But the little birds, with their dart-dots for eyes and the way they swarmed like a single living creature, rising up and falling down wavelike, or like a phantom shadow tumbling through the air, did not recognize her as kin. She sang out her song to them, meant as friendly greeting, that recognized them as kin, that said although she did not know them, she loved them. Three large and dark that rode the slipstream far above her and, closer, a flock of tiny birds. She encountered her first birds in the wild soon after she left the ghost city behind, before turning southeast again. Not even in the parts of her that were human. Oh, for if this was life, then she had not yet been alive! But then the joy of flying overtook her and she went higher and higher and higher, and she did not care who saw or what awaited her in the bliss of the free fall and the glide and the limitless expanse. And even then she did not know that the sky was blue or what the sun was, because she had flown out into the cool night air and all her wonder resided in the points of light that blazed through the darkness above. There was just a door in a ceiling that opened and a scrabbling and scrambling with something ratlike after her, and in the end, she escaped, rose from the smoking remnants below. For a long time the Strange Bird did not know what sky really was as she flew down underground corridors in the dark, evading figures that shot at one another, did not even know that she sought a way out. The Strange Bird’s first thought was of a sky over an ocean she had never seen, in a place far from the fire-washed laboratory from which she emerged, cage smashed open but her wings, miraculous, unbroken. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife. Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor, and the author most recently of the national bestseller Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy.
But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. The Strange Bird is part bird, part human, part many other things.
The following is from Jeff VanderMeer’s novella, The Strange Bird.
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