You flutter in through an open portal from your world into theirs, sorry, 'Theirs' capital Tee. You flutter, as is your wont, where your heart/eyes/ears/nose/ tummy/wings (all one and the same, really) lead you, but you after a flutter and a half at most you realize that your following has led you up the proverbial creek: there is no sky here! No connection to light except over indirect routes.
There is no sky echoes thru your mind like rolling thunder.
You flap and flutter, wings beating, a sudden suspicion dawning that you are in, like, the Mouth of a terrible cubic beast, one unlike anything you've ever known. It does not move, breathe, make noises, eat, reproduce, or grow. The air is stale, leaden. The smells are alien, offensive, and unfamiliar; the vibe is...charged. No matter the turns taken through this bluffed labyrinth you encounter only cliffs and more cliffs, around, above and below you. Cliffs where no moss grows. Although impossible, you feel out of place…
There are no teeth here, no tongue to push you towards gnashing molars, but...
They are here. You hear them, smell them before you see them. They reek tainted, stained. Ill. That time a cat clawed your sister and the wound festered in the heat; like that. That time Papi brought home the fish from the creek by the big, loud, throbbing building where the swifts nested, under the shadow of the stone tower from which smoke always gushed: those fish also smelled...off. Your guano did too, afterwards, as if composed of things not meant to be combined.
Though They do not hunt you, not really, not at first, not this time, the cold and loveless look in their eyes throws you, and you flutter harder towards an escape not presenting itself. O joy! you spot a framed picture of your world and rush that way...only to collide with a hardness you cannot see, a divide you cannot cross.
It is confounding: you see your world, your nest, in the tree you call home, right over there! You hear your happy neighbors twittering and cheeping, a moo and a baa from your friends in the nearby field, but here you are blocked from the world you can no longer touch, reach. Be part of.
'In' and 'out' do not compute. Neither does transparent hardness.
You hear Them calling the frames 'paynes,' and, after beating your brains out several times trying to pound your way through, you understand why. One is long and tall, and as your small, frail wings beat slower and slower, you slide down its surface, still sooo close to your world, and discover something inside you that you never felt before, never had any need for: hope. You only discover it because it drains from you as your wings drum ever more slowly on the payne.
Once inside the maw of this cubic monstrosity, nothing for you is as has been. Your identity, your self, is questioned; your solid foundations grow flaccid, soften; opinions and beliefs once held so firmly they were, like, not even there scatter like crows after a lightning strike. What are you doing here and why?
Having slid to the bottom of this framed view of your world, a bow-wow now pounces, and once more you find yourself inside a maw, only this one does have a tongue. And teeth. It is warm but so is fire, and you desire sky, think only of sky and of Mama Wren and her warmth so different from the warmth inside a bow-wow's muzzle. How did you arrive at this godforsaken place?
And faith founders low down the bow-wow's bowels. Until the confused (maybe) creature–a miracle!–opens his jaws. You need not be nudged out. You flutter out and up to a ledge in another cube inside this larger, cubic beast. There are other frames here, with little versions of Them inside, but none look out upon your world. O, to taste the freedom of open skies once more! Your eyes spy more cornered, framed paynes, frames without Them inside but with your world there, and fly that way, but again you bash your skull against the hard divide. What is this godforsaken place?
Now They come. In your world there are hunters, have always been hunters, but They are adversaries. They pine for neither your meat nor your blood, not your bones or feathers, not really, they want...?? Their cold and love-fremd eyes betray them. Their alien priorities betray them. Their behavior betrays them (as They betray all). But, when your strength fails and your chirp mute, with you overwhelmed by your prison, by being trapped, by being hunted and gulped by two maws, by being so close yet so distant from your world, by drowning in the hopelessness of it all, one of Them surprises you.
It rushes not towards you but towards the payne, and pushes this open. You need help finding 'out', being new to it, but, swifter then you can peck larvae, you return to your world where you belong. The perfumes and fresh air billowing through beak and feathers remind you of your place, of your glorious life, of the love you have for it and for all the creatures, great and small, within it.
Well, almost all...
Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash