5d (edited) • Short Fiction
The Ginnead
Nars woke up with morning’s bright moisture on his face. He looked up. The pinyon pines, prickled by a sudden breeze, smelled darkly of creosote. The sun had barely reached above a tear in the clouds, its light still damp in the hollow.
Nars usually woke at midday, being a nocturnal insectivore, and extraterrestrial. Today something new spoke in the wind. There were always conversations to be heard, whispering in branches at night. Fat winged moths fluttered and birds tickered and swung. Sometimes there was a singer singing. Except today. Just a small mole’s face, dry but sobbing dusty tears that smelled of centuries. Then, in a moment stranded in the river of thoughts, a leaf pile loosened and fell from high in the tree canopy. He trained the tines of his ears into the wind this time, listening again.
A small human child was laughing.
He froze. Never in all his summers had he heard such a thing, but instinctively he knew it. The loud, hollow voices of hunters one autumn had frightened him once before. All he had to do was imagine the precious pink face of this infant aged forward, beard specked, looking out from above a long grey trench coat.
But he couldn’t. How did humans say it? He didn’t “want” to imagine it.
His wings trembled, though he wasn’t cold.
There was a different, cooing voice near the child. The sound gave rise to stealthy ice picks along his spine. But the child buzzed and giggled again—mirthfully, and he couldn’t help himself.
Nars, four thousand human years old now but young in the sinews and pipette bones and filament hairs that furred his back and the edges of his wings, shook with a frightening sound. Frightening to his own kind, that is. To every other terrestrial eardrum he squawked like a parakeet.
But not this time.
While his face creased with laughter, he clapped a webbed hand over his mouth to stop it, the effort to contain the outburst causing him to drip snot from his cranial orifices for a week. Careless, indeed!
He froze, realizing that anyone, anything, could have heard him. Even the feeble ears of humans. The wind shifted. He smelled potatoes cooking with deer meat—both an atrocity and both a tumult to his senses. He looked for shadows, and sprang into the lowest branches of the pines, concentrating so that his wings changed color to match the variegation of cone and needle leaf.
He listened again.
Nothing. The blood, luminous in the membranes of his eyes, chilled to blue. He lidded them, knowing the glow could not be disguised, nor the color camouflaged. His eyes lit the dark but they also told the tale of his heart, foretold his fears before he knew them himself.
He would stay here and listen for the child again. No, not wise. He would hop to a distant sugar maple and turn the color of a peach. Then, after dusk, after a long consideration of wind direction and starlight, he would leap into the air and wing himself to the high wood, north of tumbled stream and the stony echo of falls over the edges of cliffs.
For a year, perhaps three, he would hide himself and eat grudgingly, sparing his palate for a season in which he could descend and eat the ripe sweet fruit and blossom of the down-lands.
And maybe, for just a moment, listen again to that peculiar music—the sound of human children, laughing.
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The Ginnead
