A Kindness of Owls

Content Warning: Animal deaths, vomit

Well, I had finally caught it in the act, so I did what seemed to make sense. I didn’t think anything of it. This profession is full of death. The honest reap, the slaughter. The tiny executions and sacrifices. It was laying limply on the earth, its cream-coloured feathers muddied by the moist soil. Evidently, something had smashed its delicate bones, leaving it skyless. Maybe it flew into a tree, maybe it had been attacked by a larger animal. Out here anything can happen. It was still twitching, noiselessly, moving in thoughtless muscular revolutions, like a broken clock. I took my spade, the bladed side of it, and lopped its head off. It was the kind thing to do. The age-old ritual for these countless unsalvageable lives.

I tossed the head to our old sheepdog, Marmalade. She gnawed on it disinterestedly for a while. I don’t know what she did with the skull. Buried it in the garden, maybe. And daily, I marched on, sipping on the Earl Grey that Prim brewed for me every morning.

But at night, I began to hear them. The sounds seemed distant yet many-faced, resounding into the fields’ black expanse. A thousandfold chorus of owls; an oscillating parade of owls. Their voices produced words in my head that I had never learned before; they took palimpsest in my mind. I tried to tell the words to Prim at breakfast one day, but she didn’t answer, slumped over her quietly moulding plate. She didn’t really breathe anymore. It was more of a fluttering that bulged out her chest in mock respiration. I thought I could hear something contorted and feathery inside her, worming to escape. I don’t know how it got in.

Even when I found Marmalade, laid bare in the front lawn, eyes nowhere to be seen, I didn’t realise. I didn’t understand. Until the night it came to take me away. I was wide awake, watching Prim as she gazed at the ceiling next to me. It was difficult for her, given what had happened. Where her chestnut eyes had once lain, there were now strange birdy yellow ones, that revolved and stared and then sank back into the expanse behind her face. Sometimes there were more eyes than sockets. There was a sort of scraping noise. Dragging, hard cartilage. Absently, I turned to the large bay window opposite the bed.

The head of a barn owl stared back at me. I stopped breathing. Just its little head, as if impaled on a stick, island-like. Except, it blinked at me. Slowly, almost coquettishly. I must’ve been dreaming. I was three storeys up. Or it was an awful joke, some local children who wanted to harass an old man, some delinquents, disgusting, anything. Lord save me, I rose out of bed.

I inched towards the window. I needed to see the rest of it, its body, the extent of what I had created. At the glass, I looked past the head and down across the lawn. A long, feathered neck stretched out all the way to the ground below. No body, just neck. It felt like that neck sank all the way to the core of the earth and out again.

It was striped, that neck, like a tiger’s, but in unnatural crimson slashes, the shapes of the slopes of blades, of shovels and knives and fists and rifles, and when that neck breathed the skin would expand and part wider and the inner workings of that visceral architecture were laid bare for the whole world to see. I vomited onto the windowsill and, I’m sure, begged — though I swear I’ve never been a begging man. I begged, screeching about favours and fairness and kindness, but there was something in my throat and I couldn’t breathe and for the first time in my long rugged life, I fainted.

Now I am laying in the dirt. My limbs are shattered, and the guillotine blade kisses my sallow neck.