applied to the academy, as in the FBI academy, and was given special permission to join the bureau before he turned twenty-two,” she supplied, and Morgan looked upon Spencer in a new light. This beautiful creature was a genius if ever one existed, and he wanted to be an agent. With his intelligence, that certainly wouldn’t be difficult, although he wondered how he planned on passing the physical aspects of training. Perhaps he would be passed for that as well, simply because he had so much to offer. He caught sight of a lone feather on the ground, probably fallen from Spencer’s resistance towards the staff. With tentative fingers, he picked it up.

“Doctor Spencer Reid,” Morgan repeated quietly, thoughtfully, holding the plume by the stem and letting his eyes take in the sheer beauty of just one of Spencer’s feathers. It was like touching a piece of an angel, and when his eyes rose to see Spencer once more, he realized that could be the only explanation.

Oh, how he longed to see that angel fly again.

~

Chapter 2->

[pi-cat000]

MSA: Winged Arthur AU (part 8)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7,  

Part 9: here

. 

Vivi POV 3

“What the?” There is a loud declaration of confusion from Lance. Vivi follows his line of sight to Arthur. Vivi assumes he has just spotted the wings.

“I know. I have no idea how they got there. He collapsed before he could say anything.”

Lance, attention moving between her, the ghost, and Artur, exhales long and hard. Then he angles the gun more towards the ground, ordering, “Keep an eye on that bastard. If it moves, give a yell.”

She nods, stepping forward, allowing Lance inch around her and crouch next to Arthur. He needs to do a bit of manoeuvring to avoid stepping on Arthur’s mess of feathers, but he manages it in his grumpy Lance fashion.

While Lance checks on Arthur, she once again makes eye contact with the ghost. Now hovering closer to the entrance, near a beat-up semi-trailer – where had that come from? –  the ghost is anxiously clenching and unclenching its fists. Purple eyes are tracking their movements with a disturbing intensity. Creepy. Doubly so now ‘Lewis’ looks like a flaming skeleton again. She glares and receives that pitiful expression. Thankfully, with both her and Lance there, the ghost has decided to keep its distance. Vivi would rather it go away and return to its middle-of-nowhere-mansion, but it appears she’ll have to settle for whatever this was.

“He’s okay, I think, apart from the wings anyway. Too dark out here to see much besides feathers. I want to move him inside ta get a better look.” Lance leans back, muttering under his breath, “Also, it’s gotten mighty cold all of a sudden.”

Vivi nods again, relieved to have confirmation on Arthur’s wellbeing. She’s not really feeling the cold but going inside seems like a good a course of action as any.

“What happened to that tree creature?” She asks while Lance goes about trying to pick Arthur up.

“Gone, ran off into the desert with the giant fox.”

“That’s good…I think?” Vivi can’t help the twinge of worry for her fake dog who had been bleeding heavily last she’d seen. Mystery, who had been injured protecting her. Secret or no secret, she feels responsible.

“I got in a few good shots on the tree before they went outta range.” Lance continues to speak, before narrowing his eyes at ghost-Lewis, “What’s that things deal?”

“It’s a wraith,” She states, ignoring the way ‘Lewis’ wilts, flinching back, “They’re dangerous. It’s probably best we keep an eye on it.” Sure, ghost-Lewis seems relatively fine now but she knows that calm is a facade hiding a whole lot of angry fire.

“Right.” Lance doesn’t question her, focusing instead on carrying Arthur which looks difficult due to how the wings flop about. Vivi wants to help but doesn’t like the idea of taking her attention off the ghost for any length of time. Luckily, after a little fussing and several swear words, Lance manages to sling Arthur over his back, so it looks like he’s wearing a very feathery coat. He shuffles his way to the front door. The trip takes an unreasonably long time, considering the door is only a few feet away. Vivi tracks their progress, on edge and anxious.  

There is some difficulty fitting Arthur through the screen door, forcing Vivi to turn and help arrange the wings in a way that will allow them past the frame. Once done, she about-faces to find the ghost has drifted closer, appearing hopeful now neither her or Lance are acting outwardly aggressive.

“No,” She says, brandishing her bat again. “You stay out here.”

“What,” The ghost, stunned, freezes in place, staring like she’s grown an extra head. Vivi steps forward, blocking the entrance.

“You’re not welcome inside this home,” She reiterates. “Uncle Lance. Tell ‘Lewis’ he’s not welcome inside.”

Lance, now just through the doorway, stumbles almost dropping Arthur, giving an abrupt, “Huh?”

“First rule of supernatural anything. They have to be invited into homes.”

“Not what…” Lance shakes his head, “What do yeh mean by ‘Lewis.’”

Okay, so Lance knows who Lewis is…Perfect. That doesn’t change anything aside from confirming her theory that she had known this ghost at some point. She waves pointedly, giving Lance as serious an expression as she can manage.

Lance’s gaze snaps to the ghost in befuddlement.  “Hold up. Yeh not tellin me that that, right there, is Lewis?”

“That’s what he said his name was. Right before he tried to burn me and Arthur,” She states.

“I would never hurt you…I swear. It’s just…Arthur…he’s done something. I don’t know...there’s a lot I… you… don’t know. If you would just let me explain,” The ghost pleads again, genuinely remorseful. Talk about your mood swings. Another point in favour of her wraith hypothesis.

“Is that before or after you burn us both to a crisp.” Vivi snaps back.

Lance side-eyes her seriously. Then he examines the ghost, expression hardening.

“Hurt my nephew and yeh ain’t welcome here. Simple as that,” He grunts and turns, heaving Arthur with him.

“No! You can’t. I’m telling the truth!” The ghost reaches out, fire guttering and flickering to his more human form. He sounds desperate. With one shaking arm, he grasps towards her, “Please.”

Vivi glowers and deliberately slams the door in the, now human, face.  For a second, she doesn’t move, waiting to see if ‘Lewis’ is going force his way in. There is only a loud cry of frustration, more sad and mournful than angry. Back against the door, Vivi exhales hard. Why does her chest hurt like it’s full of breaking glass? She runs a hand along her collar bone trying to massage the ache away. It’s useless, the pain isn’t physical. An inhale, and she pushes herself off the door. 

When she enters the combined living-dining space, Lance has already dragged Arthur to the couch and is in process of wrestling him into a comfortable position. He’s doing his best to work around the copious number of feathers but is struggling to find success. Vivi rushes forward to help, glad for the distraction. They end up lying Arthur down on his stomach so the wings are draped over the couch’s backrest and spill onto the carpeted floor.

“That true? The stuff about welcoming in supernatural creatures?” Lance grunts, while he checks Arthur’s pulse and breathing, running a hand over Arthur’s head and the rest of his limbs, searching for breaks or other injuries.

“I don’t know,” She sighs, straightening, “There’s a lot of lore spanning multiple mythologies, and it crops up a lot in older superstitions. It's more of an educated guess.”

A thoughtful hum.

“Suppose it’s better than nothin. Those myths happen ta mention anything like this?” Lance is now repositioning the wings to look more natural while muttering, “Don’t know nothin about birds. Do these look like they’re sittin right?”

“No myths that I can think of off the top of my head. I mean there are a few where people turn into birds. Not that I think that Arthur is turning into a bird,” Vivi hastens to clarify when Lance gives her an expression of acute alarm. She shuffles nearer, pointing at Arthur, “I think those are flight feathers. They’re definitely not supposed to be bent like that.”

They spent a few seconds straightening the plumages in soft silence.  

“There are a bunch of mythical humanoid creatures that have wings and such. I don’t know…maybe you’re related?" Vivi breaks the quiet and is met with a blank expression. “Do you have any relatives who mysteriously vanished for a few years then rocked up pregnant or with an unknown baby? Was anyone adopted into the family? Like, did someone find a child abandoned on the steps to your house and decided to keep it? Any sudden changes in a family member’s personality like they’d been mysteriously replaced?”

“What are yeh on about?”

“The most common reason why humans’ manifest supernatural traits is usually bloodline related. Someone somewhere had a fling with something not quite human,” Vivi elaborates to which Lance frowns, obviously thinking.

“There’s nothin like that that I can think of. But, don’t get along with the bastards, so who the hell knows.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. I guess I can jump online and look into it.” She looks back to Arthur. “Maybe later...”

Carefully, she reaches out from where she is crouched to smooth out a few more feathers which are twisted at odd-looking angles.  They feel real, growing from between Arthur’s shoulder blades and extending into smaller downier feathers a little along his back. His shirt has ripped from where the appendages had grown in. No sign of that golden light from earlier.

“Who’s Lewis.” She asks, the question coming suddenly. The response is particular. A huff of air followed by tired and drawn eyes. Lance appears almost haunted.

“Humph. Ain’t that a question and a half,” He stands, glancing towards the broken windows. From this angle, they can just make out the back end of the semi-trailer but said ghost is out of view.

“I know him, right? This Lewis person?” Vivi prods.

“Yeah. Yeh know him.”

Lance turns, calculating, “Suppose I could tell yeh more, seeing as ya seem to be retainin the name ‘Lewis’ well enough.”

“Wh...?”

“But not before I get a drink and yeh see to any of ya own injuries. Arthur’s fine enough, but yeh look dead on ya feet."

What did Lance mean by ‘retaining the name?’ Was this linked to her memory gaps? Probably.

“I’m fine. I mean, I wasn’t fine. I got stabbed here,” She rubs her shoulder, “but, Arthur kind of took care of it.”

Lance peers at her shoulder. There’s a lot of dried blood but no sign of the injury it came from.

“Arthur? He did what now?”

“Healing magic. It’s what knocked him out. He just, I don’t know, healed everything. I actually feel great, like I’m on some crazy energy drink. Ah… Sorry.”

Lance snorts, rubbing his eyes, “Don’t apologise. That boy wouldn’t know self-preservation if it hit him over the head. If you’re sure ya ain’t injured any, then how about yeh keep an eye on the kid while I get us something to drink. Then I’ll tell yeh what I know of Lewis.”

Vivi relaxes a little and nods.

“What can I get yeh?” Lance pauses in the doorway.

“Uh…Tea I guess? Herbal if you have it.”

Lance disappears and she hears things being moved around in the kitchen. Vivi settles down into a more comfortable position on the ground next to Arthur, continuing to smooth the feathers. So, she was right, ghost-Lewis fit somewhere into the swiss-cheese that was her memory of the last several years.

.

Note: Okay, so do people want to read a ‘Lance explains Lewis to Vivi’ conversation (if so, then whose POV do you want it in). Or do people want me to skip to Arthur waking up. I’m leaning more towards skipping atm but if there’s interest I’ll probably write that scene first.

Part 9: here

[javistg]

Ethan’s Adventure

This lovely artwork is by @white-dandelion-seeds​ who requested a birthday drabble for her sister.

Hope you like what I came up with. 😊

For the birthday girl: I hope you have a wonderful day! ❤️

Prompt: Canon compliant story about a toast baby and Haymitch’s geese. 

Ethan’s Adventure

Ethan Mellark stood on the tips of his toes and peered over the fence into Haymitch’s backyard.

His gray eyes narrowed as soon as he found the gaggle of geese which had woken him up with their cranky honks in the middle of the night.

“Nuisance,” Ethan whispered, pouring all his anger into the word Haymitch usually used to talk about his geese.

At almost five years old, Ethan didn’t know exactly what the word nuisance meant but, judging by Haymitch’s tone, it wasn’t something good.

He had never understood why Haymitch complained so much about his birds. But, after hearing them last night, the boy was starting to believe that, maybe, it had something to do with the fact that they could keep the entire neighborhood up with their shenanigans.

Unaware of Ethan’s annoyed scowl, —or perhaps unconcerned— the fat birds waddled about, stretching their long necks in the warm sunshine as they grazed.

Their fluffy plumage gleamed —white as a spring cotton cloud— under the golden morning light.

Ethan sighed, already letting his irritation go. No matter how loud they were, the geese were the prettiest animals he had seen up close. For the longest time, he had longed to run his hands over their wings.

Touching the soft down Haymitch gave Momma to fill cushions and comforters when the birds molted was one of his favorite things. The small feathers were as warm and soft as a caress, and Ethan imagined that the long feathers on the geese’s wings would be as smooth as the beautiful silk dress Momma wore on New Years’.

But, as much as he wanted to reach out and touch them, he knew he wasn’t allowed.

Momma said the geese were dangerous. Her face always turned serious when she reminded Ethan to steer clear of them. “I know you think they’re pretty, but they’re just as big as you are, and they’ve got sharp teeth inside those bills. They’re not our pets, Ethan. Just leave them be, OK?”

Ethan always nodded –he could tell Momma wasn’t playing around-- but he wasn’t sure her words were true. Yes, he had seen the teeth —Haymitch had shown him once when his parents weren’t around to scold him— but he couldn’t believe the geese would ever hurt him.

How could they when they always seemed so happy to see him? They all waddled over to the fence to greet him with happy honks whenever he went by.

Which was more than he could say about Whiskers, the family cat Willow had found hiding behind the bakery once.

Come to think of it, Whiskers wasn’t very fond of the geese either.

Willow said it was because he had snuck into their garden once –back when he was a kitten—and one of the geese had stomped on his tail.

Ethan was sure it had been an accident. Haymitch’s geese were rowdy, but they weren’t mean. Still, Whiskers never went inside the fence, and if the geese ever came out –which they sometimes did—the cat kept his distance.

Unlike Momma, --and Whiskers, apparently-- Papa didn’t think the birds were dangerous, but he didn’t like them much either. He called them thieves.

Papa was always telling Haymitch to lock them up and was quick to blame them whenever a loaf of bread went missing.

Momma knew better, though. “They feed on grass, Peeta,” she’d say, her eyes twinkling with mirth. “They might peck here and there for breadcrumbs, but they don’t need to sneak into our kitchen to take a whole loaf.”

Momma’s teasing always made Papa huff and puff in response.

Ethan didn’t like it when his Papa was upset, but the thought of a fat bird waddling at full speed through Victors’ Village with a loaf in its bill always made him laugh. He would have loved to see one of the feathered thieves in action!

After some more grumbling on Papa’s side --and some more teasing on Momma’s-- the conversation invariably turned to Haymitch, who was the most likely culprit.

Papa’s forehead would crease the way it did when he was cross but, as soon as he mentioned stepping out to give Haymitch a piece of his mind, Momma put her hand on his cheek and whispered something in his ear.

Ethan didn’t know what secrets his parents shared when they acted like this, but Papa’s protests invariably turned into a soft hum when Momma whispered to him. Their hushed conversations always ended with laughter and a kiss.

Ethan didn’t care much for kissing, but he liked it when his parents laughed. It warmed his chest from the inside; made him feel safe.

If Ethan’s parents were happy, everything in the world was right.

Except, this morning, things were not right.

Ethan scrunched up his face in confusion. Something was definitely up. It was odd enough that Haymitch’s geese had kept him awake during the night, but now they were ignoring him!

Letting go of the fence, Ethan stomped toward Haymitch’s front door. He knew it was early, --his grouchy neighbor preferred to stay in bed until the sun was high in the sky-- but he didn’t care. There was a mystery here, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.

With the fierce determination he had inherited from his parents, Ethan climbed the steps to the porch, closed his little hand in a fist, and knocked the way Papa did: loudly and without pause.

He was still pounding on the door when it swung open, and a bedraggled Haymitch appeared at the threshold.

Before Haymitch could say anything, Ethan spoke, “What’s the matter with your geese, old man?”

Haymitch’s eyes snapped open. Unlike his mother, the boy was mostly sweet-tempered. “Hey! What’s with the attitude, Kid?”

“They kept me awake all night!” Ethan crossed his arms over his chest, his gray eyes dropped to the floor, and he scowled. “And now they won’t even talk to me.”

Haymitch ran a hand through his hair. It was sticky with sweat and… Well, he hoped it was just sweat. Crouching down, he patted the boy’s shoulder. “Don’t take it personally, Kiddo. They’re just a bit tired, that’s all. Wanna see something neat?”

Intrigued, Ethan looked up. “Yes!”

“OK, follow me.” Haymitch stood up and closed the door, using the motion to stretch his back. The geese weren’t the only ones who were tired this morning. With Ethan at his heels, he walked to the kitchen.

Before going in, Haymitch stopped and turned to the boy once more. “OK, grab on to my legs, walk behind me, and don’t let go. Understood?”

“Yeah, but--,”

“No, no. No buts. If you want to see this, you have to do as you’re told. Stay behind me at all times.”

Ethan pouted. He wasn’t satisfied, but he was much too curious to challenge Haymitch at this point. “Understood.”

“Good. Oh, and one more thing, don’t make a sound. Think you can do that?”

Holding on to the legs on Haymitch’s pants, Ethan nodded.

Haymitch went into the room, carefully adapting his strides to Ethan’s short legs. The pair moved past the kitchen table and kept walking until they reached the entrance to the laundry room. Instead of going in, Haymitch stopped.

Intrigued, Ethan peeked from behind the victor’s legs to see what was further ahead.

His eyes popped open, and he gasped. Remembering Haymitch’s instructions, he tightened his hold on the victor’s pants.

A goose and a gander sat on the floor just a few steps away, right in front of the washing machine. Between them, protected by the grown birds and a soft, worn blanket, two newborn goslings napped.

Ethan leaned forward, pressing his face to the side of Haymitch’s legs as he tried to get closer without alerting the geese. The babies were so small he was sure they could fit in Haymitch’s hands! They were nowhere near as beautiful as their parents --they had no feathers, and their bills were gray-- but the little family seemed peaceful and content.

Ethan knew he had promised to keep quiet, but he just couldn’t help himself. “Can I pet them, Haymitch?” he whispered.

“No!” Haymitch hissed. Before the geese could react to their intrusion, he turned around and carried Ethan out of the room and back to the entrance hall. “Not right now,” he said once they were out of earshot. “But I’ll tell you what, when they’re a little older, I’ll let you. And when you grow up a little bit more, I’ll let you pet the bigger ones too. How’s that, Kid?”

Ethan’s eyes lit up. “Promise?”

“Promise.” Crouching down, Haymitch placed Ethan back on the floor. “Now, scoot along! I haven’t slept all night, and it’s time for my nap.”

Ethan scrunched up his nose. “Are you going to sleep like that?”

Haymitch looked down at his clothes. He hated to admit it, but the kid made a good point. He looked like he had gotten into a bathtub without undressing first.

His wrinkled trousers were dripping at the cuffs, and there was a brownish stain on his shirt that looked suspiciously like bird droppings.

How did that get there, Haymitch wondered, stretching the fabric to inspect it. “I’ll take a shower first. How’s that?”

“Good. You…” Ethan twisted his lips the way his father did when he was looking for the right words to say. “You sort of stink.”

“Alright!” Haymitch opened the front door. “Now get out of here! And don’t come back until tomorrow, you hear? We all need some rest.”

Walking backward, Ethan stepped onto the porch and waved. “Goodnight, Haymitch!”

With a chuckle and a nod, Haymitch closed the door.

Ethan rushed into his house. In his eagerness to share the happy news, he let the front door slam shut behind him and kept running until he reached the kitchen.

His Papa was there, standing by the stove. The scent of melted butter and cinnamon filled the air, and Ethan’s stomach rumbled in response. Papa was making French toast!

“Morning, Papa!” Ethan pulled out his usual chair and sat down.

“Morning, E!” Papa looked up from the pan. “You wash your hands?”

“I did before I went out.” Ethan inspected his palms. Everything seemed to be in order. “I haven't touched anything,” he grumbled.

“Where were you, little one?” Papa placed two toasts on a plate next to a spoonful of fresh fruit and doused them with maple syrup.

“Over at Haymitch’s.”

Papa looked up; blue eyes worried as he carried the plate with toast up to his son. “This early?”

“I wanted to see what was wrong with the geese.”

Papa took a knife and fork and began cutting the toast into bite-sized pieces. “You heard them last night?”

Ethan nodded. That was old news, though. “But guess what, Papa?”

“What?”

“We’re gonna have to lock our doors from now on.”

Papa stilled his movements and gave his full attention to his son. “We are?”

“Yup!” Ethan stabbed a piece of toast with his fork and smiled. “Cause we got two new thieves in the neighborhood!”

[sussex-nature-lover]

Tuesday 29th December 2020

My Bird List Again. Parts 3 & 4

♦ outside links are indicated by bold type - none are affiliated to this blog

Guest Photograph - Two Jays out of the window in South London. I’m assured there were four but as is the way, two took off. Photo Credit: Ms NW tE

♦ Faces in Things. Now I’ve circled the Jays I can see a cartoon character with unruly hair. First thought was a cheeky Ostrich’s head, but Crow thinks he can see a cute Badger. Now I can see both.

Brought Forward 24 species

Yesterday I listed the every day birds in our garden and those we can guarantee to see most days, definitely every week, plus the new spots for this year. Next up is 

GARDEN REGULARS:

These are the birds we see frequently but not necessarily every day or this time of year

Song Thrush

If you followed my Blog earlier in the year you’ll recall the calamitous tale of ‘Tracey’ who tried to nest in our porch, firstly on the top of - and with some gentle encouragement, later inside - the open fronted nest box. We called her Tracey after the artist best known for her ‘messy bed’ Sadly the nest came to nothing except a very watchable experience, but we have seen youngsters who if not from Tracy, someone else got it right this year.

Song Thrush are seen here most weeks but we can’t depend on it being so. What I could depend on through early Spring was that one had taken over from the Blackbird and was giving me wakeup calls from the very early hours. It’s annoying to be disturbed so early, but also kind of comforting to have your regulars out there making their presence known.

Wren

Strangely for such a cute little bird I don’t have anything much to say, certainly no personal stories. They’re around, but very low key. I know them best for their upturned tail and unfeasibly loud voice. Sorry no photo, must rectify that, this one’s from the WildlifeTrusts.org site

Stock Dove

Of all the birds I’ve ever seen the Stock Dove is the biggest revelation to me. Until I had my eyes replaced I thought they were plain monotone grey birds. When I could see properly WOW WOW WOW. They have so many tones, they’re so beautiful and the pink, emerald-jade and purple hues are outstanding when they catch the sunshine. This realisation is one of the most incredible sights of my life and both that initial memory and every new viewing always will be.

Collared Dove

One of the above is not a Collared Dove - nope, not buying it even if you have got your best collar on mate

To be fair, I almost put the Stock and Collared Doves in the every day/reliable category, but on balance I don’t think they’re quite there at this time of year. We do see them most days and the charming Collared ones always come in pairs - just like me and Crow.

Green Woodpecker

My ant-eaters. Not seen on the same basis as the Great Spotteds but they live here and breed successfully. Quite stately birds with beautiful plumage I love to see the brief flash of yellow underwing as they whizz through the garden and to hear their laughing ‘yaffle’ 

Similar to GSWs you can tell the sex by the red or plain black colouring. In the Greens it’s on the ‘moustache’ area - see male above with red: females have black. On the GSs it’s plain black heads for females and a red patch at the nape of the neck for males.

Magpie

Comical birds. We seem to have less here than we did. The most I’ve ever seen was a huge flock on the Common in Tunbridge Wells. It’s called the Common but it has the main road going through it and where I saw them was no more than a large patch of grass and trees. The other side is more typical common land, steep and heath-like.

One year we were highly entertained by garden resident DJ (after DJ Spoony) so called as he created a cache of goodies gathered from around the garden much like a Bower Bird decorates its nest. DJ just kept his treasures amongst the leaves at the base of the palm and included a plastic spoon that we used to put out cat food for the hedgehogs...it took us a while to locate.

Common Buzzard

This photo is from the field now known as Babs’ Field directly across the lane from our house. It’s a big field so this is a very long zoom. We saw a huge Buzzard down the lane just yesterday actually. A lot of sightings recently.

Goldfinch

A standing joke in our house - so, so hard for me to capture a picture of them they tormented me and then all of a sudden this Summer they started coming into the garden more and I got photos on fences, verges and wires down the lane too.

Pied Wagtail

Has bred in the porch nest box years ago, had two successful broods. We watched them fledge down on to the log pile. Favourite nestling was The Bunter - guess why? Maybe that was the one who grew up to be The Inspector patrolling the seed and shooing everyone away just because he could.

Grey Wagtail

Usually flies in for a very quick drink and off again, or perches on the corner of the roof by our bedroom briefly.

Sparrowhawk

Nicknamed for both sexes is Sid (Vicious after the punk rock singer)

These two are males. We know their favourite places in the garden. On the fence between us and next door with an eye line to the feeders; on the posts around the decking, perched on a spade or on the bird bath.

Female below.

Total 11

INFREQUENT VISITORS:

Swallow 

All around the local area, once very welcome guests and residents in our front porch.

I also once found one in Ms NW tE’s bedroom and had absolutely no idea how it could’ve got there. This was long before the nesting. I assume it must’ve found a way under the eaves where there’s a fitted wardrobe built in. It wasn’t panicking at all.

Swift 

Sorry no picture, too high overhead. This one below courtesy of the Wildlife Trust site. Along with Swallows and Housemartins a lovely sign of Summer.

Greenfinch

 A very welcome returner this year and they bred, which is brilliant news

Juvenile

Bullfinch 

Sadly not seen any at all this year, which is unusual. Doesn’t mean they haven’t been and we’ve missed them though

Mistle Thrush

We have seen them, but no photos as yet. 

I can’t tell the difference between a Song and Mistle Thrush, I ask for an expert ID. The RSPB says Mistle Thrush are

Medium-sized birds, they’re our largest thrush Chunky and pot-bellied Tawny brown and grey backs with a creamy white speckled front Whiteish cheeks Bold and bullish

and their song is somewhere between Song Thrush and Blackbird. That said we seem to have some Song Thrush here whose songs have evolved (as they do) This might help, although I think in real life it’s less clear cut. I obviously need more practice. 

Jay

The Jay is so shy and has a fairly comical looking face. They live in the woods but we rarely see them in the garden and any photo is snatched very hurriedly, hence the quality of this one. They don’t need to come into the garden though as the woods are full of Oak trees and so their favourite food supply and places to cache it, is right there for them.

Kestrel

Usually seen up at the farm where we saw her a lot with her babies, this mother of two came into our garden in the Summer.

Common Gull

Rather unclear it was very low light inside the kitchen and this was grabbed with my phone. The last few days we have seen hundreds of Gulls: they’ve come inland to the fields due to the inclement weather I guess.

Nightingale 

Definitely heard and confirmed by our neighbour and the local farmer, however, I can’t hand on heart say I’ve spotted them by eye. I think they should be included here though as we more than likely have seen them as well as heard them. I know where they hang out for sure and it’s steps away (see below) The problem for me is that they’re quite insignificant looking if you’re not primed to spot one.

Photo credit Bird Guides on line

9

ONE OFFS IN THE GARDEN:

Mallard

 Two males and a female decided to reside in our garden one summer. We called them Max, Paddy and Holy Mary - a Phoenix Nights reference from the TV series.

Heron 

Occasionally seen overhead, has investigated our garden pond. Not that we’ve got any fish, which is why it probably hasn’t been back. We see them fly by sometimes and definitely up at the ponds. When the one was in our garden I was struck by its size and prehistoric look, of course they look much bigger in a domestic garden than when you see them in a wider setting.

Below is my own photo of a Heron, but at Richmond, not at our pond.

Turtle Dove

2006 was a good year. We had the Ducks and a few sightings of the Dove. I think it stopped by the following year too but can’t be absolutely sure.

Yellowhammer 2014

Just the once on the patio right in front of us, it was quite a surprise.

This is not actually my photo, which is mislaid for now. It’s generic so can’t attribute it.

Woodcock 2019

The Woodcock was a complete shock. I spotted something out of the side window and because of the colouring thought it was a strange female Pheasant, until I saw its bill. Wooaaah! 

5

ONE OFFS IN THE AREA:

Kingfisher down at the bridge

Mixed flock of Geese including White and Grey Lag - in Babs the Buzzard’s field

2

Sub Category just out of interest and not counted

REPORTED BY MY NEIGHBOUR:

Visual of a Cuckoo, which we’ve only heard and not seen for sure. We possibly saw one at the farm, but didn’t confirm for certain.

Goldcrest. I’m jealous

 + 2

REGULARS AT THE FARM:

Little Owl

White Dove

Coot

Moorhen

Canada Goose

Various Ducks such as Grebe, not including Mallard mentioned above

6+

TOTAL = 57+  species spotted at home and 2 others on the one off list seen adjacent to our garden.

Plus Tawny Owl, heard frequently but can’t promise to have a sighting as yet.

Decoration from the Christmas Trees in Standen Courtyard

a lovely hand stitched heart with wild flowers. Let’s hope the Roadside Verges campaign and sensible strimming season grows stronger next year.

Christmas Music of Choice is the Piano Guys

with a very clever Christmas medley and visuals

[ezatluba]

Hunting is ‘slowly dying off,’ and that has created a crisis for the nation’s many endangered species

By Frances Stead Sellers

Feb. 2, 2020 

They settled, watchfully, into position — a retired couple armed with a long-nosed camera and three men with shotguns.

Tom Stoeri balanced the hefty lens on his half-open car window, waiting to capture the Canada geese as they huddled on the frozen lake, fluttering up in occasional agitation before they launched into flight.

A little more than a mile away, John Heidler and two friends scanned the skies from a sunken blind, mimicking the birds’ honking and hoping their array of decoys would lure them within range — until, Pachow! Pachow! Pachow! Two geese dropped in bursts of grey-black plumage, and a third swung low across the snow-streaked landscape before falling to the jaws of Heidler’s chocolate lab.

Public lands such as these at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area are a shared resource, open to an unlikely mix of hunters and hikers, birdwatchers and mountain bikers.

“It’s a symbiotic thing,” said Meg Stoeri, Tom’s wife and fellow photographer.

But today, that symbiosis is off kilter: Americans’ interest in hunting is on the decline, cutting into funding for conservation, which stems largely from hunting licenses, permits and taxes on firearms, bows and other equipment.

Even as more people are engaging in outdoor activities, hunting license sales have fallen from a peak of about 17 million in the early ’80s to 15 million last year, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data. The agency’s 2016 surveysuggested a steeper decline to 11.5 million Americans who say they hunt, down more than 2 million from five years earlier.

“The downward trends are clear,” said Samantha Pedder of the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports, which works to increase the diversity of hunters.

The resulting financial shortfall is hitting many state wildlife agencies.

In Wisconsin, a $4 million to $6 million annual deficit forced the state’s Department of Natural Resources to reduce warden patrols and invasive species control. Michigan’s legislature had to dig into general-tax coffers to save some of the state’s wildlife projects, while other key programs, such as protecting bees and other pollinating creatures, remain “woefully underfunded,” according to Edward Golder, a spokesman for the state’s natural resources department. Some states, including Missouri, are directing sales tax revenue to conservation.

Here in Pennsylvania — where the game commission gets more than 50 percent of its revenue from licenses, permits and taxes — the agency had to cancel construction projects, delay vehicle purchases and leave dozens of positions vacant, according to a 2016 report, even as it tackled West Nile virus and tried to protect rare creatures such as the wood rat.

“That’s what keeps me up at night,” Robert Miller, director of the Governor’s Advisory Council for Hunting, Fishing and Conservation, said of the inadequacies of the user-pay, user-play model that has funded conservation for decades.

A national panel has called for a new funding model to keep at-risk species from needing far costlier emergency measures. The crisis stands to worsen with as many as one-third of America's wildlife species “at increased risk of extinction,” according to a 2018 report published by the National Wildlife Federation. In December, environmentalists and hunters united in Washington behind two bipartisan bills aimed at establishing new funding sources and facilitating the recruitment of hunters.

The needs are becoming more urgent as development eats into habitats and new challenges crop up, such as climate change and chronic wasting disease, a neurological condition infecting deer. The Trump administration’s recent rollback of pollution controls on waterways will put a greater burden on states to protect wetland habitats.

The financial troubles are growing as baby boomers age out of hunting, advocates say, and younger generations turn instead to school sports and indoor hobbies such as video games.

“Hunting and fishing are slowly dying off,” said Heidler, who described himself as “a fourth-generation waterfowler.”

