Birds by Sarah Macallister

We all worried. Ever since he came back from Glasgow, Uncle Neil seemed different, jauntier. And it wasn’t just the new hat. He strutted around the village, singing in an uneven baritone. Whistling. To be honest, we thought he’d bagged someone and felt sorry for Auntie Sandy. But it wasn’t that.

He told his mate Andrew first, when they went fishing in the river. Andrew dropped by ours after looking puzzled, while Mam dropped a teabag in his mug and rummaged for digestives.

“Neil says he identifies as a bird now,” he said, looking from me to Mam. We were stunned. Uncle Neil always seemed so very male.

“Not a woman like, but a bird,” said Andrew. He dunked a biscuit. “Apparently, he prefers the pronoun ‘it’.”

We struggled to make sense of this pronouncement. Mam rallied first.

“Well, if it’s happy.” Mam prided herself on her tolerance of the latest trends, rolling with the zeitgeist. No one could accuse her of being a bigot.

I was less convinced. “He’s not just making fun of trans people, is he?”

“Pretty sure it wasn’t no joke.”

Uncle Neil was a retired doctor, who had worked at the village surgery for twenty-seven years and was well known to residents of the village. Incomers were perplexed though, when they registered at their new medical practice and found an elderly gentleman hanging around the waiting room, asking intrusive questions and offering his opinions. Retirement did not suit Uncle Neil. He grew restless and fidgety at home, starting arguments with Auntie Sandy while she tried to go about her daily business of cleaning and arranging.

Mam got him onto the internet. She’d only wanted to give her sister a break, but Andrew told us Uncle Neil had discovered an online community called Otherkin, for people who believed they possessed animal identities. Perhaps he was only curious about the nature of their mental illness, but however it happened, Uncle Neil concluded his visit to their Glasgow group convinced that he, Dr Neil McGowan, belonged in class Aves.

This had the opposite effect of giving Auntie Sandy a break. When she tried to take laundry to the washing line, she discovered Uncle Neil barring her way, crowing, and flapping his arms at her. Sometimes he plucked flowers between his teeth and dropped them at her feet.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the sound of his voice,” Auntie Sandy told Mam over tea.

Finally, his behaviour stretched the limits of Mam’s tolerance when he switched his attention from courting Auntie Sandy to their neighbour Barbara. Mam volunteered me to talk sense into him.

“He always liked you,” she added, as if this were a compliment.

There I was, trudging down the long, high-walled alley that led to Uncle Neil’s bungalow. Because the alley twisted sharply, you couldn’t see the exit once you entered, only the corner, where a lamppost illuminated the alley at night. However, when clouds rolled across the sun, the lamp remained cold and grey, and shadows claimed the alley. I craned my neck at the bruised sky and grimaced as rain dropped into my eye.

From around the corner rushed a large creature. My first idea was that it must be a black dog, delightedly bounding away during an owner’s lapse in concentration. However, the creature stopped short at the sight of me, so I could see what it was.

Hunched over and bristling with hair, no not hair, but bedraggled feathers, it stood leaning forward on narrow legs. Its eyes had migrated away from its beaky nose toward the sides of its head, but I recognised Uncle Neil at once.

“Neil, how are you?”

“How are you?” His voice sounded higher, more nasal.

“Where are you going?”

“Where are you going?” He was copying everything I said, like a small annoying child. I resisted the temptation to trick him into saying something stupid and sighed, to which he responded by sighing through his nose, and I noticed his nostrils had drifted to the bridge of his nose.

It was true, Uncle Neil had liked me best of all the nephews, nieces, and grandchildren. I was quiet, shy, and listened attentively while he monologued. Perhaps remembering that I was a receptive audience, he began making noises, a continuous stream of rattles, whirs, and whistles.

So, I thought, this is madness. And I was afraid, not because I expected violence, but because so many uncertainties snaked forwards from this moment that they induced vertigo. I wanted to sit down but there were no chairs there in the alley. In my last year of school, before committing to an application and a future, I experienced a similar sense of tumbling into a maze with a hidden destination. With no obvious way forward or back, fatigue wrapped around me, and I spent increasing amounts of time lying in bed, absorbing the details of cracks and stains upon my bedroom ceiling. Mam brought me steaming mugs of malted chocolate that grew tepid and developed a thin film over the surface. Uncle Neil was called because he used to be a doctor. I remembered him sitting on the end of my bed, talking for over an hour, but I have no memory of what was said.

The lamp flashed orange along the alleyway, banishing our shadows and interrupting Uncle Neil. Above us, a tumultuous chattering clattered across the sky, and we looked up together.

A black cloud writhed back and forth in billowing ribbons across however many thousands of miles of clear air, filling that void with noisy spirit. They stretched and pulsed as one being, but I knew what they were: starlings.

When I turned back to Uncle Neil, he shrank before my eyes into the body of a bird, another starling, small, black, yet iridescent. He shouldered into the sky and joined the others. Alone no more.

Sarah Macallister

Image: A murmuration of starlings at Rigg by Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons – a huge flock or Starlings flying in formations against a blue sky.