WHERE THE BIRDS SING
The gnarled muscle of the tree trunk is strong against my hand. It pulses, it presses, it pulls. Pulls me past. Pulls me deeper. Pulls me through. The breathing of the wood. The impossible, laughing green of its leaves. Pulls me through, pulls me over, pushes me in.
I clamber over the giant tree roots, protruding from the ground like the ridges of a hungry spine. Hunger. Always hungry now. People at home dropping like flies, little wisps of flesh and bone crumbling under the thunder that traps us. No food. No money, never had that anyway. Nowhere to go, nothing anywhere. Mama says that we, the parasites who gleefully suck nectar from the Earth’s ancient roots, have made it sick, and we are sick with it. Poisoned by it. Poisoned it. She says maybe the gods have frowned on us, maybe the Earth wants to die. Maybe we killed it. Nothing may be born of it.
But here. Here, where the green screams with the fierceness of a fire, here. Surely, the world is happy here. The Earth has decided to live here now, make this wood into the pool life spills into. All the life from everywhere else is shrinking away, crawling here, crawling home. The healthy soil, the tiny bugs, the plants and the flowers and creatures that prowl at night. The life is sucked from their mortal bodies now, yes, but it is only going somewhere else. It seeps into the soil, I think. Travels along underground rivulets, searing through the Earth until it finds this haven. So much life. Yes, how else could it be so green?
The gnarled muscle of the land breathes beneath me. Humming, beating like an old heart. It is an old heart, the oldest anyone knows. Life in green is stretching all around me, like the fingertips of the sun. The forest is rocking softly, swaying quickly as the wind twists and twirls around me, an invisible hand on my shoulder. It picks my knotted hair up off my back and flies it like a flag behind me, trailing in the air as I walk, walk, deeper, deeper, to where life grows.
I hear birds again. Sweet, happy birds. They sing their secret song, its fluttering
notes
only enjoyed by me and the quiet trees, adding a harmony of rustling leaves to their melodies. Birds don’t sing at home. Birds don’t fly. Birds only fall, their fragile, feathery
bodies keeled over on the ground, tiny hearts beating slowly, pushing their chests out, out,
out, until they are finally still. Poor things, my mother says as she scoops them up. They’ve only ever wanted to sing. They don’t know we poisoned them. I think they do. And as we eat them in our stew, I wonder what songs they may have sung once upon a time, when their numbers were many and they had stories to tell.
Eating something sick has become a gamble we are willing to take. No one can see or say where the poison starts, and no one can know where the poison ends. But we take out the heart, the liver, the kidney and the stomach anyway. Or, I do, really. That’s my job. That has always been my job. Mama thought it would prepare me. For what will come, she says. What will come, I still don’t know. Some of the women in the village, with moth-eaten and threadbare scarves wrapped around their heads frown, and think it improper. They whisper and snarl. Some of the men, hands calloused and cut by the splintering wood of an axe, find it too strange an activity. They turn their heads, not before I see the discomfort scrawled over their faces. But every one of them eats the bird all the same, gutted by me.
Seeing the blood and gore of this singing creature does not tell me its song. But I imagine that maybe, it could. Maybe, the ridges and scars its little body acquired in its short life could tell a story, if I only knew the language. But I’m too hungry to learn. We all are.
After gutting it, then plucking it, it’s barely more than a vague mess of limbs that’s hardly worth the work or the risk. But nobody says that. We lug the soup pot around the village square, and everyone drops their birds, plentiful in numbers and in danger. But not as plentiful as our hunger. And in this slow, weary village, where nothing grows, and everything seems to die, not as plentiful as my boredom.
The Great Death doesn’t keep anyone anxious anymore. It doesn’t send anyone mad, or sobbing, like when Mama was young, and it doesn’t drive fury and frustration into our hearts, fatal as a dagger. It only keeps us waiting, wondering when it will be our turn for that cold plunge to grip us by the throat and give us seconds, a minute at most, before darkness closes in on our vision, and sweeps us away forever. Mama calls it banal. I don’t call it anything. I just walked away, to where the land was too rocky, too steep, the rivers too messy and wild and prone to floods for anyone to have made a decent home here, save for the witches and the pagans who lived with, not off, the land. I climb these rocks and tumble down these hills, wade in these rivers while I still can. And then, if I climb, tumble and wade far enough, I hear the birds again. Far from where we poisoned them, their food and their homes. Far from where we poisoned ourselves. Mama tells me of the land before it got sick, and she calls it pristine. She must have been talking about this, this sprawling mess of life I have never known. I understand that everything alive must die. But I have never known my home to be alive. And this, surely, will never die. Somewhere in the rocks, hills and rivers, the ouroboros circle falls apart.
Everything here will live forever.
Everything at home will die forever.
And never the two shall meet.
But I am here. I come from a world that is dying, but as I climb the firm wood of this tree, strong and dauntless, I am alive. Somehow, somewhere inside me, under the poison that is surely mounting, I am alive.
Maybe the two shall meet. Maybe they meet in me. Maybe the circle is as intact as ever, as strong and alive as this tree I climb, as solid as the moon rising over the horizon now. This will be forever, though I am not.
With my back against the gnarled muscle of this tree, I start to feel it. Cold and thick, I feel it. Tightness in my throat. Poison in my stomach. A sick bird, angry and gutted and plucked and eaten, is restless inside me. It sits atop a mound of others, angry and gutted and plucked and eaten as well. All of them poisoned. All of them spilling their sickness now. Their sickness, caught from our sickness, our original sickness, is swilling and swelling inside me.
My eyes are flickering and fluttering like heavy weights, and a bird is singing as I fall.
Lena Killalea, 16, Sydney - Australia ✯ BACK TO FICTION: OUROBOROS
“Lena Killalea is a 16 year old writer from Sydney, Australia, and is currently in high school. Previously, she has been published in the literary magazine Words Come Isi, and has been a part of the W.J Kite Writing Competition anthologies for 2021 and 2022. Short stories are some of her favourite things to write, and if she isn’t doing that, you can likely find her practising ballet or scrolling through Pinterest with her cat.”