While his children enjoy the lifestyle, he said very few of their friends do.

“They say there’s not time between school and after-school activities,” he said, adding that even archery rarely leads children into hunting anymore.

The sport is booming at Lancaster Archery Supply, where Kevin Sweigart takes his 14-year-old daughter for lessons. Sweigart said he grew up hunting, but the culture has changed and he hasn’t passed on the tradition to the next generation.

“My dad always told me stories about hunting,” said Norah Sweigart. “But for me it’s just target shooting.”

Many states are devising ways to reinvigorate hunting culture and expand the sport’s appeal to women, minorities, and the growing number of locavores — people who seek locally sourced food.

Colorado has a Hug a Hunter campaign to raise awareness of wildlife management and outdoor recreational opportunities. Pennsylvania, where the number of licensed hunters has dropped from 927,000 to 850,000 over the past decade, is trying to stall the decline with “R3 activities” — efforts to recruit, retain and reactivate hunters.

The state is relaxing its ban on Sunday hunting this year to increase opportunities for working families. The game commission plans to bring a food truck to community gatherings to familiarize people with eating wild game. And it will expand on mentored outings for young people and first-time female hunters.

In October, Derek Stoner, the commission’s hunter outreach coordinator, helped arrange a deer hunt for 20 newcomers, many from the city, with 14 trained mentors at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Tinicum, just south of Philadelphia.

Elena Korboukh, a teacher from South Philadelphia, recognized the event was “a kind of PR campaign to promote hunting,” but said she welcomed the chance to connect with nature — an opportunity she wishes she could offer her students.

“I had hiked the refuge for close to 20 years, but you don’t see a lot when you are moving,” said Korboukh, who killed a deer with a crossbow during the October event. “When you are sitting still, you see a lot, and it’s very, very exciting.”

Pat Oelschlager, one of the mentors at the Heinz hunt, continues to take out inexperienced hunters. On a dank January afternoon in Evansburg State Park, Oelschlager set out to stalk deer with Lenny Cohen, who said he wanted to get closer to his hunter-gatherer roots, which he felt distant from, growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Neither targeted a deer that day but Oelschlager fielded Cohen’s questions about animal behavior, hunting etiquette and the names of native plants.

A few states are bucking the trend. New Mexico, where the number of licensed hunters grew nearly 10 percent over the past four years, credits its successes to R3 strategies such as making license applications available online and reaching out to Latino residents.

Many national hunting advocacy groups, such as Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, have made cultivating interest among people who have had little exposure to the outdoors key to their missions. The National Shooting Sports Foundation is seeking to turn what its research suggests is about two and a half million “aspiring hunters” into actual hunters.

Other groups aim to create experiences that appeal to women, including BOW (Becoming an Outdoors Woman) and the National Wildlife Federation’s Artemis.

“I have had more dance parties in the field with women,” said Artemis’s leader Marcia Brownlee. “And laughed more.”

But revamping the federal funding model has proved tough. A proposed tax on outdoor gear, for example, was killed by resistance from retailers and manufacturers.

The link between hunting and conservation dates back more than a century to when trigger-happy gunmen all but blasted the bison population to oblivion and finished off North America’s most abundant bird, the passenger pigeon. (Martha, the hapless final specimen, died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo before being shipped, on ice, to Washington and put on display at the Smithsonian.)

Small wonder that hunters were asked to curb — and pay for — their excesses. Avid outdoorsmen such as Theodore Roosevelt put their stamp on an enduring ethos that combined sport with conservation and led to the 1937 passage of the Pittman-Robertson Act, which imposed an 11 percent excise tax on the sale of firearms that is apportioned annually to state agencies for conservation.

While critics say the system puts too much emphasis on hunted animals and birds, it has turned the tables for many species including the now-ubiquitous Canada goose and whitetail deer, which had been in decline.

“The species that we have funded have done very well,” said National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara, “which means it’s a fixable problem.”

In December, Congress modernized Pittman-Robertson as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Act, giving states greater discretion in their use of federal dollars for recruitment. House legislators also took bipartisan steps to advance the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would provide states and tribes with $1.4 billion annually from the general fund to restore habitats and implement key conservation strategies. The bill now heads to the House floor for a full vote.

“It’s exciting to see sportsmen’s groups working with greener groups,” O’Mara said.

Still, at Middle Creek and beyond, conservation remains a constant balancing act — not only among the plentiful waterfowl, the returning bald eagles and rare bog turtles — but also among the people.

In a month or so, busloads of tourists will park along the lake, many having flown in specially from Asia, to see tens of thousands of snow geese stop over on their route north to their breeding grounds.

It’s a miraculous sight, free and open to everyone, that has inspired Tom and Meg Stoeri, the wildlife photographers, to bring along their grandchildren.

Tom Stoeri noted that the otter on their special license plate reflects their support of the state’s wild resources.

“I would pay more,” he said. “But I don’t know if the general population would.”

[gplewis]

kiss me through the phone

When you come (cum?) You get a flood of Oxytocin and Vaze-uh-pressin (how do you spell that? what is it? i’m no scientist) The basic bodily and brain systems for attachment (What mothers get when they love their babies)

You might end up attached to somebody who doesn't fit into your life https://onbeing.org/programs/helen-fisher-love-and-sex-and-attachment/

“Don't have sex with someone you don't want to feel something for”

Yep!

--

they both just really need somebody to cry in front of

“what are you trying to hide?” is most of what we deal with

what else is there to do but live once you’re free? the words won’t be good enough to keep keeping words won’t be good enough to do

living is the war of being honest with yourself while making money from other people

The chairperson has disconnected The conference will now end

--

There is one we lose over and over

again

--

oxytocin.

The “love hormone,” as it’s often dubbed, can facilitate mother-child bonding and lay the foundation for healthy social interactions. Oxytocin, importantly, also breeds organizational trust—and, ultimately, a more productive workplace https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/forget-taco-tuesdays-karaoke-fridays-employees-should-celena-chong

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/65340-rumi-the-book-of-love-poems-of-ecstasy-and-longing

As husband and wife move down the funnel together, there is more to the experience than just chemicals released in the physical body… the mind, heart and spirit are all joined together http://www.feedtherightwolf.org/2010/11/brain-chemicals-in-healthy-sexual-act/

--

could really use to put some order to this

There's a cauldron of five women or so but they're all the same woman

the faces change; it doesn't ladder up

in my head in my Notes in my life which were and weren’t so different

now the illusion’s being traded away for a chance at something real

--

"Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph." — Iris Murdoch

"Sex is always complicated and rarely in harmony with affection." http://www.thebookoflife.org/the-great-philosophers-epicurus/

the problem is simply that we don’t see our friends enough, we don’t have meaningful enough work or strong enough relationships, we don’t love ourselves or sing ourselves like we ought to and need to

so we rage

--

A woman, thirty, does not want to leave her childhood home. Why should I leave home? These are my parents. They love me. Why should I go marry some man who will argue and shout at me? Still, the woman likes to undress in front of the window. She wishes some man would at least look at her. — Lydia Davis, A Woman, Thirty

If the person you're having sex with doesn't know about your bad stuff, your struggles and your aspirations, it's going to be disappointing.

"...her whole picture of herself was of her...seductive physical presence. She was not the most successful businesswoman in Los Angeles, but she was certainly successful enough, and quite in addition to that, she was...the main sexual presence in the office. When she walked into the office each morning, everyone, women as well as men, checked her out. She knew that. She could feel her sexual presence go through the place like an invisible chemical, like a hormone, a scent, a universal solvent." http://nymag.com/news/features/45938/

could I even touch it? would I know how? [a link to someone hard to redact] and what if the link stops working? what then? would I have to explain all this and to whom I am referring

?

"If you're lucky enough to have a pretty girl love you and share herself and sleep with you, make that your secret. The best way to spoil love is by talking to too many people about it." — Rip Torn

!

"The goal in courtship is often to prolong the chase, to draw out the sexual tension, to make them wait — and to enjoy this starry-eyed journey from strangers to dating to lovers to partners." http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/how-to-win-tinder/

"Drunk text me. I want to be the one you think of when you can’t think straight." - "Drunk Texts are Flattering" haiku by Claire Luisa

"Sex is a moment in which you are known and knowable. Whatever it is you desire appears from behind the veil of shame or fantasy or nostalgia, or sheer impossibility, and in its presence, you are revealed to yourself. Porn obscures this; porn is about the fantasy of the viewer, not the mixed fantasies, realities, and disappointments of the actors in the room." http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/24/sex-and-salter-2/

"The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space." - Georges Bataille https://www.instagram.com/p/uZH1CDnIC6/

"Sex is difficult; yes. Almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious." — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"The adolescent sees a sex world which is not human enough, merely masculine, which is heat, intoxication and restlessness, loaded with the old prejudices and arrogances with which men have disfigured and burdened love."

---

Before the horns fall away, here’s what the taxidermist teaches:

Because the velvet grows onto the hide we have to skin it and cut it, so nothing rips up and causes damage.

Being cautious that we don’t give it a big yank, use your knife and just kind of pull gently.

Go on—tap the skin away from the bur. See we boned it out.

For hard boned deer we usually just kind of but we can’t do that when it’s in full velvet or it will, you know.

Now we’re going to put a puncture in the tip. So, we’re not just hitting the one vein.

That’s what we want to see.

When Aristotle dissected the embryos in bird eggs, he mistook the spinal cord for the heart.

Anaximander of Miletus wrote that the first humans burst out of the mouths of fish and that we took form there and were held prisoners there until puberty.

At its root, taxidermy means to arrange skin. O love, how precise is any vision?

It’s also true that some whitetails never lose their velvet. Hunters raise their eyebrows calling them atypical,

antlered does, cactus bucks, monsters, shirkers, ghosts, raggedy-horn freaks, because they lead

long solitary lives, unweathered by the rutting season, because their antlers

are covered permanently in a skin that most bucks shed in late summer,

because their velvet horns spike and slope backwards, never hardening to pure bone,

growing ever more askew. A recent one slayed at thirty points was described as having

stickers, kickers, and a whole lot of extra junk full of blood, hot to the human touch.

Gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze. That’s all the cassowary is when you slit her open:

She’s lungs wrapped in dark fur. She’s a full baritone with a soft wattle. There’s nothing in her casque but soft tissue.

Because it makes me want to turn away, I watch film footage of scientists

poking through the pink tendons, the reptilian claw of the euthanized casuarius.

When they fondle the sweet spot, a talon shoots out and stabs a melon the same as it would the appendix of a lazy zookeeper.

I had to cover my eyes when they severed the ancestral wing. Love, we are more than utility, I think.

Love, I know my body’s here when the turkey vulture comes out of the thicket, wings spread wide, smelling all of it.

When talking about how the brain imagines the body, neurologists use the word “schema” to describe the little map that lies across the cortex,

sensing all our visible and invisible parts.

