Envyyy

Expect glorious shenanigans, do shenanigans gloriously

[sparkbirdmusic]

A Bird in the Heart, ch. 1-6

I don't know what's next for this manuscript, if anything. Part of me thinks I should just focus on music and forget about the book. But part of me thinks my listeners would appreciate it.

So here's a sample. If you read this and you're one of my listeners: do have any interest whatsoever in a book like this? It isn't fantasy, it's contemporary realism, and I know that's not what the market is looking for right now, but maybe it's different in my listenership.

Also, if you read these chapters: please know that this certainly still needs editing and refining. Thank you for any time you choose to spend with this story. <3

CW: queerphobia, animal death (not a pet), mental health struggles, runaway/displacement themes, brief mentions of another character's suicide attempt, themes of coercion/manipulation

A Bird in the Heart

“As a young woman told me once, after first hearing the Thrush: ‘I don’t know what it is, but,’ putting her hand on her heart, ‘it makes me feel queer.’” - Florence Merriam Bailey, Birds of Village and Field

Chapter 1

I’m more of a lark than an owl.

Not the best bird to be when you have a two-hour walk ahead of you and no certainty of a safe place to sleep.

I waved goodbye to the friendly (but woefully misinformed) van-dwelling strangers who had carried me 300 miles to the high desert of Eastern Oregon. It’d taken several hours lurking around the gas station before anyone approached me, because I wasn’t holding a sign or anything. Eventually the gas station attendant asked why I was loitering, and when I explained I was attempting to hitchhike, he called some friends who happened to be headed the same direction.

The rattle of their rickety deathtrap faded into the distance and was replaced by a more invigorating sound:

Chi-ca-go! Chi-ca-go!

The iconic call of the California Quail!

I found the quail right as he ducked into a big sagebrush clump. Even that brief sighting pumped me up enough to begin the long walk toward my destination: the Tulare Living Learning Center.

At such a late hour (8:30 PM), I didn’t expect much bird activity, but the quail ended up being the least of my thrills, believe it or not.

As I trekked down Refuge Road, darkness settled in quickly. Every few yards, rustling noises or small shadowy figures darting between shrubs set my heart pounding. Then I happened to glance up at a utility pole and caught sight of a Great Horned Owl, their eyes gleaming in the fading light. I stood there gaping and grinning, almost crying at their imposing silhouette. Finally I managed to tear myself away, and a few poles later, I came upon a second Great Horned Owl, sitting like a floofy sentinel tasked to protect me from harm on my journey.

Of course, they were actually there to hunt and kill small mammals. They swooped past me in a failed attempt to catch a ground squirrel and I almost screamed.

Fortunately I didn’t, because it would have broken the most beautiful silence I’d ever heard. It was a welcome change after the interminable hours of Flat Earth nonsense from the #VanLife folks. Though the seemingly infinite acres of sagebrush sprawling out in every direction almost had me second-guessing my dismissal of their crackpot theories.

I was so busy scouring poles for owls and inhaling the strange aroma of juniper that I didn’t fully appreciate the night sky—until I reached the pond. Glowing on the water’s surface, the full moon’s reflection caught my eye, and my head tilted back reverently. My mouth hung open, swallowing all that starlight.

“Pretty incredible, isn’t it?” came a voice through the darkness, so softly that it didn’t even startle me. And I startle easily.

A shadowy figure squatted at the edge of the water like a Black-crowned Night-Heron. I rounded the sweeping arc of the figure 8-shaped pool, nestled against the curved facade of the Tulare Living Learning Center.

The moon and starlight reflecting off the pond illuminated the face of the Center’s Director.

“Valéria Flores, I presume!” I proclaimed a little too loudly and immediately felt ridiculous. Recent events had most likely damaged whatever modicum of social normalcy I might have had.

She smiled the smile I’d seen in the welcome packet. A frown-shaped smile. Tilting her head, she squinted at me. A thin silver ring in her left nostril glinted like a shooting star on the side of her nose.

“Just Val,” she said. “I recognize you. Sayre Dunn? Young Artist-in-Residence this summer?”

I was and I was.

“Well. Welcome.” She said it flatly, like it was a formality she felt awkward fulfilling. “Are you staying at the Pass with your family?”

I wasn’t.

A deep inhale filled my lungs with crisp desert air.

“I’m here to start my residency early!” I said brightly.

Val seemed to choke on something, maybe one of the hundreds of mosquitoes quietly closing in on us.

My best friend Mercy always talks about the importance of stating your purpose boldly. Confidence disarms people, she says. When you make a grand gesture, people are less likely to refuse. Go big or go home.

I couldn’t go home, so I was going big.

And really, a grand gesture was my only option. What else could I have done? Called from Eugene and told Val the whole sordid story? That someone—no idea who—had outed me to my parents? That my mom had ransacked my room in a fevered search for “the drugs associated with the lifestyle”? When that fell through, she tried killing herself. When that fell through, she sent me to an ex-gay counselor at a local megachurch for conversion therapy lite. And when that fell through, she took me—me—to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

If I dumped all that drama on Val over the phone, and asked her if the Center could accommodate me a month before I was expected to arrive, how would she respond? Sure, no problem, we celebrate teens in crisis here? Doubtful. At best she would tell me I had to wait until the actual start date. At worst she would call my parents and recommend another psychiatric evaluation.

But how could she turn me down when I’d already hitchhiked 300 miles? In the face of a certifiable grand gesture, she couldn’t say no.

Surely she wouldn’t.

When Val regained her composure, she bit her lip and furrowed her brow. Then she bit her lip at a different angle and furrowed her brow a little deeper. She bit and furrowed and bit and furrowed till I wondered if her face would give way to reveal a freshly plowed field.

I tightened the straps of my backpack. Now that I wasn’t walking, the air felt chillier, and I didn’t have a jacket. Fuck.

At last Val said, “Huh.”

Oh no. I felt my bottom lip tremble.

“I’m sorry,” I said, voice cracking. “I’m really sorry.”

I turned to leave. This was exactly what I had come here to escape. Messing things up for everyone, being everybody’s problem. Maybe I could go back to the Pass and sleep in a Porta Potty. It’d be a little warmer in there. Human waste is pretty warm. Then in the morning I could hitchhike… somewhere else. I just needed to get through the next month, and then, if I hadn’t completely blown it with Val, I could hitchhike back—

“Hey, where are you going?” Val called out. “You can stay. For the night, at least.”

I could have collapsed into the dirt, legs buckling under the weight of a hundred emotions I couldn’t bear to look at directly—not yet, not now, who knew when. An involuntary sob of relief escaped me, but was fortunately drowned out by a Sage Thrasher who had suddenly started singing sweetly from some nearby shrub. Right in the middle of the night! It struck me as an auspicious sign; a glimmer of hope stirred inside me, in spite of everything that had happened up to this point.

Somewhat less encouraging was the cacophony that followed as a gigantic white truck came barreling down the gravel road. It tore through the night, stirring up a huge cloud of dust.

“And good evening to you, Sheriff Baker,” Val scoffed, throwing a middle finger in the general direction of the truck.

I also made a scoffing noise but couldn’t think of anything to contribute verbally. Instead I tried to assume a facial expression that would convey my openness to any anti-establishment sentiments she might wish to share.

She hung her head, inviting shadows that made her face look sunken in and sort of terrifying, like a fruit in the midst of the dehydration process. Not quite a raisin but no longer a grape.

How old is Val? I wondered. Twenty-nine? Forty?

My heart started racing, because I swear from the look on her face she could tell what I was thinking. Mercy always says I have a face like a daisy: white as snow and easy to pick apart.

I gave Val a queasy smile, trying desperately to make my mind an impenetrable blank.

Then I realized I’d forgotten something.

“Thank you,” I blurted out.

Val nodded. Frown-smiled.

“It’s late,” she said. “Let’s get you settled in.”

She led me inside, where the scents of sagebrush and juniper gave way to those of wood floors and old field guides. Fixed permanently to one of the glass double doors was a sign acknowledging that the Tulare Living Learning Center was built on Paiute land, and that I should remember to be a considerate guest. On the other door, a colorful poster declared that the Center welcomed all races, religions, countries of origin, sexual orientations, genders… The list went on. We stand with YOU. You are SAFE here. And we are STRONGER TOGETHER.

Those words echoed in my head as Val fetched keys for an empty pod, and as I fell asleep in my new bed.

Even though I’d stayed up way past my bedtime, I still woke up at dawn—in my usual cold sweat—to the earnest pink! pink! pink! of dozens of White-crowned Sparrows.

My damp blanket swaddled me from head to toe, in my classic croissant of sleep safety. With the zeal of a hatchling emerging from the dank confines of an egg, I pushed my head out. Freezing desert air gushed through the window I’d left cracked open just slightly. The rosy sky agreed with the sparrows: pink! A diverse chorus caroled outside, welcoming me to a new life. I listened closely to the bird songs, identifying each one with mnemonics I’d learned.

Cheer up, cheerily, cheerily! American Robin, that was an easy one.

Maids, maids, maids, put on your tea kettle-ettle-ettle! Song Sparrow. Classic.

Don’t you DAAAARE!

I leapt out of bed and tore through my backpack looking for binoculars. Quick detour to take my ADHD meds, which nearly sent me into a panic. How was I going to make my supply last? My parents made it clear that if I ran away they would cut off my insurance, and that there was no way I could get insurance by myself until I turned 18.

Birdsong intervened—cheer up, cheerily, cheerily!—and I recalled the very sensible rationing plan I’d concocted. All I had to do was take half my prescribed dose five days a week and skip two days a week entirely, and I could make the meds last until a week after my July 4th birthday.

Eighteen at last. Talk about Independence Day.

I should be grateful I managed to get my meds at all. When I first ran away—from my house to Mercy’s—I had to leave them behind, because they were locked up in the safe where my parents kept things like birth certificates (and, lately, my bottle of paint thinner, for fear that I might be huffing it). My art teacher, Donna, managed to get my parents to deliver the bottle—of meds, not paint thinner—to the school on the grounds that I needed them to make it through graduation.

I felt a wave of anxiety at the thought of graduation. Deep breath. Bird by bird, Sayre. What was I looking for again? Binoculars.

Then it dawned on me: my binoculars weren’t in my backpack. Not today. Instead, they hung on the binocular hook by the window.

I clasped a hand over my mouth and tried not to squeal with excitement.

I did it. I made it. To a place with binocular hooks by the windows.

Squinting out into the morning, the words on the poster came back to me. “We stand with you, Yellow-headed Blackbird,” I said. “You are safe here. And we are stronger together.” I scanned the pond. “Now where the fuck are you?” 

And then I found him. Jet black, head dipped in gold, balanced on a raggedy cattail. He adjusted and readjusted his grip until at last he found the footing necessary to engage the syrinx—the song-box, the avian counterpart to the larynx. His wings drooped down to reveal flashy white patches as he squeezed out another round of his bizarre scolding song, his neck extending upward like a fluffy accordion.

Now I really did squeal with excitement. Goosebumps rushed across my arms and legs, up my neck and over my scalp. I was, as Mercy would say, plotzing. (I still wasn’t totally confident about the origin of the word plotzing—Mercy’s Haitian Jewish mom who grew up in Florida, or her Ashkenazi Jewish dad who grew up on Long Island—because they were the only three people I’d ever heard say it. Our unincorporated borderline-rural suburb of Eugene wasn’t exactly the Bronx.)

I opened my sketchbook to a fresh page, quickly but carefully. My mom had carried out enough destruction of my art to last me a lifetime. I regretted telling my art teacher Donna about that. She had cried even harder than I did.

Now she wouldn’t have to cry over me anymore. That, at least, brought some relief.

First I outlined the shape of the bird, from the puffed out breast to the pointy conical bill, the slope of the back, the odd angle of the tail being used for balance. I worked hastily to capture something of the bird’s essence before I had time to overthink it. My art goes downhill fast when I think. Sometimes I end up in the throes of an existential crisis. (What is a conical bill, really?) For this reason I could never be a composite sketch artist. That, and because I refuse to cooperate with law enforcement. Especially after my recent run-ins.

It isn’t worth getting into. Onward and upward!

I used a kneaded eraser to pick up excess graphite and tidy everything up. Next, to add color.

