Chapter 18: Dana and the Cacophony of Birds
Dana lived in the sharp corner of a forgotten suburb, where the gutters hummed in dialects no plumber could interpret, and the birds sang only to each other—lilting algorithms in feathers. Her name was never spoken correctly by the mailman, and the letters that came were always in languages extinct or not yet born. But Dana read them anyway, because the glyphs changed when she blinked.
At 4:03 every morning, the birds began.
Not chirping, not singing, no. This was something else. A lattice of clucks, croaks, screeches, and mechanical whirs—all pitched in deliberate dissonance, mapped to a geometry of some alien throat. Dana once called it the Wakening Canticle, but after that, words started dissolving on her tongue like snowflakes made of salt. She stopped naming things. Even her name—it tasted wrong now, like copper on cracked glass.
The birds—there were thousands—didn’t fly. They assembled on wires, roofs, car mirrors, and stood in ranks, blinking. They never moved when watched. Only when her head was turned would they shift, fractal-like, into new arrangements. One morning, they took the shape of an eye. Another, a perfect spiral with its tail nested in her mailbox.
Her neighbors, such as they were, had all long since closed their doors. One man walked outside once to yell “SHUT THEM UP,” but his tongue fell out mid-shout, leathery and steaming. Dana watched the birds carry it away in a ceremonial procession. No one spoke again.
Dana’s sanity didn’t fracture. It liquefied.
She took to mimicking the birds in the early light, stuffing bread crusts and shavings of VHS tape into the feeder she’d nailed to a rusting satellite dish. In return, the birds began to answer her, syllable for syllable. Their calls became syncopated with her breath. Her dreams lost all imagery—only sound remained, a code too complex for dream logic.
She remembered a time when she worked in IT support, before the bird tide. She remembered because one day a pigeon nested in her old ThinkPad, which booted itself up despite having no battery. The screen blinked with a single phrase, repeated endlessly: “THE VERB IS UNDOING.”
Dana knew then that language was the infection vector.
The birds were undoing it.
Everything they said unstitched a little more of the local grammar. Street signs began to feature glottal stops. Road names became recursive. She once saw a stop sign that said, “You already know what to do, don’t you?” in spiraling Esperanto.
On the 17th day, Dana began growing feathers.
Not on her skin. In her voice.
She opened her mouth to hum an old lullaby, but a spiral of whistles emerged, perfectly mimicking the dawn chant. The birds bowed. A rook vomited a worm onto her welcome mat. This was the coronation.
Dana stepped onto her roof, spreading arms like wings, language like plague. And the birds took flight—for the first time in years—carrying her syllables skyward to unravel the next patch of reality’s thin shell.
Someone, somewhere, forgot the word tree. The world lurched.
It had begun.