The powerful owl (Ninox strenua), Australia’s largest owl, mates for life.
Others always talked about this. The elders told us that smoking would slow us down. I feel it, for sure, after only a few days. My lungs seem to shrink and it’s harder to keep the wingspan with my head going woozy. Vertigo hits me hard even though I can’t fall. I am the height, I am the air, I am the wind.
*
I study the city and I study its people. Being in the crowd makes me uncomfortable, but I walk with their current and I listen to what they say.
‘It’s disgusting. I hate the rush,’ a woman on the street grunts and makes a face, holding a phone to her ear.
This is how I learn what a cluster of people is called. I learn later that there is a morning rush and an evening rush. It is related to the way people come and go from work. I also learn that it is easy to get food in the rush hour. In the mornings, I steal containers with human food from opened bags too heavy for their shoulders. I put them in a bag of my own. I take more than I need. I take some for him in case he isn’t so lucky.
*
We dream of the bush. It hovers in our mind, like a constant, unmoving. When I smoke, sitting down on a concrete block on George Street, a woman asks for ‘a ciggie’. I am not greedy. I give her one from the packet I stole. She sits down next to me and looks at her phone.
‘It’s been horrible, ay?’ Her eyebrows lift a little.
I accept the invitation, although this norm of casual conversation baffles me. Social butterflies, I’ve heard people called.
‘I haven’t seen the news today,’ I say.
She leans over to me, touching my shoulder with hers, showing me the screen. I look at the burn and destruction of the bush. Black stumps where the trees used to be. Not a single branch left. All bare, all desert. ‘Blue Mountains’, the headline reads. So close to my old home.
Maybe further suburbs would be a better home for us, I think then, the realisation that we can’t go back to the bush heavy in my chest. And as the day goes on, I dream of it. A little place in the east, maybe with an ocean view. Quiet life, salty air, grounding routines.
My arms itch; there isn’t quite enough time to heal after every shapeshift. We aren’t meant to be this way, to do it this often, but life dictates the rules and we do what we have to.
*
I always think of home when I am alone. I can’t help it. I think of the mornings we used to have with nothing in them. All stillness, all quiet. For days, for weeks on end, we remained in our true form. Human skin and bones seemed needless to us. We watched others, like us, cutting the sky with their giant wings in search of food.
We all had to flee before the fires reached us, moving in different directions. Weeks earlier, he had been waking up every night unable to breathe. He felt the effects of smoke more than I did, involuntarily turning from bird to man and back again. He sat in our nest with his head between his knees, breathing. In, hold ten seconds, out. I hurt all over, watching him.
We headed for the city because it seemed safer. Nothing to burn. Flying over the bush, we prayed for the rain, like the rest of the country.
*
I steal for us. I steal a warm blanket from the window display of a homewares store. It is an earthy green colour, with a nice fringe at the edges. I think of his human eyes when I look at it. I miss him every second we aren’t together. Every minute we walk the streets as humans, it feels like everyone knows. We look the same as them, but it feels as if something gives. Afraid that our peculiar manners are too obvious in the both of us, we don’t go out together. We’ve been told by our elders that the city isn’t a safe place. So we separate for the day, to find food and to learn; since no one sees us together, no one picks up on how strange we really are.
I steal another red lighter, in case something happens to the one I keep in my pocket. From a different shop, I try to steal a T-shirt for him—a long-sleeved one for when the cold hits. But the alarm on the exit gates goes off and I slap my forehead and exclaim, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m still holding this!’ and rush off. I think, then, How do others do it? There aren’t many who decide to lead a human life, but I know one personally and have heard of others, all of them transitioning for a longer life expectancy. I think of how they go to work and earn money and live by human laws. I wonder how on earth they don’t get caught. How on earth do they play in this human game so flawlessly that no one sees who they are?
When I find my way into Kmart for the first time, I spend half a day inside. I walk around and try on clothes and try weird sports equipment and fall off a skateboard. At last, I see solar-powered string lights, take them out of their box and walk out holding them beneath my jacket in my underarm.
*
I find home in a million different places. Lying on the ground in Hyde Park, looking up at the trees, I see our bush. Closing my eyes and feeling the wind on my face, I am back near the almost dried-out creek. At night we switch on the fairy lights I have woven through the gaps in our nest, and I can almost see the lights flicker like the fireflies that used to entertain us so much. Tiny things can trigger my longing, but I welcome it gladly. I want to ache for it, I want to stay conscious of how life is. It reminds me to be grateful.
In the mornings I wake up tucked firmly under his arm, his smell hits my nose and it makes me ache in all the places I didn’t know I had. It reaches all the hiding parts of my being and tugs and pulls. I am grateful for him. So grateful it verges with an all-consuming fear of losing him. I am yet to find a balance of calm acceptance. Of ‘whatever happens, happens’. But now, after my home is burnt, I need to remind myself that whatever is good can be taken away at any moment. It is not the healthiest thing—preparing myself for loss—but it is something I have to do, though hopefully just for now. Meanwhile his human smell is my new home. The musky scent of his neck, the oily smell of his hair. I burrow my nose in it and breathe in deep. He laughs.