Out of habit, I reached for the tin of colored pencils that I usually kept in my backpack. Usually, but not usually enough.

I pursed my lips, picturing the broken tools of my craft. I tried not to picture my mom breaking them.

Whatever. What’s done is done. For now, I would lean into pure, unadulterated graphite pencil drawings. Many great artists have done some of their finest work in black and white.

I turned to the back of my sketchbook and started a new bird list for a new era. I added a star next to Yellow-headed Blackbird to indicate that this was also a lifer—a species I’d never seen before. Then I checked my black Chuck Taylors for scorpions, as Val had warned me to do, and put them on, pausing for a moment to rub a thumb over the pattern of feathers Mercy had drawn for me on the left toe cap, and the pomegranates and leaves I had drawn for her on the right. Hundreds of miles away, Mercy might be putting on her own shoes with the same patterns.

I shook this thought out of my head and stepped outside for my first morning in the Northern Great Basin.

I inhaled deeply. Exhaled. Sagebrush and juniper.

The Center opted for a dispersed dorm setup, with pods scattered across a patch of desert. In this way, the pods afford visitors and residents a level of quiet and solitude that would be impossible to achieve in a dormitory block. It also minimized the environmental impact of construction: each pod was constructed offsite but locally and transported to the desert for a quick installation. The pods stood on short legs to maintain the continuity of the desert floor and leave the habitat mostly undisturbed.

Approaching the Center by foot last night, I had marveled at the spectacle of the dorms. They looked like a moonlit herd of giant hovering armadillos.

Since I started birding a year ago, I’d dreamed of visiting the Center. I figured I’d make the pilgrimage to Tulare National Wildlife Refuge after graduation, dragging Mercy along with me. I knew she’d agree because she’d want to record soundscapes for the followers of her wildly successful self-help podcast, Mindfulness with Mercy Mack. I would take advantage of the Center’s famous observation deck. Mercy would see a Black-billed Magpie and finally transform into the BBF—Best Birder Friend—of my dreams. And because I had no money, we’d spend our nights at the Pass, an RV park with cheap camping options.

Then in January, my miracle-worker of an art teacher, Donna, told me about the Center’s Young Artists-in-Residence program. She helped me craft a compelling project proposal and put together a portfolio. I didn’t think I had a chance—there are only three slots each summer, and it’s pretty competitive—but lo!

“And now,” I said aloud, “I’m living in one of the pods. I’m a pod person. This is my new life.” Independent living had made me giddy.

I hadn’t even made it off my porch when a twinge of panic discolored my joy. Before Val Flores had given me the key to my pod and sent me off into the night, she’d told me to meet her on the lower observation deck at eight o’clock in the morning.

Fuck. I scrambled back inside. The clock read a few minutes to seven.

Just enough time to figure out what I could possibly tell Val.

Chapter 2

As Mercy always said on Mindfulness with Mercy Mack, “Honesty is an overblown virtue.” That was the quote on her bestselling merch, so I was inclined to believe it.

Heeding those words of wisdom, I gave Val a euphemistic version of the story:

After spring break, my parents took an interesting new approach in their relationship with me. They gifted me a stimulating change of environment. They arranged some thought-provoking encounters with an improbable mentor. This ultimately resulted in an engaging visit to a prestigious institution. Finally, the pursuit of fundamental truths inspired me to come to Tulare a bit in advance of my summer residency. Starting immediately, I would undertake an interdisciplinary project that would satisfy my remaining academic requirements and allow me to graduate with honors.

I didn’t mention the church. Or the hospital. Or the “wellness check” conducted by the police when they tracked me down at Mercy’s house—the catalyst for my departure to Tulare. I couldn’t drag Mercy and her family into my mess.

Oh, and by with honors, I meant at all.

Some might’ve called this lying. Mercy would call it aspirational reframing. Did the gatekeepers of fantastic opportunities want to hear the traumatic details of my downward spiral? No. They just didn’t. They were headed in the opposite direction, riding First Class on the Positivity Train.

It was time to talk myself up. Focus on my strengths. Do and say whatever it took to meet my needs.

And what did I need?

I needed to start my residency now. I needed to finish high school. Above all, I needed to focus on my art. I was sick of everything getting in the way of my art. And since my mom destroyed most of my best work, I had a lot of rebuilding to do.

The thought of overwhelming yet another person with the unfiltered truth sent a stab of pain through my gut. 

Amazingly, my veiled explanation satisfied Val, who nodded and said, “Alright. I think I get the gist of what you’re saying.” She smirked a little, but her eyes were sad. “And what you’re not saying.” I nearly flinched, but I willed myself to press my lips tight and remain calm. “So yeah, sure, why not. You can stay.” 

She continued, after I had thanked her profusely but I think not too desperately: “But Sayre, we don’t have the finances to support you from now through the end of summer. If it starts early, it has to end early.”

I had anticipated this, and promptly presented the week-by-week project outline I had been holding casually at my side for just this purpose. Val in turn presented her latex-gloved hands with a helpless shrugging gesture, so I set the paper next to the tray where she was dissecting what would appear to the uninitiated to be a large black turd. I recognized it immediately as an owl pellet. Owls swallow their prey whole, and before they can have their next meal they typically need to regurgitate a pellet containing all the indigestible bits—bones, fur, teeth, what have you.

Val glanced at my outline, still holding her hands up like a surgeon after scrubbing. The probes, forceps, and other tools of dissection on her metal tray added to the effect.

I pointed out my various self-imposed deadlines and progress targets. “Six in-depth profiles of resident birds per week over the next month, with accompanying sketches. Then, over the following month, a pruning period of sorts, narrowing my focus to the most charismatic fifteen species. Perfecting the artwork, expanding on the life histories. The end result: a major artistic achievement that will satisfy my remaining high school requirements and reflect fantastically on the Tulare Living Learning Center.”

Val stared at the outline like it was written in Biblical Aramaic. A rattlesnake tattoo coiled around her right forearm, the mouth open wide near her elbow. Her gloved hands were still held up in front of her, but even upside down the snake’s sharp teeth and dripping venom were intimidating.

Was she regretting her decision to let me stay? Maybe I had taken the wrong approach, pretending to be organized. Maybe she saw right through it. My eyes scanned the outline frantically, searching for uncrossed T’s and undotted I’s. Maybe my best recourse was to lean into my actual area of expertise: personal trauma. Just reveal it all and beg for sanctuary, in spite of how much I wanted to transcend my pain and move the heck on.

Or maybe she was just distracted.

Finally she said, “Uh, wow. Looks like you’ve got it under control. Could you grab a book for me? Comparative Bone Identification.” She waved a scalpel to point past me and I withdrew quickly to avoid being maimed. 

I hustled to the low bookcases lining the wall, feeling like my execution had just been pardoned. I could stay. I didn’t have to find somewhere else to go. In spite of achieving the outcome I’d hoped for, the stabbing feeling struck my stomach again. Was it possible for a 17-year-old to develop an ulcer?

Above the bookcases, panoramic windows spanned the length of the room, at eye level with the desert floor. As I searched for the bone book, the movements of birds and small mammals outside calmed me slightly.

“Are those ketchup containers?” I asked when I returned with the book, eyeing an assortment of little plastic cups.

“Bone vaults,” she intoned ominously.

She used her elbows to flip through the pages until she arrived at some photos of iguana ribs. Then she started sorting tiny bones into the cups. Before I could ask how an owl pellet in Eastern Oregon could contain iguana bones, she said, “I was looking through your file. You were on the Marbled Murrelet survey a couple months ago. Up at Beaver Creek? That must have been pretty dope.”

“Oh,” I sighed, and my whole body deflated. My head felt too heavy for my neck. “Yeah, it was.”

Getting to hang out with field biologists and help them study adorable seabirds had been a spring break fantasy come true. But from the moment the trip ended, my life had been a total disaster.

I gazed at the intersection of desert and bookcase. My vision grew fuzzy.

The whole point of coming here was to get away from everything that happened, leave the past in the past. How was I going to make any progress if I had to keep thinking about it?

Thankfully, Val was so laser-focused on her bone sorting that she didn’t notice me cloud over.

“Given your experience,” she continued, “Brandt might want to snag you for some research assistance. You know Brandt Galloway?”

The name shook me out of my state of torpor. If ever a field biologist ended up on the cover of GQ, it would be Brandt Galloway. His social media feeds were one part adorable imperiled birds and two parts thirst trap. I had no idea why he needed to take his shirt off to monitor a Mountain Quail nest, but far be it from me to stop him.

“Brandt Galloway is here?” I gushed, clouds clearing. “That’s dope!”

She paused her work to give me some bemused side-eye. “He wants to figure out whether the Scrub Sparrow should be upgraded to full species status, instead of just a subspecies of Sagebrush Sparrow. Kind of a lot riding on it, actually.”

I nodded. “The detention center project.”

“Right. That.” The clipped way she said it contained gallons of don’t even get me started. But I didn’t need her to explain; I’d been following the drama as it unfolded, from the moment the government announced their plan to “repurpose and revitalize” remote public lands through the construction of immigrant detention centers. A parcel of Tulare National Wildlife Refuge was among the locations selected, within spitting distance of the Living Learning Center. A lawsuit filed by the Center and the local Paiute Tribe put the project on hold pending an Environmental Impact Statement. The EIS hinged on the species status of a little brown bird that few people would ever see.

Thankfully the government moved slowly. According to the latest update I’d read, it could take a year before the EIS was completed.

“Anyway,” Val said. “Don’t let him rope you into the surveys if you need to concentrate on your own work.”

“No, no, no,” I said, anxious to ensure my spot on Brandt Galloway’s research team before the moment could be upstaged by whatever enormous parcel had arrived. “I can incorporate the Scrub Sparrows into my work. Feed two birds with one scone.”

Val snorted.

The front door swung open and a brawny set of arms and legs strolled in, hidden by a giant cardboard box. A muffled voice said, “Val? You there? Where did you want this?”

Val signaled for me to stay quiet.

The person behind the box said, “Alright, I guess I’ll take this life-size Sandhill Crane plushy back to the post office…”

“Don’t you dare!” cried Val, imitating a Yellow-headed Blackbird.

The person dropped the box, revealing the biggest celebrity—in terms of both preeminence and physical stature—I’d ever seen.

Brandt Galloway spread his arms wide as if welcoming me and Val to gaze upon the spectacle of his miraculous appearance. He pushed the box aside. “Sayre Dunn!” he exclaimed, crossing the distance between us in a couple of strides. Then he hugged me.

It was surprising, but I didn’t resist. What can I say? Running away is lonely business, and even though it had only been a couple days since I last hugged Mercy, my skin felt starved.

Plus Brandt was undeniably attractive, with his thick dark hair, chiseled jaw, and rakish Disney Prince smile. My face was pressed into his torso, which resulted in a kind of sensory overload. I’d seen muscular people, but I’d never been this close to one, nor had I ever expected to. His chest was so ample you could safely balance a precious vase on it. I was sure he could feel my heart pounding.

At the same time, he smelled like a campfire, which immediately triggered my asthma. “How did you know my name?” I wheezed, my voice muffled by his upper abs. I needed my inhaler.

Brandt held me at arm’s length. His glistening brown eyes were framed by dark lashes and impressive eyebrows. “Val told me all about you.”

The back of my neck grew warm. Brandt’s hands were like a weighted blanket on my shoulders. I craned my neck to look at Val, who looked indifferent until she read the expression on my Transparent Daisy Face.

“Just that you’re here early,” she said quickly. “And I may have shown him your portfolio.”

“Your work!” Brandt exclaimed, shaking me a little. “Phenomenal. Top-notch stuff. I mean, really, Julie Zickefoose who?”

“Oh, my God,” I said, my throat tightening to match my respiratory system. “You’re too kind.” I felt myself turning redder and hoped it had warmed up enough outside that Brandt could interpret it as heat stroke. Val had clearly put him up to this to try to make me feel welcome. There was no way Brandt Galloway had just compared me to my favorite bird artist and writer. 

“I’m serious,” he said. He sounded breathless, like my art had suckerpunched him. He entreated Val, though his eyes stayed fixed on me, as if everything else had fallen away and his life’s purpose was to make me feel seen. “I mean, come on, Val, back me up!” She agreed heartily, repeating the words “phenomenal” and “Zickefoose”.

“Sorry, I need to use my inhaler,” I said, slipping out from his grasp.

“I was just telling Sayre about the Scrub Sparrow surveys,” Val said. “Maybe you could use a hand?”

Brandt fiddled with a piece of loose tape on the box. “Oh, if you’re into that kind of thing,” he said. “Kind of dull work. Tracking down sparrows, mist-netting them, collecting data. What do you think, Sayre? You game?”

I couldn’t respond; I had to hold the medicine in my lungs for ten seconds.

Brandt rubbed his neck, his bulging bicep testing the stretchability limits of his short-sleeve checkered shirt.

His smartwatch lit up and buzzed. “Oh, I’ve gotta FaceTime with Rachel. The girlfriend.”

“I’m game,” I exhaled the words along with the medicine, deflating a little at the reminder of Brandt’s Instagram-perfect girlfriend, Rachel Poole. Not like I’d stand any kind of chance at even a casual desert fling with him, even if he wasn’t super straight. And not that anything more than his warm welcome hug would be appropriate, even after I turned 18. He was basically one of my bosses.

A very hot, charismatic boss.

Suddenly it hit me that I would have exactly zero peer connections until the other Young Artist-in-Residence arrived next month.

Fortunately I had plenty of experience being alone after nearly two months under house arrest. Since getting outed, my parents barely let me leave my room. They dropped me off at school at the last possible minute, then picked me up during free periods and at lunch, to keep me from “associating with the wrong crowd.”

Now I could associate with whoever I wanted, but I’d fled to one of the most sparsely populated areas in the entire state of Oregon.

That was fine. Solitude and independence were the point. No one to disappoint but myself.

And maybe Val. And now Brandt.

But I wouldn’t disappoint them, or me. All I had to do was actually follow that outline I shared with Val. Cram my days full of birds and work and leave no room for pesky distractions like trauma. That’s what Mercy would do, minus the birds.

I’d rebuild my portfolio and myself, then reenter society a new and improved Sayre Dunn with no problems whatsoever.

Brandt told me he’d be in touch soon and we’d see if our schedules lined up. “If you need anything at all,” he added, “I’m in Shrike.”

“I’m in Tanager.” The pods all had bird names.

Brandt gave the big box a couple quick smacks and made a finger gun at Val. Then he sidled away like a jeans model on a dusty runway. I stood, riveted by the sight.

Val’s gaze didn’t linger at all. She immediately returned her attention to her iguana bones and heaved a hefty sigh. “This 15-year-old kid a few farms over breeds iguanas.”

“Interesting hobby,” I said, absentmindedly rubbing the cardboard box where Brandt had touched it.

“He took one of the babies outside to sunbathe and a Great Horned Owl snatched it up.”

That snapped me back. “Oh, my God, really?” I said, maybe a little too fascinated. I quickly made my tone more serious. “That poor iguana. And poor kid.”

“Meh,” Val said. “An owl’s gotta eat.”

I nodded. You couldn’t just leave potential prey animals outside and not expect an owl to eat them. “So you’re sorting out the remains? For a proper iguana burial?”

“Not quite,” she said. “The next day the kid did a stakeout, used another baby iguana as bait, and shot the owl.”

My jaw and heart dropped so far that I couldn’t manage a vocal response. The stabbing feeling ripped through my stomach again.

Val had an air of resignation about her. “I know. Two dead iguanas and a dead owl. It’s a lose-lose-lose scenario. Or worse, because I witnessed it.”

“Seriously?”

“Their property borders a nest site I was monitoring. I didn’t see the iguana till she swooped down. Didn’t see the kid till the shot rang out.” She stared into the middle distance for a second. “Anyway, local cops don’t give a fuck, and who knows when Fish & Wildlife will get back to me. The forensic ornithology lab in Ashland can’t help without approval. So I’m documenting the whole shit show as best I can.” She shrugged. “Kinda cool to pick apart something other than a vole.”

Not even the mention of forensic ornithology could derail me. I was fixated. “Did the owl die immediately?” My voice cracked and I coughed to cover it.

“Oh, she definitely suffered. Bullet hit her shoulder. I bagged her, luckily the kid didn’t shoot me too. Took her to a rehabber—that’s where she hacked up this pellet—but she died by morning.”

Tears filled my eyes. I tried blinking them away, but the tank was suddenly full. I shifted toward the window, pretending to spot something interesting. An involuntary sniffle betrayed me.

“Whoa, you’re a sensitive soul, huh?” Val remarked gently. “That came out wrong. I’m just so inured to this shit. No tears left to cry.” She scooted aside, patting the bench. I staggered over, sat, and buried my head in my hands.

God, I was being ridiculous. I needed to pull myself together. Practice mindfulness. What would Mercy tell me to do? Focus on something around me, let it drag me out of my head and into reality. The floor—what color is it? What texture?

I knew the floor was a handsome reclaimed wood, but it blurred behind a quivering wall of water. Absurdly heavy drops plunged out of my eyes, pitter-pattering audibly. I couldn’t believe I was crying in front of Val just moments after presenting myself as a paragon of stability. My mortification only made me cry harder. I heard Val walk away and return. She laid a hand on my back and I jumped. Then she handed me a glass of water, which I gulped down.

It stopped my hiccuping, but not my thoughts.

Why would anyone blame an owl for being an owl?

Chapter 3

Val didn’t prod for an in-depth exploration of my emotional outburst, thankfully. Maybe she thought it was entirely about the owl. Frankly, my reaction puzzled even me. Val actually witnessed an owlicide and she wasn’t weeping into her bone vaults over it. If I let myself get this rattled by secondhand trauma over birds I’d never even met, I’d never get anything done.

So I did what I did when I found out my mom tried to kill herself because of my queerness. I’d cried excessively then, too, but I told myself over and over: you need to stop this. And eventually I stopped. It was a minor success both then and now.

I made a mental note: maintain a facade of aloofness.

Val offered to give me a tour of the Center. Probably an attempt to distract me and cheer me up. I declined in favor of getting out in the field, away from the demands of human interactions.

First, though, she wanted to ensure that I was prepared to face the elements.

“Uh, yes?” I croaked. I regretted the audible question mark and overcorrected myself: “Yes, yes, yes.”

Painting a falsely rosy picture of the reason for my early arrival had been a relative breeze, but a simple yes or no question somehow slayed me. The facade was compromised. My defenses weakened, she struck again.

Did I have a hat? Nope.

Sunscreen? No.

A good jacket? Not even a bad jacket.

She rolled her eyes. “Dude.”

“Not a dude,” I responded, surprising myself. Only Mercy knew I didn’t like being called dude. I braced myself for another eye roll.

“Got it,” Val said instead. “Thank you.”

A gaggle of birders clomped down the stairs from the observation deck. I try not to assume too much about people’s identities based on looks, but they were likely all cis white men over fifty-five—birders straight out of Central Casting. Binoculars bounced against their chests as they marched to the water bottle refill station. Many carried scopes. Most wore hats in assorted flavors of beige.

As Val led me to the Lost & Found closet near the gift shop area, she gave me a quiet rundown of the boys’ club of birding across the room. I’d actually heard of most of them, even read a few of their books.

“It’s part of the magic of Tulare during migration.” Val punctuated the statement with some half-hearted jazz hands. “You never know who might show up. That goes for birds and birders.”

I got the feeling Val didn’t particularly love never knowing who might show up.

She grunted, fumbling through a million keys crowded together on one tiny keyring. “These are actually very well organized,” she declared, jamming an ill-fitting key into the lock and twisting aggressively. “Just you wait. Beyond this door lies a treasure trove of swanky birder swag.”

I edged away, browsing the field guides and cute enamel pins, and somehow started feeling a little lighter. The scientific illustrations in the field guides and shiny, stylized interpretations of the birds of Tulare kindled excitement in me. They reminded me of my purpose here, everything this place had to offer me. Everything I hoped to offer it in return.

Maybe I’d just needed one last big cry. Now I could be like Val, desensitized and doing just fine.

Behind the drove of white people came a middle-aged couple of Asian heritage. They paused, looking up the stairs. After a moment, a person around my age bounded down, taking the steps three at a time. The kid seemed excited and showed the older folks something on a camera. They all laughed and exchanged some words. What could be so amusing? I angled my ear toward them uselessly. I couldn’t overhear the couple, but the kid went, “RIGHT?” so loudly that my shoulders tightened. I didn’t want them to get in trouble.

But in trouble with who? This wasn’t a library. Even from the building’s most distant closets, Val herself could probably be heard swearing at her ring of keys.

The couple headed out, but the kid lingered to clean off their camera screen, then the camera lens, then their glasses. As they rubbed each lens, they turned absently toward me, head down, mouth slightly open. A lustrous crown of curly black hair framed their face.

When they shook their hair aside and put on their glasses, the first thing they saw was me staring at them. I don’t know why I was staring. Maybe I was surprised to see someone my age here on a school day. And still wondering about the source of their excitement, not that I would ask.

Plus, ever since I caught the birding bug, I’d been confined to the small circle of birders my parents deemed “trustworthy”—a local Christian group called The Bird and the Word. Seeing any birder my age was novel. Especially someone this cute.

Curly Hair Kid’s face registered confusion, then amusement. They gave a friendly wave. I looked down quickly. My neck burned, and I thanked the Lord God Bird for the fifteen feet of distance between us.

My gratitude crumbled when I lifted my gaze and found Curly Hair Kid making a beeline for me.

I steeled myself, expecting a confrontation wherein this person would scold me for ogling. I’d try explaining and come across as defensive. Then we’d endure a series of painfully awkward encounters around the refuge. Purely by coincidence, I’d keep going to the same birding hotspots as them, and they’d file a restraining order. Years later, at a critical juncture in my career, they’d turn out to be an influential figure, maybe the curator for an important bird art exhibition. They’d recall the way I ruined their trip to Tulare so many years ago, and they’d print out my digital portfolio just to rip it to shreds. 

I could picture it all vividly, particularly the destructive end. That part resembled the way things ended at home.

But instead of scolding me, they radiated pure joy.

“You know Rails Where They Don’t Belong?”

“Is that a picture book?” I envisioned something like Where the Wild Things Are, but featuring the small, chicken-like waterbirds known as rails.

“Ha!” The laugh sent their curls bouncing. “I wish. It’s this FlockTalk trend, made possible by rails being totally ridiculous. You’re on FlockTalk, right?” Before I could fully fail to answer, they showed me a video of a Virginia Rail dashing past potted petunias and hummingbird feeders.

“Is that the observation deck?” I asked, amazed. I let myself emerge slightly from behind a postcard rack.

“Five minutes ago. They took off, though.”

A tap on the door caught my attention.

“Um,” I gestured toward the older couple waiting outside. “Your—”

“Oh, right. Grandparents. See you around!”

My heart caught in my throat as they turned, and I found myself yelping, “Wait!”

Curly Hair Kid spun around. “Yeah?”

I wanted to ask their name and pronouns and eBird username—my parents banned me from FlockTalk, because it aimed to provide a safe space for all birders, and they were innately suspicious of safe spaces—but it felt too forward. Flailing, I grabbed a postcard of a bashful-looking mule deer and held it out. “Thank you for visiting the Tulare Living Learning Center.”

Again they burst out with a loud “Ha!” and looked deeply entertained. “I’m good.”

I forced an unconvincing “Ha!” of my own. “Right?” I said, like postcards of mule deers were so déclassé. But then I accidentally dropped the card and gasped and scrambled to catch it like it was a pair of high-end Swarovski binoculars. So I bet Curly Hair Kid knew where I really stood on the value of postcards.

As they backed outside with another laugh and a little salute goodbye, I felt an inexplicable ache.

“Val,” I hissed over the T-shirts and hoodies. “Who was that?”

“Who was who?” she shouted.

There was no time to mourn, because as soon as the front doors shut, they burst open again. A gust of wind rattled all the flyers on the bulletin board. Time yawned into slow motion, like a scene from a movie. Standing there, majestically windblown and backlit, were the most badass femmes of birding.

My hands flew to hide my face, like Moses before the burning bush. I nearly shrieked with unadulterated fanperson glee.