Some phantasms about our bodies in relationship to gender and sexuality are idealized, some degrading, some compulsory, some transgressive.

I am using this embrace, Love, to keep us here in this perceptual field.

When I focus my binoculars, Love, I am as careful as a raccoon working its way

through trash. A soda can passes as the skull of a bird, an eyehole where somebody

drank some sugar down. Love, come close. Love, lie back. Love, lie with me here

beneath a bridge where the light falling on the water shimmers upward casting

shadows on the slats beneath. When you are here, Love, I am beside myself.

If secrets are prayers then maybe bodies

are worth revealing worth repeating

How much plumage dare I show How much down

Some days I am rich as the common garter snake

with more testosterone than you can handle

and the sweetest stench of pheromones

O small pouch O tiny nipple O lactating man

Or as the French say cyprine O Icelandic clam

And whales with lady hips And dandelions in the thick grass

growing stamens growing pistils O lion’s tooth However the wind

rips each part apart However we clone and clone and clone — Jenny Johnson, "In Full Velvet" http://muse.jhu.edu/article/538037/pdf

---

her erotic self was her fake self

in bed she wasn't real

--

we suppress the erotic self in life so it’s in bed we have to be true otherwise what else is there for a hot-blooded thinker to do but lie here awake and long—long for the past transgression we couldn’t help but fumble in our fingers in the dark—love I was your only hope until you left me home

--

I jam my foot inside the gurgling pool filter so I don’t drift away; I want to recover the proper place to put this but years tell me there’s no proper place I’m always getting out of order but the sun comes up and the world still spins

I always return to my instruments

--

"To get along, we all have to conceal our feelings, and to practice the cultivated, calibrated, pragmatic art of dishonesty; we call that professionalism." http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/big-data-comes-to-the-office

“I believe sexuality is the basis of all friendship.” - Jean Cocteau http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4485/the-art-of-fiction-no-34-jean-cocteau

Facebook’s Last Taboo: The Unhappy Marriage http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/fashion/facebook-last-taboo-the-unhappy-marriage.html ignorance isn't bliss, it’s an opiate you never know how good you could be having it

never cry out loud smile for no camera

either way, we’re still ruled by cords

--

“In any relationship, the one with the power is the one who cares the least”

I hated hearing this, I knew it was true

the truth will break your heart before it sets you free but we were made to make it this far, you thinking this, me having written it

[brimbrimbrimbrim]

Smutember Day 25: With Food

Fandom: Infamous: Second Sons

Summary: Delsin’s procured you both some free ice cream. Nothing better, right?

The rattle and ping-fucking-ping of the spray can is soothing even while Delsin tries to ruin your mood. He was always like this at the beginning of the week. Talking nonstop about bullshit that didn’t matter out here in the city. If he wanted to stress over tribe politics he came to Seattle - crashed on your couch - and took your around the city to tag any and everything. A part of you hates that on top of being a friend, you're also somehow his therapist. Maybe that’s harsh though, because this is Seattle and no one cares about the Akomish people, so he is free-er than normal to say what he wants without looking over his shoulder every six minutes.

He edges along the alley wall, frowning with unconcealed boredom, getting closer as he talks and talks and talks and oh - the jerk’s doing it on purpose now.

“If you want me to blast you in the face or something, just say it, Delsin,” you smirk, rattling the number-eleven sunshine yellow spray can beside your hip. “I can make you look like Big Bird if you don’t vamoose your caboose.”

“Hmp,” he snorts, “No thank you. I like my rugged, rusty good looks more than piss-colored plumage.”

“Well,” you cut your eyes to the side, “park your ass over there before you get a mouthful, Smoke Guy.”

His body deflates like some neglected teenager - decorated arms hanging limply at his jean-clad thighs. Delsin rolls his eyes with an obnoxious groan before spinning against the wall, cursing you and your ancestors until he’s a safe distance from a gush of yellow paint.

“Jeesh, if you were a dude and I didn’t know any better I’d think you were flirting with me” he smirked, folding his arms over his stomach until the veins under his dusky skin bulged. You blink, ignoring his intentional display as the paint fumes start floating up your nose.

“Girls can spray stuff in your mouth too, ya know.”

“Gross…” he comments jadedly, and then after feigning a look out at the trees growing over from Thornton Creek park, rolls his gaze to you with a wide grin, “sounds sorta hot actually. You wanna put stuff in my mouth, baby?”

You can read the rest (all 4k) at AO3 HERE. You can, if you want, tip your writer HERE.

[theramseyloft]

On a scale of 1-10 based on show standards what would Richard be? I don't know anything about show pigeons but Richard looks very well bred and very high quality

Thank you!

I definitely tried to breed Richard well! He and Victoria are the best I threw out of Metin and Nurray last year.

So, here is an overview of the Show standard section by section, with his grade following.

GENERAL IMPRESSION: A small to medium sized (average weight 11-12 oz) cobby pigeon, with a jaunty disposition. Stations at near to a 45-degree angle with the tip of the tail just clearing the floor. Typical characteristics include a breast frill, peak crest, grouse muffs, and a medium-short thick beak. Satinettes are shield marked / tail marked birds with white bars or laces on their shield and Moon Spots or laces on their tail. Blondinettes are whole colored birds which also possess white bars or lacing on the shields and Moon Spots or lacing on the tail...Some varieties have the lacing extending over most of the body.

Richard’s overall impression is nice, but he leans forward a little too far.

HEAD: Roundish to slightly oval, substantial, wide. Arched forehead that flows in a smooth, continuous curve from the tip of the beak to the tip of the peak. Wattle small and neat.

There is a tiny bump between his beak and wattle that barely interrupts the curve, but otherwise, his head is very nice.

EYE: Large, bright and prominent. Eye cere fine in texture and flesh colored. Bull eyes in Satinettes. The eye in Blondinettes to be yellow gravel to deep red brown depending upon the variety.

Richard has very nice, big, dark eyes. His cere (the bare flesh around them) could be a little more narrow, but the texture is quite fine.

BEAK: Medium short in length, substantial/thick, blending into the forehead in a smooth, uninterrupted curve. Flesh colored in Satinettes, flesh to horn to black in Blondinettes, depending upon the variety. Wattle small and smooth. Classic Old Frills can feed their young and do not need feeders.

He could stand to have a thicker beak, which would smooth the outline of his head substantially, but overall pretty nice.

CREST: Needlepoint Peak Crest. Upright and central. Rising at least as high as the highest part of the head. Peak crest supported by a well-developed mane, without any sign of a mane break. (The indentation between the Peak Crest and the mane.)

Richard’s crest and mane are fantastic. The needle point, ideally, should rise slightly higher than the crown of the head, which his does. And his mane is practically a straight line from shoulders to peak.

NECK: Short and strong, appearing thick due to the mane at the back of the neck, and the gullet. Held proudly, and upright so that the eye is directly over the juncture of the toes with the ankle. There should be a pronounced gullet extending from just under the lower mandible down the throat into the frill.

Richard is a little long in the neck, which drastically accentuates his forward lean. Were he inclined to station correctly, he’d be tall and regal, but probably a little too tall.

FRILL: The frill should extend from the middle of the gullet and continue into the breast (ideally 2" in length). It should be well developed and profuse. A shorter, more profuse frill is preferred over one that is sparse but greater in length. Feathers to grow outward to both sides uniformly. Feathers that grow only to one side or disproportionately to one side will be penalized. Rose shaped frills will be penalized.

Richard’s frill is pretty sparse and short, and tends to grow mostly to one side.

BREAST AND BODY FORM: Breast is broad, well rounded, held forward prominently and tapering toward the rear of the bird. Size is small to medium with Body Form to be firm. compact and cobby.

Richard has a fine, broad breast that he carries quite proudly. 

WINGS: Strong, lying close to the body, covering the back, without "sails", and lying flat on the tail.

Hard to see with out being stationed, but Richard’s wings are excellent.

LEGS: Short, profusely covered with grouse muffs all the way to the toenails. Toenails to be white in Satinettes flesh to horn to black in Blondinettes depending upon the variety.

The Ramsey COFs have outstanding muffs, especially our cocks. And Richard is no exception. 

PLUMAGE: Well developed, tight, lying flat with the exception of the Frill and the Peak Crest.

Check. Crest, mane, and frill aside, Richard’s feathers are tight and smooth.

FLIGHTS AND TAIL: Flights short, resting flat on the tail. Flights and tail to be shorter rather than longer. Tail to be no more than 2 feathers in width. Tail just clearing the floor when in show position.

It’s hard to judge with out knowing what would be considered short. The shape is correct, when he stations, but it’s hard to see in this photo.

STATION: Upright station at near to a 45-degree angle, which causes the tail to be held downward rather than horizontal.

As mentioned a few times, Richard tends not to station well. He leans pretty far forward and tends to stretch his neck out.

COLOR: While no preference is given to any one color, all colors should be bright, smooth and even. In laced birds the lacing should be clear and distinct. In barred birds the bars should be clear, narrow. long and even. The color inside the bars or laces should be white. The color inside the Moon Spots or tail laces should be white. The factors which give the Oriental Frill its unique coloring are Toy Stencil and Frill Stencil, in combination. Toy Stencil affecting mainly the body and Frill Stencil affecting mainly the tail. Without these factors in proper combination, various shades of color will be produced, from normal coloration to bronzes/ sulphurs and a root beer coloration, in their various hues. Toy Stencil and Frill Stencil causes the whitening effect that one sees in a well marked Oriental Frill.

The inside of his lacing is very nearly white, and lightening as he ages.

RECOGNIZED COLORS:Blue Silver (Dilute Blue) Brown Khaki (Dilute Brown) Ash Red Ash Yellow (Dilute Ash Red) Black (Spread Blue) Dun (Spread Silver) Lavender (Spread Ash Red & Ash Yellow) Recessive Red Recessive Yellow There will also be a class for AOC, for other factors which fanciers successfully transfer over to Classic Frills, such as milky, reduced, opal, etc. It should be noted that these factors must also have the telltale marks of Oriental Frills, and that is the Toy Stencil and Frill Stencil Factors, in combination, so that the same requirements stated in other parts of the standard are applicable to any new color factor added to the gene pool.