*
At the end of the day, I buy myself a cup of tea in Starbucks and ask for it to be served in the tumbler I stole (despite everything, I’m not prepared to make things worse with a single-use). I walk back to the corner of Market and George Streets, lean on the traffic signal pole and sip my tea. It’s hot and rich and warms me up. I’m always cold when in human form, too bare to keep the temperature up.
At one point I feel a strong gust of air and a familiar musky scent hits my nose. I breathe in deep, feeling tight in my chest, feeling sad and happy all at once. I wait until it gets dark and no one has walked by me for a good ten minutes. Then, with a glance to the left and a glance to the right, I force my feathers from my skin. Grimacing, I feel them rip through the back of my arms, but it’s all too familiar now. I learned to control the shift to only change some parts of me, to only disturb my body chemistry as much as necessary. And yet I still feel the sting on the tips of my ears and along my spine, the places I did not intend to change.
I take a swing with my arms and the wind catches me. I’m wobbly and have to work twice as hard in this half state, but my feet still land on the roof of the Queen Victoria Building. I walk deeper in, around the glass dome, and see him. His wings are larger than mine, covered in spots in different shades of brown. His big green eyes stare at me and he smiles, tired and a bit worried. I step into the nest and tear off my clothes, ruffling my feathers, struggling and getting stuck with the t-shirt tugging on my remiges. He turns fully human and helps me out of it, and I fall on the soft bedding and under his arm. I fit against his chest perfectly.
*
One day, he hears a rumour from a group of teenagers passing by, but we decide to see it for ourselves before we believe it. For the first time since we arrived in Sydney, we transform completely into owls. It is exhilarating, I feel the nervous energy ready to burst out of my chest, but somehow the longing feeling does not grow weaker. Even as a bird, my worried heart is in flight. I think we’ve spent too long inside human minds.
We wait until the very last moments of darkness and take off. The flight is brisk and uncomplicated, the cemetery easily visible from the skies. We land right there, in between graves, and shed our feathers. The bag he carried in his beak is filled with clothes and in a moment we are two regular people again.
The graveyard is aglow with the white marble of the tombstones. It is a big territory to cover and we set off, walking slowly, him in front me, holding my hand while I tag along. I look at the back of his head. It is comforting to be in his presence. The sun is below the horizon, but it still illuminates the sky with purples and pinks.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask while counting my steps. The ground is spongy and it scares me. I see sinkholes closer to the edge where the white fence separates us from the stone benches on the little square of a viewpoint. I imagine disappearing beneath the earth, cold hard bones closing around my ankle and dragging me down.
‘Uneasy, my love.’ His voice is quiet and raspy, his first words in a while. ‘So many broken tombstones.’
I look where he looks and I see them. Many flat marble ledges covering the graves are cracked or broken in pieces, fallen through the gap into the space where the ground sinks beneath the stone. I convince myself that it happens from natural causes: the age, the weather conditions, the movement of the ground. But in my head, hundreds of the dead are rising from their graves, pushing their way through the earth.
Only on the other side of the cemetery, on a steep slope, do we find what we were looking for. A big corpse of an owl, half disintegrated, its body larger than the nearby graves. Its wings are lifted off the ground in the unnatural firmness of rigor mortis. I know what this creature is as soon as I see the size of it. We don’t see its face, the head is hidden beneath the rocks that were used to murder it, only a cracked beak showing through the gaps. My stomach churns and the acid rises up my throat. I don’t know what happened here. Maybe it was a group of teenagers who got scared and violent. Maybe it was a sick joke. When I finally force myself to lift my eyes from the corpse, my gaze lands on a marble child sitting on a pillow on the top of a tombstone, his little foot tucked neatly under his bottom. The child is missing his head.
I kiss my partner’s shoulder and read the engraving below. In loving memory of our dear little daughter who departed this life, 17th of August 1909, aged 4 years & 9 months. And below: Also my dear husband, father of the above, who departed this life, 4th of January 1910.
We walk on, reaching the gap in the perimeter fence. But before we can step out towards the stony benches and leave the graveyard behind us, I see another grave for a daughter and a husband with the same years of death. I shiver from cold sweat on the nape of my neck. I point towards the tombstone and say, ‘Bad omen, we should go.’ I lead him away.
*
We head to the beach and sit on the rocks to watch the waves and breathe in the salt. The place is empty of all but two boys. They are knee-deep and jump over the little waves that crash with white water on their young chests. When they jump up, their long hair bounces off their shoulders and their hands flail upwards in much the same manner. I swear in that instant that they must be twins, but when they walk back towards their towels I see that their faces are too different to be related. Twins but not twins. Doppelgangers. Bad omen. One creature was murdered here. I wonder who will be the other, to fit the pattern? I rise from the rock and pull him up, standing.
‘We have to leave now,’ I say.
He does not question me. For the second time today we turn all the way and, covered in feathers, we soar above the ground. For some time I think about the fairy lights left behind on the roof of the Queen Victoria Building. I will miss them, but my whole being feels lighter. I know with a scary certainty that this was a last-minute escape, that should we have lingered I’d have lost him. Like those women burying their families. My heart cries for them.
I feel his presence in the air and his shadow through the clouds. The longer we fly, the less human my thoughts become. I welcome the tranquillity. We head south.
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