First came a lanky Black woman with warm ruby undertones and a high fade. The Queen of Birding herself—Queenie Allen, known to her tens of thousands of followers as QBird. She carried the crown jewel of spotting scopes, the foam-padded legs of its tripod resting on one gleaming shoulder.

The next woman was wispy, white, and auburn-haired, using a white cane with a hot pink handle. This was Lola Moon, the first trans woman and first person who is blind to grace the cover of The Avian Advocate magazine. I had the magazine delivered to Mercy’s, because it was on my parents’ list of banned birding publications. Until I read Lola’s interview, it hadn’t occurred to me that someone who was blind might be interested in birding.

Lola held out her phone. “Hey, Siri. Play Long-tailed Duck call.”

The phone clucked with unbridled passion.

Q groaned, laughing. “I swear to you, Lo—”

“No, Q, I swear to you—”

Striding in after them came a curvy white woman with at least a dozen visible bird tattoos and a fancy video camera. Birder, climate justice activist, and filmmaker Heidi Berman. She had blue and black hair like a Steller’s Jay, and glittery Doc Martens.

“If you two are done with your duck sex shenanigans,” Heidi said, “how about we pound this episode out?”

My hands dropped from my face to clutch my heart. I had dreamed of this moment, a dream that had inspired my now-destroyed triptych of icons depicting Q, Heidi, and Lola as holy figures.

“The magic of Tulare,” I mouthed prayerfully.

Heidi held opened the door to the coworking studio for Q and Lola. Before disappearing inside, she glanced my way. I looked away before yet another person could catch me staring.

“There’s a jacket that should fit you.” Val had opened the closet door. “It might rain later.”

I nodded, still speechless from the miraculous apparition I had just witnessed.

“Sunscreen. Hat. All times, kid,” said Val. Her expression was like talc, simultaneously stony and tender. “You look a little red already,” she added, eyes narrowing. “If I have to reapply every two hours, a ginger probably needs a fresh coat every ten.”

She was right. I could burn during a mid-winter downpour in an old growth forest.

As she rummaged around in a storage bin, I sneaked a glance at the studio door. Presumably Q, Lola, and Heidi were working on the latest episode of their web series, Three in the Bush, chronicling their (mis)adventures in birding. They’d hinted their next season would take place in the desert, but I hadn’t dared hope they’d be in the same desert as me.

Pain hit my gut with the force of a Great Blue Heron stabbing a fish. When I got accepted to the program, I’d expected it to be a full-time job trying to impress Val and my fellow Artist-in-Residence. That was before everything went down with my parents, when I wasn’t also trying to rise as the phoenix from the ashes of my past. Now the roster had grown to include Brandt Galloway and the Three in the Bush trio, birding superstars who could make a huge difference for me, career-wise. But the thought of actually interacting with them scared me shitless.

And then there was Curly Hair Kid.

“Heads up,” Val said suddenly, whirling a bottle of sunscreen directly at me. I ducked helplessly and it sailed over me, struck a column, and burst open, splattering everywhere.

After Val finally finished laughing at me (or with me, as she insisted), she told me to pick out another bottle of forgotten sunscreen and whatever abandoned hat suited me. She’d handle the mess. “I said heads up,” she added for the fifth time.

Ah, guilt and humiliation! My old friends.

But they were mixed with an unfamiliar relief. Every time I apologized, Val shrugged and said, “It’s all good.” She didn’t fully convince me, but it was comforting to hear. And a refreshing treat to not be punished for something out of my control.

None of the hats in the Lost & Found felt like me. Or, rising-from-the-ashes me. They were all very basic, and I should know. Basic is what I do best.

“Find anything good?” Val called from the sunscreen disaster area, salvaging some of the spill and rubbing it onto her calves. Catching my incredulous double-take, she added, “Oh, come on, it’s not like I’m eating it.”

I pulled a sky blue rain jacket off its hanger. Desert temperatures could swing to extremes, so I needed layers. Behind the jacket, I noticed something poised daintily on a nail, deep in the closet: a floppy wide-brimmed pink and green sun hat.

It brought me instant joy.

I put it on. It fit comfortably and provided considerable coverage, but I had no idea how I looked. I wished I could get Mercy’s feedback.

“Val? Where’s the nearest mirror?”

She looked up and grinned, a different smile than I’d seen on her—wider and not at all frowny. “You don’t need one,” she said. “You’re stunning. A vision.”

Possibly she was being facetious, but I decided to take her at her word.

Chapter 4

Compared to many 17-year-olds, particularly in the birding community, I was not an especially well-traveled individual. The average potted plant had undertaken more spectacular journeys than I had. As a result, the number of birds on my life list was embarrassingly low.

In all my eBird-stalking of my fellow teen birders—which I realize sounds creepy but it’s public information—I found that most had observed over 200 species in Oregon alone. Some had attended Audubon summer camps in renowned hotspots like Arizona, Costa Rica, and the unlikely Holy Grail of birding: southern New Jersey.

I, by way of contrast, had done the majority of my birding within a 5-mile radius of my house—my parents’ house. Plus a few coastal excursions, thanks to Mercy’s family, who rose to the occasion for birds like oystercatchers and pelicans but didn’t exactly share my enthusiasm for Heermann’s Gulls, or my tendency to hyperfixate on notoriously confusing shorebirds.

And that was fine. Numbers didn’t matter to me. I traversed a different path, arguably a richer one: observing fewer birds, but at greater length. Getting to know them personally, developing a kind of kinship with them.

That being said, I was keen to boost my numbers.

I hopped on one of the Center’s “trusty broncos,” as Val called their loan bicycles, and zoomed off. Actually, I pedaled as slowly as I possibly could while still staying upright. Luckily my emotional rollercoaster of a meeting with Val hadn’t taken up too much of the morning. Birdsong still splattered vibrant color across the muted palette of dust and sagebrush. The high desert and scrubland of the Northern Great Basin felt a world away from the lush Willamette Valley, where I had lived my whole life up to this point, west of the Cascade range.

My destination was Headquarters—the hub of the Tulare National Wildlife Refuge. A lush oasis, situated amidst boundless expanses of desert. It was what birders called a “migrant trap”—a patch of attractive habitat migratory birds inevitably funnel through when they travel. Like LAX but for birds.

My mind flashed to the sign on the door to the Center; Headquarters was built on the site of an ancient Paiute settlement. The location was used seasonally for thousands of years until colonizers showed up. They weren’t considerate guests at all, and I doubted a poster with a land acknowledgment would have convinced them. My ancestors weren’t in Oregon yet at that point, but presumably they were messing things up for Indigenous people wherever they were, too. Leaving me with such a fantastic legacy.

Now the local Paiute had access to only a fraction of their land.

The land’s status as a refuge was supposed to at least protect it from future development. Then the government decided to use public lands for immigrant detention centers. Thanks, so-called justice system.

The desert rolled endlessly in every direction with few interruptions. A cynical person might say Mother Nature had been liberal with the copy/paste function. But I imagined how from above it might look like a Pointillist painting, thousands of dots on a dusty canvas—pale green for sagebrush, yellow for flowering rabbitbrush. Fifty miles southeast, an incomplete frame: a snow-covered fault-block mountain stretching across the horizon.

I rode along, stopping every few feet to marvel at a new species or reconnect with a familiar favorite. Here and there I paused to sketch furiously. A Sage Thrasher met my gaze with their own intense stare, yellow eyes and a frowny bill giving them a shrewd expression. The sage in their name referred to the habitat, but it tickled me to think of it as an honorific title reflecting hard-earned wisdom, or maybe a Ph.D. in Flying in Undulating Circles.

It took me two hours to reach Refuge Road, and when I did, I gasped. Perched on the rusty barbed wire fence was a Loggerhead Shrike—the most adorably fierce bird in Eastern Oregon.

“Hello, Butcherbird,” I whispered, fixing my binoculars on them.

The carnivorous songbird sat quietly, the breeze tousling their feathers. Smoke gray covered their head and back. Their wings and tail were mostly black, with white touches on the wings like hankies in their pockets. They had snowy underparts and a dark eye mask. A twinkle shone in their eye, and I could almost perceive an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile on their hooked bill.

Next to the Loggerhead Shrike, a fluffy fledgling was skewered on a long barb.

The fledgling twitched and the Loggerhead Shrike used the tooth on their upper mandible to stab at the downy neck, tearing off a piece of flesh.

I lowered myself down into the dirt, stunned, and began sketching. The shrike flew off, leaving the fledgling to turn into jerky alongside other skewered prey: grasshoppers, beetles, even part of a garter snake. But none of the barbed wire pantry’s contents captivated me like their freshest kill did.

I sketched, ignoring the ants trailing over my crossed legs.

The shrike came alive on the page—and unalive, the fledgling.

The negative space around my subjects glared up at me, demanding a little context, but I resisted. Looking at anything but the details in the foreground sounded like torture. But the drawing wasn’t finished. I needed to follow the productive thread to the end.

I forced myself to look out at the landscape and sky. The shift in focus made me feel weak and dizzy, like standing up too quickly.

Part of the problem was not knowing where to focus. The lack of visual variety in the landscape—no hills, no trees taller than myself—led my gaze upward. The sky compensated for the monotony below. Bright azure dazzled in the west, fading through turquoise to white at the horizon. I thought of colored pencils. My head swayed on my neck.

To the north, marshmallowy cumulus clouds floated, with cirrus streaks above. But in the distant south and east, gray clouds spilled over the flat mountain, creeping steadily toward me. How long until the storm hit? And where could I find shelter in a place devoid of every familiar form of cover?

Living in the valley, I’d taken the buttes and towering evergreens for granted. Suddenly I realized that this was part of what had drawn me to birding. It wasn’t just the birds. I’d felt at home in that environment, surrounded and held. Now, everything was different.

“Everything is different.” I said it out loud and the sound waves dissipated into the open air.

It occurred to me then that I should have taken my second pill an hour ago, but there was no second pill to take. Not on the rationing system I had to follow to make the meds last till I turned 18.

Something in my stomach tightened and the stabbing pain rushed in with so much force that I almost vomited. Instead, I started crying. Panic stirred in my chest, fluttering up to my throat, and my breathing became shallow. But I didn’t reach for my inhaler; I couldn’t afford to run out of another medication, and anyway, it wasn’t an asthma attack.

I knew about culture shock, when a place you’re visiting feels so wildly unfamiliar that you get disoriented. Usually it happened in another country, but Mercy felt it on a family trip to Florida.

Was it possible to experience nature shock?

Until that moment, running away seemed like the right decision. Now I wondered what on earth I had been thinking. In leaving everything behind, I left the good along with the bad, trading everything for a blank canvas in a place that felt like another planet, maybe even an alternate reality.

What would Mercy say to me right now?

I sifted through her catalog of advice.

Revenge is a dish best served cold. That was a weird one.

Embrace the chaos. Ha. Okay.

Be shameless in pursuing your dreams. This almost sounded relevant, if I substituted your dreams with the right to exist. But did shame have anything to do with what I was feeling?

Then I remembered Mercy’s sign-off, the words she uttered at the end of every episode of Mindfulness with Mercy Mack.

Keep moving forward.

There was no going back, no turning back time, no matter how desperately a part of me wanted to.

I hugged my knees to my chest and closed my eyes, willing myself to focus on breathing out. After a few minutes, the panic gave way to a foggy numbness. An ant bit my ankle and I flinched but couldn’t blame them. The ground was their space, not mine.

Finally I uncurled myself and examined my work: the Loggerhead Shrike, the jagged fence, the tops of a few sagebrush clumps. The pierced fledgling.

And where reality presented me with a dramatic, richly colored sky—I’d drawn nothing. A blank.

I felt drained. And alone.

The darkest gray clouds drifted closer. A raindrop narrowly missed the page. I had to finish this up. My wrist felt sore and stiff from drawing with too much tension, but one final element remained.

I signed my name at the bottom in simple print. Sayre Dunn.

“Okay, I’m done,” I said quietly. The old family joke, a script I used to follow whenever someone said my full name.

I began walking my bicycle back to the Center, slowly.

Chapter 5

My plan for the rest of the afternoon involved hiding in my pod and feeling sorry for myself. Watching birds from my window. Maybe curling up with a jar of peanut butter and a spoon.

On the way back to the Center, it continued sprinkling on me, and I thought I heard thunder rumbling in the distance.

The sound drew nearer and I realized it came from a deep red SUV trundling down the gravel road. I wheeled the bike further toward the road’s nonexistent shoulder, expecting the vehicle to pass, but instead the driver parked alongside me.

I took a deep breath of that damp-dust smell, preparing to apologize for doing something wrong without realizing it—say, walking where walking was forbidden—or for not knowing the answer to a question. Unless they asked where the Center was, in which case I could just point.

Maybe, though—my nerves buzzed at the thought—maybe it’d be Curly Hair Kid.

The window rolled down to reveal the chiseled features of Brandt Galloway. “Sayre!” His enthusiasm made it sound like I was a contestant on a game show. “Got time for some sparrows?”

My lips twitched with a smile in spite of myself, and before I knew it, Brandt had stashed my bike in the back of his SUV and we were rattling down the road toward the proposed detention center site. Seriously rattling—a pair of paper grocery bags in his backseat sounded like foley for a multi-saloon brawl.

“Do you use those bottles in your field work?” I jerked a thumb at the bags.

He laughed, glancing at me with just his eyes. “Can’t hear you, buddy.”

I smiled and waved it off. Better not to pry about Brandt’s methods. I didn’t want him to regret bringing me. Just watch and learn.

Brandt spent the ride whistling a cheerful but atonal series of notes. It reminded me of Mercy’s party trick, or what would’ve been a party trick if we ever went to parties: playing any melody backward on the ukulele. Among her innumerable skills, it stood out as uniquely impractical. Even as the leader of our school’s ukulele orchestra, she hadn’t made any real use of backward ukulele fingerpicking. I knew this my three interminable months as an orchestra member, after which I dropped out to save our friendship and my withering sense of self.

We pulled up at mile marker 4. No signage indicated this spot’s importance to the humans who wanted to destroy it or to protect it, or to the flora and fauna inhabiting it. If I hadn’t spent hours reading about the types of habitat here, I wouldn’t have fully appreciated it. But my mind added it up: the size of the sagebrush, the abundance of greasewood and saltbrush, the vegetation density. Together these elements formed the perfect habitat for the Scrub Sparrow, the bird Brandt intended to prove deserved species status.

Brandt popped the hatch and dragged out plastic storage containers and a long, slender black nylon bag.

“We’re gonna be mist-netting.” Brandt bit his lip as he unpacked a large wad of some gauzy material. “Taking measurements, drawing blood samples.”

My heart leapt. I tried to nod as confidently as possible, but inside I was shaking. Blood samples? From tiny, helpless feathered angels? After Val’s story about the murdered owl, and the sight of that impaled fledgling, I wasn’t sure I could hack this.

“Sounds good,” I heard myself saying.

The clouds had cleared enough to reveal the sun. I welcomed the warmth but recalled Val’s warnings about sun protection. My floppy hat was in my backpack, but for some reason I felt reluctant to wear it. Instead I applied a fresh layer of sunscreen to every visible inch of my body: face, ears, neck, arms, elbows, hands. Goosebumps rose everywhere the cold cream touched, confirming that the actual temperature of the air wasn’t as warm as the sun’s infrared radiation made it feel.

My legs were in the clear, mostly, but I rubbed some sunscreen on my knees through the holes in my pants.

Brandt handed me the nylon bag. “You can get to work on those poles.” He slid out two metal rods to demonstrate, attaching them to make one extra long rod. “Just kinda shove it in there.” My face flushed and I tried not to react like a 12-year-old, but Brandt beat me to it, smirking. “That’s what she said.”

We set up a small pop-up tent where we could band and collect data on any birds we caught. Then we waited.

Waiting turned out to be our primary occupation. Brandt assured me that the nearly-invisible nest was hung in a suitable place, but nonetheless it took half an hour for a bird to stumble upon it. A Song Sparrow, not a Scrub Sparrow.

“You look so concerned,” Brandt commented, untangling the bird for release. He furrowed his brow in imitation of me.

“I just feel bad,” I said, forcing a small laugh. “Interfering with their lives.”

“For science, bud!” He nudged me and all my senses went into hyperdrive. “They don’t remember this stuff. Didn’t Val say you worked with Marbled Murrelets?”

My eyebrows jumped up. I couldn’t believe she told him and that he remembered. “I did, but we were just documenting presence and absence of nests. We didn’t interact with the birds.”

The tiny sparrow burst from Brandt’s hands as if spring-loaded. “This’ll be a real treat, then.”

We hunkered out of sight on low camp stools, Brandt taking frequent swishes from a stainless steel canteen. I sipped from my water bottle more daintily.

“You settling in okay?” Brandt stretched his legs out, leaning back against the SUV, apparently unconcerned that it still had raindrops dripping down it.

“It’s a big change,” I admitted. How honest could I be with him? He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d understand problems I left behind.

His gaze swept across the landscape. “Big change,” he repeated, like he actually did really get it. A light sweat broke out on my forehead. How much did Brandt Galloway know about me? “I’m still finding my rhythm out here myself,” he added.

“Oh, right,” I said, feeling silly. “You’re new here too.”

“Yeah, fresh start.” His expression turned pensive. “Sometimes you just need to leave things behind.”

A lump formed in my throat. Maybe he understood better than I thought.

“These Scrubbies are giving us the cold shoulder.” Brandt unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt, exposing the upper edge of his chest hair. I could almost feel the texture under my fingers, like the fibers of brushes I used for watercolors.

He pulled out his phone, and I half-expected him to take a selfie.

“Let’s see if we can coax them out,” Brandt said in a low, pillow talk voice. He wore his sly, lopsided grin, but it didn’t seem to be directed at me.

Then he blasted a bird song so loudly that I could only stare, aghast.

“This is a Sagebrush Sparrow,” Brandt explained. “Scrub Sparrows haven’t been recorded yet, but it should still do the trick.”

I knew the use of audio playback was standard in banding, but it still caught me off guard. Audio playback was forbidden on the refuge, and the Code of Birding Ethics discouraged it, especially for threatened species. It could stress them out and interfere with essential bird matters. Matters such as survival.

A few minutes later, a cheeping sound cut through the recording. I peeked around the SUV. “We caught someone!”

The bird twisted, trying to break free. I spotted a bold white eyering and dusky malar stripe, the bird’s “mustache”. Adrenaline surged through my veins, but I contained my excitement. “Looks like a Scrub Sparrow.”

Brandt, being so much taller, scanned the net from where he sat, his trademark half-grin forming. “You called it, buddy. Let’s move in.” A pat on my back made me wish for another hug, even if it meant another asthma attack.

We moved in, and I worried Brandt might inadvertently crush the bird with all his muscles, but he handled the sparrow with the utmost care.

“Here you go, buddy,” he said, and I realized both the bird and I were buddy to Brandt.

The Scrub Sparrow chirped in frustration, trapped in Brandt’s strong hand. I reminded myself that this was for the greater good.

Inside the tent, Brandt demonstrated how to hold the sparrow gently but firmly. My excitement mingled with reverence, knowing I was about to hold an endangered bird.

“You ready?” Brandt gave me a warm smile, melty like fresh chocolate chip cookies.

He guided my hand to make the transfer. The calluses of his palm felt rough compared to the bird’s soft feathers.

And then the bird was in my hands. My heart must have been beating as fast as theirs.

Holding this tiny, imperiled sparrow terrified me—moved me—like nothing I’d ever experienced. Never had I known such a heavy burden of responsibility. I felt like a parent holding their baby for the first time.

A twinge of guilt struck me at that thought, but I pushed it down. Suddenly, in this small way, I now understood what it meant to hold someone’s life in your hands. And I understood my duty to protect that life in a way my parents clearly didn’t.

“First we bleed the bird.” Brandt held up a thin needle.

Instinctively, I pulled the bird toward my chest. I’d been dreading this part. Hearing it phrased that way only underscored my horror.

Brandt chuckled and rested a heavy, reassuring hand on my shoulder. “We don’t need much at all,” he spoke softly into my ear, resulting in all-over goosebumps. Brandt’s mixture of fragrances flooded my senses, like a campfire but also like medicine. “Just a few drops.”

I took deep, steady breaths to keep from going completely unhinged. While I kept the bird in a firm but gentle hold, Brandt produced a skinny plastic tube, like a straw for a beverage being served to a longhorn beetle. He pricked the medial metatarsal vein in the bird’s leg and held the collection tube up to the drop of blood that beaded on the skin. Suction pulled the drop into the tube, then a second drop, and one more.

“Now I transfer the blood sample to a tube with a stabilizing solution.”

I watched, awestruck by his composure. Almost as if he could take a nap at any given moment. Clearly he’d done this many times.

Brandt would analyze the samples later and compare them to genetic material from populations of Sagebrush Sparrows.

But DNA wasn’t enough. The classification committee had been known to reject proposals with the most damning DNA evidence imaginable if it lacked supporting observational data. You’d think it’d be cut-and-dry like a human paternity test, but the committee was famously conservative in its decisions. 

Measuring every measurable part of the Scrub Sparrow—wings, tail, the thick bill that set it apart from Sagebrush Sparrows—took just a couple minutes. The whole time, I felt the bird’s heart beating rapidly in my hands. Brandt selected numbered and colored bands to affix to the bird’s legs. We’d be able to identify individual birds through binoculars just by looking at the combinations of band colors.

“From here on out, this little guy is SNAG.” Brandt pointed at each band. “Sky blue, brown, aluminum, green.”

I squinted at him. “That’s S-BAG.”

Brandt chuckled. “We take the N from Brown. SNAG.”

“That makes no sense,” I said, pleased that I’d made him laugh.

Unzipping the pop-up tent, Brandt suggested I have the honor of releasing the bird.

“Me? Really?” I stepped outside, grinning with the bird in my hands.

Brandt crossed his arms, biceps and forearms bulging against each other. His expression was tender and a little amused. “You’re so stoked.”

Then I thought he added, “It’s cute.” He must’ve meant the bird.

I looked hard at the sparrow, trying to cement this moment in my brain. The bird’s tiny eye glinted up at me, and something seemed to pass between us.

I thought hard at the sparrow: I will protect you, SNAG.

In return, I imagined SNAG saying: If I should die… avenge me, Sayre. Avenge me.

The moment I relaxed my grip, SNAG burst out with a scolding chip note and disappeared into the sagebrush. Brandt Galloway laughed, clapped, and patted me on the back, and my soul took flight, too.

Chapter 6

Clouds gathered as I rode back to the Center. Brandt offered to drive me, but it was so close, and the next round of rain didn’t seem imminent.

I got lucky; the moment I stepped under an awning, the sky unleashed a volley of rain, then pea-sized hail. I was crouched down locking the bike when someone hissed my name from inches behind me.

“Good godwit, Val!” I dropped the lock, spinning around to find her hovering over me.

She shushed me. “You don’t know me.”

My mouth opened and shut like the suckerfish in Mercy’s aquarium, the ones that died prematurely because she kept the tank too clean.

Val looked exasperated. “You don’t live here. You’re not a Young Artist-in-Residence.”

More fish lips. Val must have decided she didn’t need my chaos in her life. Maybe Brandt warned her that I brought toxic energy to an already dicey sparrow situation. Together they’d probably found endless reasons to turn against me. Like my parents.

Lightning flashed in the dark sky.

“I need you to do me a favor,” Val said, her voice steady.

Thunder rumbled. She was kicking me out and she wanted a favor? As cruel as it sounded, I couldn’t blame her. Really, it made perfect sense. “Of course,” I croaked out. “Anything. Just tell me when I need to be gone.”

“Gone?” She looked taken aback. “Please, Sayre. You were made for this place. I just passed Brandt, he said you already helped him band sparrows. Way to hit the ground running.”

I took a deep breath, realizing this conversation might not be leading somewhere painful. I hoped Val would continue with the flattering sentiments, but she blazed ahead in a conspiratorial tone. “Sheriff Baker showed up with a mysterious stranger in a business suit. They’re on the observation deck right now. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’d bet my supernumerary tit that it’s got something to do with the detention center.” She seemed a little wired, like Mercy any time she’d been within six feet of a chocolate-covered espresso bean. “I need you to spy on them.”