Richard is Blue Lace

COLOR / PATTERN / MARKINGS: Satinettes are white except for a colored shield and colored tail (including about half of the rump and the wedge to the vent). Ash Red birds are to have clear and obvious tail color and markings (It should he noted that it is most difficult to achieve the same quality of tail markings in Ash Red/Ash Yellow birds as in other color varieties). The shield is laced or barred. Spread birds have a laced tail. Non-Spread birds have a barred tail with white Moon Spots. The shield bars are to be White. The inside of the laces on the shield are to be White. The inside of each Moon Spot is to be White. The inside of each laced tail feather is to be White. There should be a clear delineation between the lacing and the ground color. The bars should be clear, long, even and narrow. The ideal is 10x 10 white flights, always with colored thumb feathers. White thumb feathers will be penalized. 7 to 10 white flights are allowed, with even numbered flights preferred over odd numbers of flights on opposing wings. There is to be an even line of demarcation across the rump between the colored tail and white back. This line falls about half way between where the wings first separate and the actual beginning of the tail feathers. An even line, both top and bottom, is more important than the actual location of the line on the rump. The same description applies to the Blondinettes with the exception that the Blondinette is a whole colored bird and has no solid white feathers. In Spot tail version of Blondinettes, usually just the tail and the wings show Toy and Frill Stencil. In Laced Tailed varieties, the lacing usually extends over most, if not all of the body--these are usually the spread factor birds.

Richard is a Satinette, as are all of my COF. He has some hip staining, but is actually one of my least mismarked young birds.

So, here is how we came to Richard.

This is Glasgow, my foundation cock.

Fantastic station, though he’s a little horizontal. His crest is a little low and not especially pointy.Good thick mane. Beautiful head, big eyes.Profuse frill and muffs.Excellent lacing.Overmarked in the chest, belly, and legs.

And this is Rosequartz, my Foundation hen.

VERY horizontal stance, with a thin beak and broad crest.

Excellent frill, color, pattern, muffs, mane, and head shape.

Notice that these birds have several good features in common, and mostly opposite faults.

Ash Red and blue are sex linked back grounds.

The cherry on top of this pair is that a Blue Cock on an Ash Red hen will throw Ash Red cocks and Blue hens.

Here is their beautiful daughter, Nuray, showing off her excellent station and overall shape.

And here she is at nearly 6 months so show the development of her beak and peak crest and the clearing of the root beer stain from her lacing.

She is overmarked on the legs, but a clear improvement over both parents, which is what you are aiming for.

I purchased Metin for Nuray to improve her head shape and markings.

They threw me Richard, pictured up top, and Victoria.

Victoria has more of a Seraphim head, but her structure and color are excellent.

You can clearly see the improvements along the family line, bringing the birds closer to the Standard.

We will select from her young with Richard this year the baby with the best stance, head, frill, crest, mane, muffs, color, and pattern and select a mate for him/her from an unrelated loft.

I have a possible keep back selected already, but I will be observing the rest of the peeps through out the rest of the year to see if I hatch any more sound.

[galacticbugman]

My favorite Birds

Somewhere along my crazy life I became a birder long before I became really interested in insects. It was back in the year 2015 when I had to have surgery on my kidneys due to a thing I have had since birth. Anyway while I was recovering my late grandmother bought me a camera to use. That Camera was a Nikon Coolpix L830. It was the camera that would lead me down this new path as a naturalist. While I was recovering I found myself using it more and more. I would often spend time out in nature and I found myself studying birds around my home town. My aunt taught out in a small area and next to their school they had a filed and an old farm stock tank. I would spend a lot of time photographing the birds and that is how my love for birds grew. I became a birder and have been all over Texas and Arkansas and even in parts of Oklahoma looking for birds of any kind. Even after I got into the Texas Master Naturalist program and now I am still a birder and have found many cool species in just a matter of four short years. I over 170 birds species on my life list but I am going to share just a fraction of those since that would be a lot of ground to cover. So here we go with my favorite birds from 2015-2019. Here we go with... *Dramatic Voice* NUMBER ONE! 

One of Texas’ most iconic birds; these little guys are not a parrot but they are related to the Northern Cardinal. Meet the Painted Bunting. This is a male that I got out at a place called the Southwest Nature Preserve. It is the place I got my start before I became a Texas Master Naturalist. These guys are so pretty with a head of royal blue, tow toned green feathers, a bright red breast they are a birder’s gateway bird. This one is one I had been searching for all my life. I finally saw my first one in 2015. It was at my feeder but I didn’t have my camera ready but this one I got in 2016 totally made up for it. These guys have one of the prettiest songs and for their tireless singing they are illegally caught in Mexico and sold as cage birds. They are a Near Threatened species unfortunately due to them being sold and put in captivity. The males are the most colorful of the two sexes. The female is an electric green color for camouflage when it is time to raise a family. She nests in a tickets of green brier which is a spiny vine that grows in most forests. They feed on a grass known as cup grass which is a Texas native grass. Some times they will feed at a feeder like the first one I ever spotted. It was one day after school and I was not having any luck with the birds so I went inside and after a while I went out to look out my den window and a male Painted Bunting eating out of my feeder that I had put mixed seed in. He ate and ate and ate. He would fly off and then come back. That was a truly special moment of my life. Now during most summers I get to see about two or three a year. Still one I am not sick of seeing. They are one that should always be on any birders watch list. They are such a striking and lovely bird.

Now on to bird *Dramatic Voice* NUMBER TWO 

Next up is the endangered Loggerhead Shrike. I have been going to Tarrant County College for a while now and I get up there pretty early to go to school during the Fall and Summer. This is one that I see pretty often while arriving by the Football Stadium across the street. These guys are colored very much like the Mockingbird but they have a darker and much bolder mask, hooked beak, and a more stouter build. They are a song bird but they have a raptor like way of life. Remember that hooked beak remark? Well that is how they rip and shred their prey. However they have a slight problem; their feet are much more like a songbird than a bird-of-prey so they have a solution to dealing with this issue. They will skewer their prey on a barb or a spine on a tree, bush, or barbed wire fence. These guys will then pull apart their prey. The more they have in their tree or where they store prey the more female shrikes will consider them to be more fit to be father’s to their chicks. They are one of my favorite birds and I have even noticed some of our trees have been used as their food trees. They are a really neat bird and one that is found in open areas. They are often seen on power lines and even in trees. They will eat a lot of things such mice, snakes, bugs and frogs. They are one of the coolest birds to learn about and one of the most interesting having the best of both worlds being one half song bird and one half raptor which is only seen in one other bird which is the Northern Shrike which we do not get in Texas. 

Bird NUMBER THREE! 

Now why is this Coyote in the photo well because the bird coming up is the Coyotes’ greatest nemesis. Well... okay... maybe not in real life but it is in the Looney Tunes skits. Lets meet the Roadrunner. 

The Greater Roadrunner is not really on the menu for the Coyote as most of Looney Tunes fans would like to think. In fact they get a long pretty well for the Roadrunner is fast and in actuality the Coyote wants stuff he can catch. The Roadrunner is a fast bird but instead of sticking out his tongue and making a *Blup* *Blup* *Blup* *MEEP! MEEP!* Sound followed by a loud ricochet sound; these guys actually sound much like a dove. Their calls can be a triple bill clap followed by a single whoop which is an alert to stay back which I have experienced first hand. They also have a sound that is a dove call that is loud by then gets softer and lower in tone but it is more of a gruff tone. I have only been able to photograph these birds three times this one here was my most recent one. This one was at a place near my school called Stella Rowan Prairie. We had just parked and my dad told me to look up and we saw it and I was able to get out and get this shot of the bird before he went into the under brush and disappeared. These are one of my favorite birds. Let me tell you they are fast but don’t believe everything you see in Hollywood productions. I love the roadrunner for many reasons one they are fast and two they are one of the funniest looking birds we have in North America. They are known to eat reptiles but are no strangers to raiding the dog dish. They will also eat insects. They are one of the fastest animals I have ever seen in the wild. You have to be very quiet to sneak up on one of these or they will quickly flee from you. They are sometimes a pain to photograph but once you do it is an experience you are not ever going to forget. 

The next one is one of my favorite ducks; this is my favorite of the North American Ducks. Meet the beautiful North American Wood Duck. This is a male; just look at his beautiful plumage of green, white, and chestnut, mixed with some cream color on the side where his wings are. What a beauty! These are my favorites for the male’s calls just make my heart melt. The males when calling make a squeaky DEZEET DEZEET DEZEET! Sound. It is high and a pleasant sound. The photos don’t do these guys justice; you have to look for them and experience them in the wild. I took all of my Wood Duck photos in Fort Worth Texas. This one was taken in Fort Worth at a nice little duck pond that is not too far from the Trinity River. These guys are so beautiful and the funny thing is they don’t look real. The female of this species is nearly all gray with some white. They nest in hollows of old trees in little cavities about seventy five foot up so predators don’t get to their nests. When time to hatch the female goes to the water as her babies hatch they will fluff up and then she will start to call and they have to drop seventy-five feet down to get to her. It is kind of daunting but they have a nice cousin to land in. They are one of the most common of our ducks but in my experience I have seen very few in my life time but they are real treat to see in the wild. 

One of my favorite birds of Prey will have to be the American Kestrel. I was lucky enough to be out at the exercise track out at TCC South when I saw this guy sitting on a power line. This guy would take off and it was one of the very first birds I got in flight for the first time. They are the smallest bird of prey in North America and are the smallest of our falcons. They are specialists mainly insects and other small things. They are very pretty with colors of reddish brown, a grayish blue color, black spots on the face with black spots on the wings. They are so pretty and you will almost miss them. They are very cute and they don’t really look like a bird of prey but they are and they often fall prey to other birds of prey if they are not careful. These are often found in Texas in the winter time more times than in the spring and summer. 

One of most recent birds I got on my recent trip out to the Texas coast. This is the funnest bird you can ever look for down here. They look like something you will see in a Zoo and truth be told you can but like most things it is more rewarding to seek these guys out in their natural habitat. Meet the Roseate Spoonbill. These birds are naturally born white but due to the algae and the shrimps they eat they turn pink. These guys are always out in the early morning in feeding groups like the one here. I took this at a place called Indian Point Park near where we were staying. This was one of my favorite shots even though it was not that close. Any closer and they would have fled. There was a lot of stuff feeding that morning. I got a lot birds on the trip when this was took. I love birding it is very fun and rewarding. It is one of my favorite past times even though I often get side tracked and look for other things. Let is just put it this way I love to just watch wildlife and explore its beauty. Whether watching the birds of the skies, or the bugs that crawl around, the fish that swim, the plants that are so fragrant and green, the fungus that looks like it comes from another planet, the mammals that are everyone’s favorite, or the reptiles that are lesser appreciated. I love nature and all that is in it. Nature like I have said has some neat stuff to look at. It is the best thing we have; without it we could not survive. It is the life force that keeps us afloat and we must protect it for it is in danger from what we are doing to it. We must do our part and do what we can to prevent more harm to the environment. So get out an explore and make that connection. Lose yourself and discover a world of wonder.        

[starlingbright]

Expect the Unexpected

“Goodbye, Goodbye!”

“Funny way to say good morning, sweetheart!”

“Oh, it was just my dream. There was this black swan, and she was so very kind to me. We sailed on a sea!”

“Did you?! What else happened?”

“Well, I ate jelly beans and saw an owl in a pea green boat, like that poem you read me! We sailed and sailed and the sky was blue and purple and pink and black and orange and then I woke up!”

