Chapter Fifty-Four. Daye
Daye
“Food?” the chickadee chirped at her.
“Gone,” Daye trilled back. “No, wait—” She felt around in her pocket. “Here.” She offered the chickadee half a nut.
A starling made a curious sound from the trees. “I’ll bring more later,” she told it.
“Mine,” the chickadee chirped as it chipped the nut into smaller and smaller portions. “Mine, mine, mine.”
Daye smiled. Over the last weeks, she had come to know the birds in new ways.
The silly exuberance of the chickadees. The internal politics of the starlings, always embroiled in some strife that sent the whole flock chattering.
The deep, rumbling contentment of the owls.
Things she’d glimpsed through years of observation—small, disjointed fragments—coalescing into coherent wholes.
So close to the personalities she used to imagine, but fuller, deeper.
Like stepping into a puddle and discovering that it is a waist-deep pond.
The joy of it was sharp and lemony bright.
“More? More?” The chickadee pecked at Daye’s toes for attention.
“Soon.”
With Rory, the words kept lodging in her throat, never natural, never right.
There was a constant act of translation—from her thoughts to her hands, from her hands to her tongue.
But more than that, there was the lingering taste of resentment in the back of her mouth, a reverberating echo in the shadow of every word spoken: Not right, not right, not right.
But this? Chirping and whistling and trilling at the chickadees? Hooting with the owls and crowing with the ravens? It felt natural. It felt hers. It was a vocabulary she already knew, somehow, and her lips shaped the calls perfectly, her voice never cracking, her throat never closing up.
It didn’t work with any other animals. She tried talking to the rabbits under the heather, to the deer that roamed the forest, to the squirrels as they dug in the loam for the last of the season’s acorns.
None of them answered. She was almost thankful for that; it would have been awful to hear the owl’s satisfaction mingle with the desperation of the rabbit it clutched.
And anyway, even before Rory did … that thing he did, it had always been the birds that Daye loved most. And now the birds accepted her as one of their own.
She was part of the flock of geese that landed by the lake on their way south.
She moved between them, smoothing ruffled feathers, dispersing seeds, pulling a thorn from a webbed foot.
Her hair preened. Calls of “Ours, ours, ours” following her as she made her way back to her clearing.
She was part of the group of starlings, tossing sound back and forth, making music through subtle manipulation of the calls of robins and tits and blackcaps.
And at night, the owl nesting a few branches above her would tell her of the conquests it had made, singing of fallen mice and of wheat fields to the south, a strange lullaby.
“Mine,” the owl would say as she stood at the window, brushing her cheek with its wing.
“Mine,” the chickadees would declare, preening her hair.
“Mine,” the robins digging at her feet would twitter, offering a beakful of worms.
“Yes,” Daye would agree. “Yours.”