I stammered a sound that was vaguely question-shaped but not quite a word.

“I can’t get close to them without arousing suspicion.” She shuddered, I think from having used the word arousing in this context. “You’re a total stranger. To them you’re just an innocent, ignorant child.”

“Um,” I said.

“To them,” she repeated, plucking the helmet from my head. “Here’s the plan. You wander toward them, pretending to look at birds. They’ll probably wait until you pass to start talking again.”

“Then what’s the point?” I asked. “I won’t hear anything.”

“That’s where your phone comes in,” she said slyly.

I grimaced. “Sorry, I don’t have a phone.” This wasn’t strictly true. My parents equipped me with a rather primitive flip-phone—my burner phone, as Mercy called it. But at the start of my house arrest, before I even considered running away, my parents warned me that if I left with it, they’d report it to the police as theft.

Val’s eyes widened as if I’d said my body didn’t contain an aorta. “What kind of 17-year-old doesn’t—” She shook her head. “You can use mine.” I didn’t reach out, but the phone found its way into my hands. When I stared at it like a foreign object—a subspace transmitter, a football—Val grabbed it back. “I’ll start taking a voice memo right now. Hurry upstairs, casually wander over to the scary man with the gun and his crony, set the phone down, and mosey away. Any questions? Great. Off you go.”

In a daze, I walked to the front doors of the Center, cradling Val’s phone in my palm like a delicate egg.

We stand with YOU, the poster on the door reminded me. You are SAFE here.

I glanced toward Val, who made an urgent gesture of flapping wings migrating toward the observation deck. “Crow,” she mouthed. Or possibly “Go.”

My heart pounded, the back of my neck burned, and sweat coated my palms. Then the pelting rain came to an abrupt stop. Something shifted inside me, and it wasn’t food, because I’d forgotten to eat breakfast or lunch.

This could be an opportunity—a chance to prove myself.

I pushed the door open and stepped into the cool quiet of the Center. Shafts of light filtered through the panoramic windows, illuminating dust, which made me nervous about breathing.

Through the door to the coworking studio, I could hear the muffled laughter of Q, Lola, and Heidi. I paused, wondering what part of Three in the Bush they were working on. Then I remembered that the digital tape was rolling on the phone, and I marched up the stairs.

When I reached the landing, I lingered briefly, weighing the merits of donning my pink and green floppy hat to obscure my features. But no, a statement piece like that would only attract unwanted attention.

I peered out the window by the door. Like all the glass at the Center, it was etched with fine lines to prevent bird collisions. The entirety of the deck was visible through the faint markings: a rustic terrace spanning the rooftop. Cushioned deck furniture, a few tables sheltered by broad, sage-green umbrellas. Two high-quality scopes that Val set out each day and stored inside at night. The potted petunias where Curly Hair Kid saw the Virginia Rail. The midday sun had burned through the storm clouds; steam rose from wet patches on the deck.

Only one element was missing: the sheriff and his besuited accomplice. The place was utterly deserted.

“Hmm,” I said. Maybe they’d already left. But no, I would have seen them going down the stairs, or heard the ding of the elevator. I grabbed the door handle and pulled.

It didn’t budge.

“What?” I snapped, tugging again.

A strange but thrilling fever surged within me. The plot had thickened. What had the sheriff and his accomplice done? Locked the door? If so, where were they now?

Whatever the explanation, I couldn’t let minor obstacles like locked doors stop me. I had a mission to fulfill.

I slipped Val’s phone into my pocket, strangled the handle with both hands, and prepared to yank with every ounce of strength.

And then—the details are a mortifying blur—I was whiplashed forward and straight to the ground. Because, of course, the door opened outward, not inward. The sheriff and his accomplice had been loitering in the one spot I couldn’t see: directly on the other side of the door. While I’d been busy gathering strength for one mighty yank, one of them actually did yank, probably with minimal effort, and sent me sailing.

My face collided with the observation deck’s rubbery tiles, a tuneless violin squeaking in my ears. Those tiles were meant for foot comfort, not face comfort. Under a skidding face, they burned. Bad.

“What the hell?” someone shouted. “What are you thinking, kid?”

A second voice added a noncommittal: “You okay?”

You? Okay? Presumably they meant me. Was I okay? The pain in my face faded to numbness. I thought I heard a cicada ring out, but the call was coming from inside my head.

Heavy footsteps thumped around me, then a boot prodded at my sides until I flipped over like a reluctant pancake. The first voice: “Well, shit, is he knocked out or what?”

I cracked open my eyes and stared drowsily into the face of—a goat? Tongue poking out, creepy rectangular goat-pupils leering at me. But no, I realized. Human eyes, with typical human-eye pupils. Not a goat face—a human face. A face with a goatee. I wanted to scream. Then I remembered the hummingbird feeder. I didn’t want to scare any birds, so I just wheezed, “They.”

The goateed face scrunched into a frown.

From elsewhere, the second voice: “You okay, son?”

Then a third voice arrived on the scene—younger, lilting, buoyant. “Oh, wow! What happened? Here, let me help you.”

A warm, soft hand enveloped my cold, clammy one. Curly Hair Kid. A human teenage sunbeam reaching down from heaven, with actual sunbeams casting their hair in an obsidian purple glow. Long-lensed camera slung over one shoulder, eyes wide with concern behind their glasses. I held their hand and stared but didn’t get up.

Perhaps they’d returned in search of that errant Virginia Rail. Or maybe they changed their mind about the free mule deer postcard. Hopefully not, because I wasn’t really at liberty to hand out freebies from the gift shop inventory.

“Oh, jeez, can you sit up? Can you stand?” When I wasn’t forthcoming with answers, Curly Hair Kid addressed the sheriff and the man in the suit. “What even happened? It looks like they hit their head.”

They. They said they. In spite of it all, I found myself smiling. 

“Beats me,” said the sheriff, looking ready to stomp right across me if I didn’t skedaddle posthaste. But I didn’t care. Curly Hair Kid still held my hand, presumably intending to help me up, but I wasn’t in any hurry.

The suited man said, “I heard something crack.”

My senses slammed back into me.

Val’s phone. Oh, shit, Val’s phone.

I scrambled to my feet, nearly pulling Curly Hair Kid down in the process, and bolted.

Chapter 7

Val found me, disheveled and distraught, pacing frantic circles behind the life-size Sandhill Crane plush Brandt had delivered earlier. Surely there were better hiding spaces in the Center than behind this conspicuous bird, but after mismanaging what should have been a simple mission, I hardly felt entitled to go explore.

“The sheriff and the suit just drove off,” Val hissed. Then in a normal voice: “So I guess I don’t need to whisper.” Then, much louder: “What happened to your face?”

For what felt like the fiftieth time that day, my lower lip trembled and my vision blurred with tears. I blubbered something about deserving not only this but many additional facial injuries, and vowed to repay her. Hanging my head in shame, I held out her broken phone.

I looked up when she snorted. She held up a finger, took the phone, and peeled off a screen protector. All evidence of my latest mishap vanished. But before I could whimper with relief, I noticed a crack running down from the upper right corner.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh no, oh no.”

“That tiny crack? Not your doing. That’s ancient. And barely noticeable.”

I found this hard to believe, so I didn’t nod. I also wasn’t about to tell her she was full of it, so I just stood there shaking like a traumatized gazelle.

“Truly not the end of the world, bud,” Val insisted, looking bewildered by the trembling creature before her. She reached as if to hug me, then swerved to hold my shoulder with one hand while patting me on the back with the other.

I hiccuped, which in tandem with her patting me on the back felt especially humiliating, like I was a baby being burped.

She sat me down slowly, then applied some kind of salve to the scrape on my face as she extracted the whole story from me. Not much to tell—just that I’d pulled a door I should have pushed, and got hurled into oblivion.

Val received this information graciously, barely suppressing a hint of her frown-shaped smile. She dabbed at my face and I tried not to squirm. The salve stung like nettles and smelled like minty poison. Yet after a minute, this methodical dabbing began to relax me. I almost felt like I might nod off. When she finished administering First Aid, Val pulled out her phone. I closed my eyes to avoid seeing the crack I had definitely caused.

Through a fog, I registered her playing back the audio. I shut my eyes tighter, bracing for more embarrassment. The tinny, recorded version of Val’s voice said, “Okay, now you hurry upstairs…”

I slumped back against the cool wall. When Val-in-a-can finished speaking, the recording shifted to a soothing soundscape of occasional footsteps and distant birdsong—the sounds of my failed mission. It dragged on like white noise, and I must have actually drifted off, because the next sound I registered was Val’s hysterical cackling. I flailed in terror and she tried to calm me through tears of laughter.

When she couldn’t articulate any full words, she played a short clip of the recording back to me. I heard myself at the top of the stairwell: “Hmm.” Pause. “What?” Pause. My agitated sigh. A staticky sound, fabric rubbing against the microphone. A muffled grunt, a moment of suspense, and finally, the most ridiculous clamor and the word “Whoa!” uttered simultaneously by multiple voices.

At first I felt embarrassed, but I couldn’t help laughing with her. Just like earlier, I felt reassured that the words on the door were true. I was safe here, even if I didn’t have my shit together. Yet.

On the fourth listen, my ears pricked up. “Go back a few seconds.”

Between my “Hmm” and my “What?” was an indistinct but definitely human sound.

“That isn’t me,” I said. “I think it picked up part of their conversation on the other side of the door.”

She swore. “It’s too quiet.”

Closing my eyes, an image of Mercy editing her podcast flashed in my mind. “Could you manipulate the file somehow?”

Val snapped her fingers. “I know who can.” She jumped up and headed straight to the coworking studio. Halfway across the room, she spun back around. “Well, aren’t you coming?”

I stared vacantly for too long. “I should probably go back to my pod,” I said, trying not to look too forlorn. I knew she would ask the Three in the Bush trio about editing the audio. I didn’t think I could handle that kind of interaction right now. “Maybe I should try to take a nap.”

“That’s the exact opposite of what you should do. You might have a minor concussion. No sleep for you, buddy.”

Even though she had opted out of hugging me, every time Val called me buddy I felt something protective wrap around me. It warmed me from the inside, like the sound of my first Yellow-headed Blackbird. Like seeing Mercy in the hallway between classes. Like Curly Hair Kid defaulting to they without even knowing what it meant to me. Like the touch of their hand…

When I rose to follow Val, the room wobbled and darkened for a sickening moment. Maybe she was right about the concussion.

We entered a room with cotton-white walls as bright as the desert outside. Two massive white oak work tables were lit by pendant lamps and skylights.

Beneath a skylight in the far corner, a large agave grew straight out of the floor, as if the room had been built around it. An enormous, scaly trunk shot up from the center of the prehistoric-looking plant and through the skylight. A clear plastic tarp stretched across the opening, with a hole for the agave to grow through. Small rivulets of rainwater trickled down the plant. A sign staked into the earth showed a cartoon drawing of the agave with the words Hi, I’m Amelia! I’m going through some changes. On Amelia’s laughing face was a bead of nervous sweat, or possibly agave nectar.

Beneath the cartoon, the sign indicated that Esther Estebeni, the Center’s founder, had planted the agave twenty years ago.

Against another wall stood several desks laden with computer monitors and audio-visual equipment. Q, Lola, and Heidi huddled around one of the monitors, all wearing headphones. Q and Lola sat cross-legged in task chairs, while Heidi bobbed up and down on a balance ball.

Val strode down the ramp and announced our presence with a shockingly loud whistle, the kind that involves fingers. The sound must have barely penetrated the trio’s headphones, or maybe they were just that cool and collected, because they turned around casually.

In the split second before anyone spoke, I hoped to godwit that no one would notice my—

“What happened to your face?” Heidi blurted.

Q, pushing Heidi off balance on the ball. “Babe, what the fuck.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lola muttered. Theatrically, like teaching Etiquette 101 to kindergarteners, she introduced herself. “I’m Lola Moon. She/they. What are your name and pronouns?”

For an unbearable moment, no sound came out of my mouth. My thoughts tangled like noodles that had been cooked, drained, and left in the sink for a few years. Finally I managed to get out my name and pronouns before Val had to jump in.

Q gave a gesture somewhere between a wave and a salute. “Queenie Allen. Call me Q. She/her.”