“Alright, peaches. What shall we do this morning?”

“Let’s learn about black swans!”

“Alright, after breakfast.”

A quick meal of cereal and milk is consumed and mother and child sit down at a computer to research.

‘A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict. Black swan events are typically random and unexpected.’

“Wow, baby! That’s really neat! Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“What does deviate mean?”

Mother patiently defines all the big words and child is suitably impressed.

“Let’s see about the actual birds now!”

From Wikipedia: ‘The black swan (Cygnus atratus) is a large waterbird, a species of swan which breeds mainly in the southeast and southwest regions of Australia. Within Australia they are nomadic, with erratic migration patterns dependent upon climatic conditions. Black swans are large birds with mostly black plumage and red bills. They are monogamous breeders, and are unusual in that one-quarter of all pairings are homosexual, mostly between males. Both partners share incubation and cygnet rearing duties.

Black swans were introduced to various countries as an ornamental bird in the 1800s, but have escaped and formed stable populations. A small population of black swans exists on the River Thames at Marlow, on the Brook running through the small town of Dawlish in Devon (they have become the symbol of the town), near the River Itchen, Hampshire, and the River Tees near Stockton on Tees. Described scientifically by English naturalist John Latham in 1790, the black swan was formerly placed into a monotypic genus, Chenopis. Black swans can be found singly, or in loose companies numbering into the hundreds or even thousands. Black swans are popular birds in zoological gardens and bird collections, and escapees are sometimes seen outside their natural range.’

Mother finishes reading alone, child having run off to play. Idly, she searches for Dawlish.

‘Dawlish is a traditional seaside town, with a wonderful golden sand beach on its doorstep. The town offers a range of amusements and is centred around The Lawn and Brook, which is home to the famous black swans. Just a few miles down the road is Dawlish Warren, a beautiful nature reserve with a blue flag beach.’

Wow, she thinks, sounds like just the place to retire to!

That night, as they snuggle before sleeping, she tells her husband about black swans and Dawlish, which it turns out doesn’t have much in the way of jobs, so she was right about retirement, although she knows it’s probably just a pipe dream.

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The sky overhead is blue and so vast that her mind can barely comprehend it. Wait, she thinks, why can I see the sky? I’m in bed!

She clambers out and sure enough, there is her bed, sitting in the sand. Before her stands a great ocean, nearly as vast as the sky. Behind her is a stand of trees so thick she cannot imagine breaking into it. She calls out for her husband, her daughter. There is no answer.

Panic! Everything is okay as long as they are with her, but without them, her only goal is to be reunited. She walks the beach; it is a softly curved and less than a mile long, cut off by forest again at either end. “Where am I?!”, she cries aloud. “Please let me be dreaming!”

She does not wake up. She despairs, but only for a moment. She must do her best to find them! She returns to the bed to assess her supplies.

The bed has a wooden headboard and metal rails. It’s got a mattress and a boxspring; fabric, stuffing, metal springs and wood. There is lots more fabric in the comforter, sheet and pillowcases. So, she has quite a bit to burn, quite a bit to wear, and something to use as a very awkward weapon, perhaps. In theory, she could make some kind of raft, but there’s nothing in sight and she knows oceans are vast. She looks at the impenetrable forest again; she will just have to penetrate it. She looks along the edge till she finds a sturdy walking stick and smaller sturdy stick to help her push her way through.

Ten...fifteen...minutes of hard struggle, scrapes, scratches, and bugs later and the woods thin out and suddenly she is free, before her more sand and the sea...and an occupied pea-green boat. She runs for all she is worth; it’s long, the island being roughly a mile wide, but she grows more and more excited as she runs, because it clear that the boat contains one large person and one small one. Soon, she is close enough to see dark hair on both heads and her heart beats harder. At last, she is close enough to call out and they answer and the world is right again because they are hers.

She stumbles into the boat with them and throws her arms around them as she gasps for breath. It is clear they are fine. Her lungs finally full, she says wryly, “I guess this is what we get for having a daughter named Alice...” and they all laugh.

[maudeling]

Scapegoat

AN: A short story based on a draft written for a class project on heterosexual productivity, the “memory wars”, and blaming queerness on child sexual abuse.

Revised: 1 February 2020

The doctor sunk his hands into her skull with a thick squelch. He strained the gray matter with his fingers, searching for odd clumps, plucking them out like ugly pearls. Look at these, he said, fishing up pieces of blackened shrapnel, her childhood bath toys, her mother’s running shoes, and a ball-peen hammer from her father’s old toolbox. He held each scavenged treasure up for her inspection, close enough for her to see the glint of her cerebral fluid dripping from the soaked fabric of a tattered shoe, before discarding them one after another on the floor. She scooted back to avoid the falling hammer, only to tear open the soles of her naked feet dragging them over the jagged bits of metal scattered across the linoleum. Don’t they seem familiar?

The young woman sat stiffly across the desk from the psychoanalyst, the letters on his nameplate dancing into illegibility before her eyes. In her arms, she cradled a glass jar filled with a murky liquid, something dark and billowing suspended in the muck. Goosebumps crawled up her skin at the doctor’s placid mouth. Let’s try this again, he said, wiping the gray matter off his fingers with a handkerchief. What frightens you the most?

Basements, she didn’t say. Kitchen tables. Road trips out into the countryside. Nothing she hadn’t dealt with for years on her own. Some things shouldn’t be spread outside the family, that much she knew. The doctor listed the symptoms of a disorder he didn’t name. Flashbacks, night terrors, and suicidal ideation. He tapped a pen against his clipboard in a heartbeat rhythm: tap-tap, tap-tap. The young woman struggled to unclench her fingers. Sexual dysfunction, he added with a crick of his neck, and a repetitive compulsion to spoil happy relationships. His words rang hollow in her bones, trembling with the force of little earthquakes and spreading out into her extremities like she’d been cursed by a magic spell. She was a trespasser in her own body, nothing more than nerves and flesh stretched over someone else’s skeleton: if she brought herself to her feet, her abdomen might tear open like an amniotic sac, spilling an epitaph onto her lap, carved into granite and soaked in afterbirth.

I want to help you remember, the doctor insisted, standing next to a mannequin hanging from a tall wooden frame in the corner of his office. It was dressed in a loose lab coat over tight-fitting underclothes, soft cotton stretched out by false muscle and an exaggerated bulge. A lopsided wig covered the dome of its head, some of the hairs torn out by the roots to mimic a growing bald spot. The loose details of its face had been traced in black sharpie, from the laugh lines and the stubble to the fat mole on the bridge of its nose. It looked nothing like the young woman’s father, too still to be alive and too hollow to be a corpse. The doctor didn’t seem to mind. He asked her leading questions about the pale spots in her childhood memories, all the while caressing the mannequin and staring reverently into the white plastic of its eyes.

The doctor’s hunger for the subject was incomprehensible to her. She couldn’t remember what she had for breakfast the week before, let alone what happened in these missing moments of her childhood that rang louder with dread the longer the man talked. We bury the things that hurt us deep down within ourselves, he said, leaning over the armrest of her seat. She wrinkled her nose at the cloying smell of mint on his breath. No matter how deeply we lay them to rest, they always linger. He picked up the hammer, wiped a spot of blood from the handle with his thumb, and gently tapped the lid of the glass jar in her arms. Like the bones of a body in a grave. The jar shattered in her lap, spilling dishwater and sharp edges and the strange weight of her mother’s head, waxen and twitching like a live catch on the cutting board at the fish market. It’s not impossible to dig them up.

She caught the head before it could stumble down her thighs, gripping the cold, slippery flesh with the pads of her fingers. Her mother’s eyes were clouded with a milky film, her lips were bloated and blue, and her hair was soaked in brine and adorned with shimmering scales. She hugged the disembodied head close to her chest, burying her nose into its crown, straining to breathe in the sickly-sweet odor of saltwater, anesthetic, and rot. From behind her, plastic hands tugged at the soaked fabric of her shirt, pulling at her hair and pinching bruises on her skin. I don’t want to go with him, she pleaded quickly. I want to stay with the head in the jar.

The young woman shone like a constellation in shards of glass, their sharp iridescence thrust into the soft flesh of her stomach and thighs. Her wounds bled a clear, yellowish fluid that dripped into the puddle forming on the linoleum. The doctor lay at her feet with a hammer embedded in his skull, pink foam trailing the slow path of a toy boat through the mix of blood, water, and afterbirth. Hollow hands cupped her cheeks from behind and slipped their fingers into her mouth, fouling her tongue with something hot and damp and bitter. The head landed on the wet floor with a small splash. It blinked the milk out of its eyes and gasped, air rushing into its mouth and spilling out of its severed throat, blowing ripples into the fluid, and spoke—

Sarah found herself alone in the passenger seat of her mother’s car, her head a stiff and throbbing weight suspended from her neck. The keys still hung from the ignition, and the radio spat bursts of static between the warbling of a gospel song mired in signal loss. The morning shone through the windshield, bright and unsparing, turning the air of the sedan muggy and hot with trapped sunlight. Sarah ran her hands down the stomach of her blouse and smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt. Her seatbelt had been undone sometime in her sleep, and her lap had been picked clean of the orange peels and paper towels left over from the morning’s drive. Gone too was the handbag in which Eunju kept her sketchbook and cigarettes, though the back seats were still stuffed with bloated grocery bags and Sarah’s luggage from the airport. The vehicle itself was parked on the flat dirt before the entrance to the hanok, the house’s wooden gate held open with a length of rope.

Stumbling out of the car, numb and uncertain on her feet, Sarah took in the achingly familiar sight of the mountains with her eyes half-shut from the glare of the empty sky. Once upon a time, back when she’d been a child with a different name, before her family had emigrated to the States, she’d spent the odd weekend in her mother’s ancestral home. Though the original building had been burnt down by People’s Army soldiers during the Korean War, the house had been rebuilt by the village not long after the armistice had been signed. Whenever Eunju got stuck on a difficult commission or fell too deeply into her depression, she’d pack little Sarah into her car along with her art supplies, an overnight bag, and far too much food for them both, to drive them out to the country house in Yangpyeong. She’d weed out the dying garden, hike up the mountain to splash rice wine on her family’s graves, and haunt the rooms hosting her late grandparents’ portraits, until she felt human enough again to return to her husband. There was a polaroid somewhere, of a child mounted on the back of a burial mound, smiling for the camera with missing teeth and gripping a bouquet of wildflowers in a small fist. Likely lost in a box along with her great-grandfather’s yut sticks, and the long woolen socks her grandmother had knitted for her every winter until the year she died.