“Heidi Berman. Also she/her.”

“And your name is Sayre?” Lola asked. “Like Zelda Sayre?”

I hadn’t heard that one, so I ran through my usual script: “Like Sayre sorry, Sayre welcome, Sayre gonna love me forever. Full name Sayre Dunn.”

“You’re done,” Heidi said.

I had heard that one.

Val cut to the chase. “We need your help with something.”

“It’s okay if you can’t,” I chimed in quickly.

“Please, Sayre,” Lola said. “I, for one, would leap at a chance to stop working for a few minutes.”

“Right, because you were working so hard,” Heidi said. “That’s why you started snoring.”

“How dare you? I mean, really, truly, how dare you.”

Q cleared her throat loudly. “What did y’all need help with?”

Val explained our pedestrian attempt at espionage.

Heidi’s ball squeaked against the taupe-gray planks. “You know it’s illegal to record law enforcement without their knowledge, right?”

Val and I exchanged awkward glances.

“Kidding!” Heidi said. “Fuck the police.”

Heidi opened her audio editing program and Val sent over the file. I recognized the app as the same one Mercy used.

“Fully agree that all cops are bastards,” Lola said as Heidi worked, “and, why would they come here if they’re up to something shady?”

“To intimidate me?” Val suggested, tapping her foot nonstop. “To fuck with me? Because they can? Stop me anytime.”

I barely registered the conversation. The program on the screen transported me back to Mercy’s house, two days earlier. Mercy looped a small snippet of Mindfulness of Mercy Mack, tweaking the audio mix. The clip: “Follow your intuition, even if it defies logic. Your gut knows what's best for you.”

I must have heard it three hundred times. It bounced around my head as we hugged goodnight. In the guest room, I gathered my few belongings and wrote a brief, reassuring note. “It’s like you said,” I wrote, quoting her word for word. That way, she’d understand why I had to leave.

Now, in the coworking studio, I half-expected Mercy’s voice to come through the speakers. Instead, Recorded-Val’s voice resonated: “Okay, now you hurry upstairs, casually wander over to the scary man with the gun…”

Lola rested her forehead in her palm. Q gave Val an incredulous look.

After the intro, Heidi frowned at the track on the screen, jumping to different points. “Jesus, the waveform is practically nonexistent for ten minutes, until that huge spike near the end. Is anything even happening?”

Everyone turned toward me, and I suddenly felt like I was on trial.

“I don’t really remember,” I confessed. “I guess I got kind of… distracted.”

“I get it,” Heidi said, turning back to the screen. “Forgot your ADHD meds, huh? We’ve all been there.”

I laughed too loudly, my face burning with the heat of a thousand flames.

Val caught my eye, her expression shifting from confusion to dawning insight., like I was a Magic Eye picture and the hidden image had finally appeared. I looked away. When you suffer from transparent daisy face, sometimes all you can do is hide.

“Here.” Val commandeered the mouse from Heidi and split a ten-second snippet from the track. “This is the part we need.”

Heidi put the clip on repeat and I cringed at my amplified voice going hmm and what over and over till she trimmed it down. Now only the mumble through the door looped like a broken record. She fiddled with plug-ins, creating a rainbow of hills and valleys in the EQ window, until the sheriff’s voice became crisper, clearer, louder. Our jaws dropped as words came into focus. Once we could hear them, I wished they’d remained a blur:

“You can bet these bitches will put up a fight. But they’re outsiders. The county’s got your back, sir.”

We sat in stunned silence as the clip looped.

Finally Val butted in with all the grace of a Wild Turkey, pounding at keys until the sound stopped. As she pulled away, the mouse clattered to the floor.

When Val spoke, her voice sounded both weak and dangerous, like a dull knife. “Alright, what the fuck is going on?”

Q looked like she might speak but shook her head, covering her mouth with one hand.

It didn’t take expert investigation skills to figure out who the sheriff meant by the bitches: Val and everyone here at the Center. But what did he mean by outsiders?

The Center had existed for decades in one permutation or another. It owed its current glory to Esther Estebeni, a local Basque woman rancher whose biography and works I had devoured after landing the residency. In the 1970s, Esther was a minor figure in the lesbian back-to-the-land movement, then achieved unexpected success in the 80s with her bittersweet rural fiction. Between bestselling novels and film adaptations—Tumbleweed Palace and Larkwood came to mind—she amassed a small fortune.

When she died, her entire estate went toward renovating the dilapidated research station where she did most of her writing: the Tulare Living Learning Center. She even put stipulations in her will ensuring that a hefty percentage of revenue would be paid as reparations to the Salt Flat Paiute in perpetuity.

Maybe some of the people at the Center weren’t locally grown, but they were carrying on a grassroots effort.

And what did the sheriff mean about putting up a fight? The detention center project was already on hold, thanks to the lawsuit. The Environmental Impact Statement wasn’t expected until next year.

Any reasonable person would have spent the next several hours worrying and wondering, but Val Flores wasn’t any reasonable person. She stood abruptly and she stomped out, not even glancing my way as she said, “Sayre, come.”

I hesitated for a moment before hurrying after her, pausing to look back at the Trio with puppy dog eyes.

“Nice meeting you,” Lola called.

It sounded ominous, like there wouldn’t be a next time.

“See you in the field,” Q added, reassuring me a little.

By the pond, Val paced with her arms crossed, muttering to herself. When she noticed me, she gave me a death stare. Her lips were a thin line, the muscles in her jaw pulsating.

“I am so angry,” she said.

I felt myself shrinking. “I’m really sorry…”

She blinked. “What? Not at you, Sayre. I’m angry at the sheriff. At the fucking powers that be. Mostly, at myself.”

“At yourself?”

“I didn’t do my due diligence when I said you could stay. I thought, why not? Give them a place to stay, food, water, a hat.” She hesitated. For the millionth time, I braced myself for orders to hightail it back to a home that no longer existed. Instead she asked, “What was going on in the silent part of that recording?”

I swallowed. Honesty is an overblown virtue, I reminded myself. “I guess I got distracted. I think I’m just…tired. And, you know, it’s a new place.”

Val didn’t seem satisfied. She stopped pacing but continued kind of shuffling in place. “I hate to point this out, because there’s nothing wrong with it, but… you’ve been crying a lot. And I’m wondering…” She trailed off.

“It’s okay,” I said. Despite her earlier claim that I belonged here, she couldn’t abide my constant histrionics. My immediate departure was necessary. “Fire away,” I added flatly, resigning myself to fate.

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What’s going on?”

It was a simple question, but it shocked me. When I cried at home, my mom didn’t ask what was going on. She’d scoff and say, “I don’t understand why you’re so mad at me.”

I didn’t know what to say to Val. There was always a right answer when adults asked questions like what’s going on? If I wanted to stay, I couldn’t afford to get it wrong.

“Okay,” Val said when I failed to respond. “I assume you ran away. Or got kicked out. Right?”

So we were really going there. No hope skirting around that inconvenient detail now that Val had voiced it. “Ran away, technically,” I answered weakly. “But I’d say I was driven to it.” No need to give the full itinerary, which included my brief stay at Mercy’s. If I mentioned her, I’d start crying again.

“And are you—” She stopped short. “God, I hate asking these questions,” she mumbled, glaring at a nearby quail. She ran her hand through her hair, a wavy dark bob that could have earned her a spot among the angels in Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate, if angels wore oversized vintage sweatshirts that said VOTE. Finally she spoke: “Are you on any medications?”

Oh, boy. This was it. I needed to proceed with the utmost caution. Val was probably one of those people who didn’t believe in psychiatry. Like the people at my church who told me I wouldn’t need meds if I prayed hard enough. Or maybe she was anti-Big Pharma, which, okay, but also I needed my meds.

“Uh, just one medication,” I said, softening the blow by excluding my inhaler and PrEP. “A really low dose.”

“And you have enough?”

Anxiety zipped into my mind like a wasp sniffing out a picnic. Did I have enough? Kind of. Probably Val just wanted to know if she could send me away guilt-free. “Enough for now?” I cursed inwardly at the question mark.

“Enough for how long?”

“Um, depends.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“On whether I’m taking them as prescribed,” I went on.

Her other eyebrow joined the first.

“Not like abusing them!” I said quickly. The last thing I needed was another person thinking I was self-medicating. “Just… making them last.”

“Ah,” she exhaled with apparent relief, then bit her lip and furrowed her brow. “Do you have health insurance?”

“My parents pay for some kind of insurance,” I said, then hesitated.

“I sense a but.”

“No, no.” Averting my gaze. 

Arms folded, then quickly unfolded. “Sayre.”

“But… they said they’d take me off the plan if I left.”

Val resumed pacing, I think to keep from exploding. Probably she wanted to lecture me about my questionable decisions.

“I’m sorry,” I offered, so quietly it might not have been audible over the Yellow-headed Blackbirds screaming Don’t you DARE! and the Red-headed Blackbirds replying Konk-la-REEEEE! “I’m sorry,” I repeated more loudly.

Val turned to face me. “Hey. Listen.” I looked down, bracing myself for a tsunami of vitriol. When only silence came, I looked up. I expected a face contorted in anger, but instead she had the same look my art teacher Donna gave me when I needed to cry on her couch. “You have nothing to apologize for. If I want an apology, I’ll ask. Got it?”

I didn’t totally get it—it seemed oddly straightforward—but I squeaked a small affirmation.

“We’ll figure this out. The Center can give you time and space, but what’s the point if you can’t use it?”

My eyes brimmed with tears. I blinked hard, took a deep breath. Keep it together, Sayre. A voice inside called me selfish, a sponge absorbing resources that other people deserved more.

If Val helped me, I needed to make sure I didn’t inconvenience her again. I had to return the favor—and then some.

“Val,” I cleared my throat. “What about the sheriff?”

She shrugged, gazing heavenward like Botticelli’s angels. “We don’t know what we’re up against yet,” she said. “But whatever it is, he’s not wrong. This bitch is gonna fight.”

[enviousidiot]

My technique still needs work, but HAS improved, and with the help of some new brushes, I am very proud to submit this piece to Sparkbird’s latest art contest, inspired by both Sparkbird’s upcoming song “After The Ball” AND Madilyn Mei’s new album, “A Thousand Songs About It All; Act 1.”

I feel as though the songs in that album and After The Ball share a similar vibe, and as I very much resonate with many of the songs in the album, I wanted to combine my love for BOTH artists and make another stained glass piece!

I may or may not make more to submit, but either way, I’m very happy with the work I’ve done :D

[enviousidiot]

My other submission for The Light That Comes through. I turned the cover art into stained glass itself!

I’m really proud of it :D

[enviousidiot]

I drew a thing for my friend and decided (with permission) I’d try my hand at submitting it into the Sparkbird art contest for The Light That Comes Through!

[miseria-fortes-viros]

yoooo guys these wings my dad made look INSANE i can’t wait to try them tomorrow

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i don’t think you understand i totally thought we were gonna die locked up in this castle but this fucking genius was like “im going to invent a way for humans to fly”. shout out to my dad he’s a real one fr

[miseria-fortes-viros]

LMAOOO this dude told me to be careful as he affixed the wings to my back…..dad no offense but you just invented flying and we have to go high enough to avoid the king’s archers. soo

[miseria-fortes-viros]

HOOOOLY SHIT YOU GUYS I AM SO AFRAID. THE GROUND IS SO FAR. HOW DO BIRDS DO THIS. OH MY GODS OH MY GODS OH MY GODS

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it’s so beautiful up here

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i don’t like seeing the ground. i’m going higher

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it’s cold and i can’t see anything. not sure if that’s better or worse

[miseria-fortes-viros]

by zeus….what is that thing…….it’s as bright as the sun and twice as warm

[miseria-fortes-viros]

the gods look truly down on me this day…apollo calls to me from his chariot of fire. a mere mortal. he must think my flight such a wondrous feat

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i don’t understand why but he’s coming closer. he is not supposed to stray from his path, lest the sun fall from the sky. why does he look so anguished to see me?

[miseria-fortes-viros]

oh. i am in his path

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it’s so hot…was it this hard to fly before? maybe i’m tired

[miseria-fortes-viros]

the wax

[miseria-fortes-viros]

he really does look like the sun…the light emanates from his fingers, his hair, his skin. he means to catch me. i reach for him

[miseria-fortes-viros]

his skin burns. i cannot hold on

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i slip through his fingers.

[miseria-fortes-viros]

it takes a really long time to fall from the sky. longer than i thought

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i wonder if he cried for me

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i pray to him just in case. i am grateful he tried. my palms are red and cracked from where they touched divinity. the ground does not look any closer than it was

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i have not seen my father since we took flight…i hope he escaped. i hope he will not witness this. i wish i could tell him how joyful these wings made me before the wax melted

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i do not regret it. i have seen with my own eyes what others will only dream of

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i am not afraid

[miseria-fortes-viros]

i am not afraid i am not afraid i am not afraid i am not afraid i am afraid i am afraid i am afraid

[miseria-fortes-viros]

please please please please please pleaseplease

[miseria-fortes-viros]

the gods will not save me. i suppose this is a lesson in hubris. i am forever a flightless thing

[miseria-fortes-viros]

please please please i have no coin for the ferryman if i am to die now i will never reach the realm of hades please turn me into a bird any bird or a bug or something anything please please pleasepleaseplease

[miseria-fortes-viros]

I AM NOT AFRAID I AM NOT AFRAID I AM NOT AFRAID I AM NOT AFRAID I AM N

[otselotus]

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [we are here!!!] OMG it took only 11 months omg soooo productive If you are not familiar - this is desertduo Fish Au comics I did I a while back :"D This chapter is more about Scar and his backstory, and right now he is about to meet the rest of the crew (omg whoo are theyyy) A huge thank you @mayvora for helping with the text! Their part was so great that I had to actually use my brain trying to write something even remotely on the same level because their writing is just insane please check out their works!!

--

Okay but for real thank you for reading all that, thank you for still remembering my silly little comics about two 1/4-fish men. I really appreciate every message, reblog, I read everything and It is still overwhelming how positive people are about this stuff. So thank you so much really. Usually I am too tired to react or respond for the most part (and after that it becomes weird), but i still read and cherish every single comment, they mean the world to me qq thank you so much for sticking around, see you in 2025 <3

[philip-the-nickel]

Ok, so since Joel is the car, I'd like to point out that this....

... is the 1964 Mercury Comet

and this is Joel's Car:

may I make a suggestion?

JOEL THE COMET

[isjasz]

YOU'RE DEAD TO ME

Also a cover version done as a joke bc it looked like a novel/manga cover for some reason + lineart :D

[enviousidiot]

Snatched

[prompt-heaven]

a list of 100+ buildings to put in your fantasy town

academy

adventurer's guild

alchemist

apiary

apothecary

aquarium

armory

art gallery

bakery

bank

barber

barracks

bathhouse

blacksmith

boathouse

book store

bookbinder

botanical garden

brothel

butcher

carpenter

cartographer

casino

castle

cobbler

coffee shop

council chamber

court house

crypt for the noble family

dentist

distillery

docks

dovecot

dyer

embassy

farmer's market

fighting pit

fishmonger

fortune teller

gallows

gatehouse

general store

graveyard

greenhouses

guard post

guildhall

gymnasium

haberdashery

haunted house

hedge maze

herbalist

hospice

hospital

house for sale

inn

jail

jeweller

kindergarten

leatherworker

library

locksmith

mail courier

manor house

market

mayor's house

monastery

morgue

museum

music shop

observatory

orchard

orphanage

outhouse

paper maker

pawnshop

pet shop

potion shop

potter

printmaker

quest board

residence

restricted zone

sawmill

school

scribe

sewer entrance

sheriff's office

shrine

silversmith

spa

speakeasy

spice merchant

sports stadium

stables

street market

tailor

tannery

tavern

tax collector

tea house

temple

textile shop

theatre

thieves guild

thrift store

tinker's workshop

town crier post

town square

townhall

toy store

trinket shop

warehouse

watchtower

water mill

weaver

well

windmill

wishing well

wizard tower

[enviousidiot]

Snatched

[mosswall]

No offense but I think some of you would be a lot happier writing a fictional atlas or encyclopedia instead of a narrative story

[ramshacklefey]

Concur! Go forth and write your Dragonology and your Guidebook to Fairyland! Write a traveler's diary of a setting! These are fun and legitimate things to do!

[lizardywizard]

I love books that are literally just this!

[777-delirious]

i've been able to draw nothing except dragons this last week, which works out perfectly for the au

[enviousidiot]

Sick broski, welcome to the stash

[youbutstupid]

This is the game they made a brain rot movie of and it is kinda sad seeing such a big piece of nostalgia turned into something that is clearly not geared towards the age group who was raised with it. They could’ve made something so beautiful and at least tried to replicate that magical feeling of being a kid and discovering/learning everything this game has to offer whilst the soft music plays in the background.

[enviousidiot]

AAAAAAAAAAA

[enviousidiot]

I keep thinking about how easily tone could change the ending of Thunder Bringer. Like, most people know tone conveys meaning-

But in written terms, Odysseus says “I know…”

But what if he didn’t sound as sad? What if he just sounded… fine with it. Eurylochus just betrayed him.

“…But we’ll die.” Eurylochus says- he sounds a mix of upset and content. He knows what Ody’s choice will be.

“I know.” Odysseus responds. He sounds angry. Fine with them dying. They betrayed him. He doesn’t cry as he points to his crew. His face is that of a monster- blank. Uncaring.

[cheruib]

that comment about how you should not borrow grief from the future has saved me multiple times from spiraling into an inescapable state of anxiety. like every time i find myself thinking about how something in the future could go wrong i remember that comment and i think to myself: well i never know, it might get better. it might not even happen the way i think it will and if it does happen and it is sad and bad ill be sad about it then, when it happens. and it’s somehow soo freeing

[1dietcokeinacan]

[afewnovelideas]

I need this reminder today.

[enviousidiot]

This is just a good thing to have on hand imo

[writing-prompt-s]

“Pick a god and pray” they said, and you did, praying to every god you knew. And as you did this a name popped into your mind, one you didn’t recognize, yet you prayed to them all the same. In response the air stood still, like even the world had forgotten their name.

[enviousidiot]

Okay. But. Hear me out.

A god named Please, whose domain resides over prayers and wishes. Whenever you beg, or pray to another god, you whisper their name. “Please, let me pass this test.” “Please, [insert god], grant me with magic.” “Please, mother, I want some chocolate.”

Please. Please. Please. That’s what you always say first.

And though it goes unnoticed at first, Please does their best to fulfill those prayers.

So you pass your test.

You are gifted magic, a favor Please asked of the god you attempted to speak to.

Your mother gives you some chocolate.

Please is a god long worshipped, forgotten yet their name is whispered in the wind.

“Please.” You whisper. “Whoever can hear this. I have no gods left to pray to. Please, save me.”

And, faithful as they are, Please shall answer your call.

[illinicoise]

“But if you forget to reblog Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”

[spn-fandom-breathing-heavily]

not even risking that shit

[codyslipring-deactivated2015060]

scrolled past this, re-evaluated my life, then SCROOOLLLED back up and hit the damn reblog button. 

[tumblgang]

She ain’t no games in real life so I take her serious all the time

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

I’m not climbing no mountain with a pig on my back, 🙅🏽🙅🏾🙅🏿 Negative.

[skuubasally]

Nope. I know better, have your reblog Madame Zeroni.

[luckytaters]

who the fuck is Madame Zeroni

[saudadesinfinitas-deactivated20]

Look at these stupid children who don’t know who Madame Zeroni is

[drayaintshit-deactivated2019030]

☝🏾😂

[callmedeku24]

Man lissen if you don’t know you better ask somebody AFTER you hit the reblog button

[emeraldmercury]

Idk who she is but I have an exam today so I’ll reblog her

[haiku-robot]

idk who she is but i have an exam today so i’ll reblog her

^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!

[jacobmick]

Because wise, I am.

[seymonecristina]

Oh fucks no she’s back lmao must reblog. I’m sorry guys

[silverslipstream]

Reblogging Madame Zeroni because I would hate for my great-great grandson to get hit in the head by running shoes

[scruffy-bunny]

ok but who TF is this?

[sony-official]

MADAME ZERONI DIPSHIT

[scruffy-bunny]

That doesn’t answer my question In The slightest

[sony-official]

true

[enviousidiot]

Met Madame Zeroni in my current D&D game. Nice as hell, creepy as hell. Do not wanna get on her bad side.

[yourlocalxenomorph]

please can we do inbox trick-or-treating this year. can we make that a thing on tumblr. please please please please please

[yourlocalxenomorph]

literally all it entails is sending people "trick-or-treat" asks and people answering those asks with pictures of candy or those silly spooky plastic toys or whatever else you would give a trick-or-treater. please. please can we have some whimsy

[coelii]

Don’t forget trick or treating this year everyone!

[marvelmaniac715]

I won’t forget this year

[bigmilkymantatas]

You'll all get treats this year if you send those asks my way!

[that-mf-under-your-bed]

Mutuals

Get ready

[royallygray]

@katkat030 @mysteriouswolf @emmaestrella @geodetojoy @periwinklepaint @charbeloved @jae-birde

[geodetojoy]

OH MY GOD YESSSS

@eowynarchives @just-watching-dont-worry thoughts?

[just-watching-dont-worry]

we're going trick or treating this halloween!!!

@paranormaltheatrekid @kairithemang0 @loganschwarzy @tedfagoffski @orangeslikesbread you guys want to join?

[orangeslikesbread]

oh im so in !!

@bothsloth @owchie-wowchie @kairithemang0 @ireallyliketalldarksultrymen @t4tgempearl guyssss

[just-watching-dont-worry]

woo!!!!!!!

wait i kinda want to tag more people

@uhhhitsme @t4tgempearl @zeros-dumpsterfire @anfroginous @starkidobsessedgiantgremlin @musicalfan78 @jasperthejester @felixisfruity

you guys in?

[musicalfan78]

HELL YEAH LETS DO IT!

@chickensoupbmc @fanaticastrid @forevertrueblue @nerdyratz @mostlyelliott @michaelmellz @jerberryyuri YALL IN?

[possibly-evil]

IM IN!!!!

@bestbeeking @cockycockroacha @bug-ina-rug @jaydove-writes @finleyforevermore @teavilgenius

[jaydove-writes]

You can only tag 5 people per line. So put the 6th through 10th people on another line next time. Like this:

@nerdulascrungula @translesbianfoxgirl @apple-eating-goat @bettinalevyisdetermined @caretaleandotherstuff

@alchemicalwerewolf @thecrazyalchemist @moringmark

[caretaleandotherstuff]

HELLO EVERYBODY

[scooburst]

What’s happening? Idk. Oh well. @skelpiescool

[skelpiescool-deactivated2025071]

HOLY SHIT YES AND THEN QE POST PHOTOS OF OUR COSTIMES/OTHER PEOPLES COSTUMES WITH CREDIT

@asclexe @thatacefrog @ratmare-catnap @th3-r4t-48

[thatacefrog]

OMG YES!!!!!

We can change our pfps to have our characters in costume!!!!!

@turquitheslimeplush @sallowcorvid @life-is-okay-rn2 @aroace-wizard

[aether-the-kitsune]

i cant, id need to like get art made bc i dont have time

[arsonanarchyandanxiety-deactiva]

@angelicmuttsys @leahface @graveyard-darlingg @cha0s-critter @dion-daemos-child-of-hades @totally-italy @rat-detector @sammy-and-the-sheep

sorry for the tags. just going off of memory on who moots are but i don't run this blog so

- 💝 - 🌕🔮👑

[totally-italy]

Gods, yes please!

[spaghetti-o-fficial]

@nanochittle @walmart-the-official @the-real-catholic-church @chaos-on-stand-bi @maryland-no-rabies @unofficial-ihop @official-imagine-dragons

[the-m-is-for-minor]

hmmm

[spaghetti-o-fficial]

How are you like always online. You're always the first one to interact with a post if I've tagged you, and you always just pop up randomly 😭

[the-m-is-for-minor]

:33

[spaghetti-o-fficial]

Actually wait it's probably bcuz you have like 5 accounts or whatever

[enviousidiot]

I wanna do thisssss