She found Eunju in the courtyard before the old vegetable garden, sucking on a cigarette, sitting cross-legged in the grass with her shoes discarded by her naked feet. Her attention was stuck on the sketchbook in her lap, open to a drawing of a sparrow stuck in the brambles: a small and delicate thing with dark, beady eyes and a ragged plumage, captured in the tender grayscale of Eunju’s pencils. Cheep! Chirrup! The bird itself looked like it’d been the plaything of a lazy housecat, wounded but alive. It flapped its mangled wings against the ground to no avail, having lost too much of itself to carry its own weight. Eunju peered back and forth between the bird and her drawing, her lips twisting into something like scorn. As Sarah approached, the woman blew out a plume of smoke into the sky; she wiped the sweat from her forehead, smearing her skin with graphite, and tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette before dousing the stub in the soil.

“I used to dream about you,” Eunju said, tearing out the page from her sketchbook. “Before you were born. A taemong, or so I believed. Of a persimmon tree that grew right here, in my grandmother’s garden. Its branches reached out for me, spilling through an open window into my room, climbing into my bed to wind themselves around my swollen feet. They bloomed strange little petals brimming with a phantasmal light, shining as bright as stars and pulsing with a sympathetic heartbeat.” She crumpled the torn page into a ball. “Your father was drinking with my relatives in the sitting room, watching a news broadcast about a floating city that had emerged from the Yellow Sea to ferry immigrants across the ocean to America. My mother was alive,” she said with a quirk of her lips, sparing a glance at Sarah as she sat next to her on the grass. “Praying at my bedside. She’d come to the front gate on the back of a white tiger, claiming Heaven had given her a reprieve, that she might visit us for an evening to see her grandchild in person. And in my arms?” She tossed the crumpled paper ball at the grounded bird. “I held a beautiful baby boy, with a soft face, and a promise of good fortune etched into his palms.”

Sarah tasted sick in the bottom of her throat. She clenched her fists hard enough for her nails to dig into the trench where her heart and head lines entwined. She strained to hear over the sound of her own breathing, waiting for the basement door to slam, and her father’s heavy footsteps to rattle the hollow stairs. What a senseless thing to fear, in the courtyard of a hanok without a cellar, within the walls of a property that Eunju had kept religiously to her side of the family, not once letting her husband step foot inside the place outside the wildness of a dream. It was just the two of them left, her mother gathering more memories she could sharpen into weapons, and Sarah bracing for the blow of a backhand instead of words soaked in vinegar and honed to a point. She tugged the hem of her floral-print skirt further down her thighs.

“Can you imagine what this dream meant to me?” Eunju asked. “Four years married and childless, with my sister muttering that I must be barren? When we were still in college, she never talked about settling down and finding love, because she’d had the temerity to be born a girl and was raised as an afterthought, and I would be married before she’d have to worry about our father’s ‘polite’ concern, or the silence of our mother’s grave. I’d give our parents the grandchild they’d always wanted, while she’d fly off to France and bury herself in the words of the dead writers that climbed through history to steal her heart away with pretty words. In my dream, everyone was happy with me because you were born. Then the dream came true,” she ran a thumb down Sarah’s neck, lingering at the bump of her Adam’s apple. She tugged the straps of Sarah’s bra beneath the collar of her blouse. “And I could almost hold this fantasy in my hands: my mother, beside me again, fussing over bathing you properly and feeding you right. My sister coming home for the holidays, lavishing you with gifts and spoiling us with fantastic stories of her cosmopolitan life. It was all I ever wanted—my family, together again, finally satisfied—and didn’t I deserve that?” she asks. “After all that I’ve done, for everyone?”

It’s not about you, Sarah bit her tongue. Swallowed the words back down her throat, unsure if it was the truth, but certain it would hurt. Especially with Eunju caught up as she was, picking at the loose hairs on Sarah’s shirt and pinching skin. Gorging on her regrets with a blank sketchbook and an empty stomach, mourning her only child in front of her daughter like Sarah was nothing more to her than a living grave. An imitation of loss that felt too much like the real thing. She knew where this was going. Why her mother had brought her here, after all these years, with her father too dead to hide from and herself barely speaking to the only family that would still acknowledge her existence. Just like she knew if you put a cup too close to the edge of the dinner table before a fight, it would stumble over onto the kitchen tile. Like a recurring nightmare. All she could do was wait for the glass to shatter: for shrapnel and warm fluid to soak the linoleum by her feet.

“It’s always the mother’s fault when the child turns out wrong. Because all men have their tempers, and widows shouldn’t speak ill of their dead.” Eunju took Sarah’s hands into her own, kneading at her wrists until her fists uncurled to reveal twin rows of crescent moons across her palms. “Sometimes I dream of traveling back in time. To when your father was still kind and you were healthy and untouched. We had such hopes,” she shook her head. “Of a good life in a new country, believing the tragedies of our past wouldn’t follow us over the ocean. We promised each other we wouldn’t mourn the mistakes of our parents, let alone repeat them. That we’d raise you to be a good son who’d marry and have children of his own, and be satisfied with what he’d been given. I was so certain you needed your father in your life,” her voice grew worn and thin. “You loved him the best when you were a child, don’t you remember? You’d stay up late into the night because he’d bring you toys instead of apologies for missing another monument in your life. He and I might have hated each other by the end of our marriage, but we both hoped you could be happy in our stead. And sons need their fathers, just like girls need their mothers.” She brushed a thumb over Sarah’s cheek, leaving behind a dull smear. “What good came of it? Now you’re so frightened by his memory, you won’t even admit what he did to you, to make you think dismembering yourself into a woman could ever give you back what he took from you.

“It was never your fault,” Eunju absolved. “It was his. And now he’s gone.” She grasped the back of Sarah’s head and forced her to meet her stare. “It’s not too late,” she said. “You’re still so young. If only you would abandon this dead end, and see the world ahead of you.” She leaned in close, as if she meant to whisper a secret into Sarah’s ear, or slide a knife between her ribs, just until the tip could prick at something vital. “There’s this doctor I want you to meet. He told me he’s had experience with patients looking to de-transition. He could fix what your father broke,” she crooned, running her hands down Sarah’s back. “Find you a good surgeon, when you’re ready to be my son again. I would give anything to go back in time to fix my mistakes. It’s not too late for you, for that to be impossible.”

Sarah shut her eyes. She felt a tremor down her spine, as if a colony of ants had skittered out of her mother’s fingers to explore the ridges of her vertebrae. And for a miserable little moment, Sarah wished she’d inherited her father’s explosive temper, instead of the listless tincture of disenchantment and betrayal that never did more than petrify her into salt at the sound of Eunju’s voice. If only it were so easy, to tear herself free from the woman’s fumbling attempts at intimacy and drag her body out of the garden, heavy with a stricken heart and a stomach engorged with longing. To leave her mother behind to monologue into her empty sketchbook, her only company her discarded pages, cigarette stubs, and a flightless bird, surrounding her in a ritual circle like the wreckage from a bomb. Perhaps it ran in the family, this fathomless want to forever escape what she couldn’t just ignore. Or to circle back, like kinship was a bad habit that dwelled in the lungs, blackening her insides and suffocating her slowly.

Pale smoke spilled out of her mother’s mouth like a waterfall. Eunju tapped the butt of her lighter at the crown of Sarah’s skull with an upsettingly familiar rhythm: tap-tap, tap-tap! Her mother’s words tasted like ashes and rotten fruit; they bloomed like flowers in a dream. She plucked the cigarette from the woman’s grasp and wrapped it in her lips to extinguish the embers between the molars of her teeth.

Repeat the truth often enough, and the truth starts to sound like a lie. How many times had Sarah claimed her being transgender was nobody’s fault? She’d exhausted herself in the effort, wearing away her voice into a tattered thread, bloodying her fists against the wall of her mother’s stubborn incredulity. Hear a lie repeated often enough, and the lie starts to sound like the truth. Your father molested you when you were a child, so now you dress like a woman to escape him. There were gaps in Sarah’s memory that warped each time her mother asked her to relive them. Flashbacks to events that didn’t make sense when put together in sequence. She was terrified of basements, kitchen tables, and road trips out into the countryside. She remembered sitting next to her father in an emergency room, biting back tears as he promised her sweets and extra time on the computer in his lab, if only she’d be an obedient son and keep her little mouth shut. She remembered the apologies he’d offered her on his deathbed, too afraid of damnation to pass away quietly, but not remorseful enough to name what he’d done to her that had haunted his mind for decades but slipped from hers entirely.

Whether it had really happened or it was a false memory that never took, Sarah couldn’t understand why her mother kept insisting on her to remember being raped. Wasn’t it enough, that her pulse picked up like a jackhammer whenever her roommates shouted to be heard through the walls of their apartment? Some nights she dreamed so deeply she’d wake up paralyzed, with an impossible weight pressing down on her chest, like a wet corpse, or her mother’s disembodied head, starving her of strength and oxygen. In the mornings after, she’d scrape from the bottom of her heart for every spoonful of feeling, as if her nightmares had stilled the blood inside her, and functioning as a living person would feel like wading against the ocean at high tide. She’d been hurt, and hurt others, in innumerable ways; she didn’t have to remember something different, for what memories of her father she did have to haunt her still.

Sarah’s hands were slick and aching with soft bruises and damp flour. Rows of uncooked dumplings lay plump and still on the table before her. A singer crooned a hymn over the kitchen stereo. A drop of sweat ran down her neck with an idle itch. She pressed her weight into her elbows to give mercy to her mangled feet, careful not to disturb the growing puddle of mixed fluids leaking into the kitchen from beneath the walls. Across the table, her mother hummed along with the music as she kneaded the thick filling with plastic hands. She had a terrible singing voice, being all head with no lungs, trailing behind the key like a casket thrown from the back of a hearse. The meat in the Tupperware looked stiff and rubbery, consumed by an overgrowth of thick veins and deep ridges that wept a curious liquid under the pressure of her mother’s hollow fingers. The pungent odor of the meat mixed with the stench of the brackish fluid slowly flooding the kitchen overwhelmed any appetite left over in her stomach.

Like this, Sarah waited out the remainder of the day, wetting her fingers to mold flour around lumps of filling, counting the products of her labor only for her brain to skip tracks every time she tried to come up with a number. Between her mother and herself loomed an armistice built from inertia and sour feelings expunged like organs in an autopsy and what she might have once called love. It was a ceasefire as tenuous as her grip on the circles of thin dough as she peeled them from their packets. It could slip through her fingers at any moment, just as easily as—a thoughtless word might escape her lips, the slam of a door might rattle her heart, or the echo of her mother crying in her sleep might smuggle itself from the master bedroom and into her ear. How much more could she take until her nightmares snapped under their own weight, and this distance between them separated them forever? Even still, Sarah treasured the sharp point pressed against the back of her neck, the naked threat of the unknown hanging from the rafters above her head. It was as heavy on her nape as her father’s lingering ghost, or the pallor of her mother’s flesh. Sarah had never known such a thing as a perfect peace, let alone an unconditional love. But what little she had now was more than she should have dared to hope. And wasn’t that enough?