Theodore & The 7 Layers of Space, Book 1: Brick & Bird

CHAPTER 3: Bird & Boy

Fear comes to us in many forms. Fear of heights and fear of flight. Fear of the unknown, and fear of the known. Fear of a stranger, an event, a memory, a conversation unsaid and undone. Fear of failure or success.

For many of us, we don't know our true fears until we face them. For others, our fears are too easy to find everywhere.

Once, in a deserted lot in the Layer called Earth, a giant Bird found a small lost boy who was shaking and afraid. Scared for him, she fed him some delicious chocolate cake, and took a cautious bite of it herself. She showed him the way to a House where he would be kept reasonably safe.

Neither of them remembers it, and a lot has changed since then, but they are both still very afraid.

***

Up until this moment, Theodore had felt relatively satisfied by the idea that he must have been mistaken about The Bird taking The Brick. Now, he once again felt alarmed.

The giant Bird stood perched on the chimney with one fork-like claw held aloft, clutching The Brick. Her existence felt like a kind of optical illusion, but even at that she seemed as if she ought to tip over. Her very presence was a dark threat that dared him to pass.

Theodore ceased his eyeglasses repair and held still, caught in her long shadow. His heart pounded. A speck of blek dripped from the boy's broken spectacles with a rogue little PLOP.

"Ha," said The Bird. It was a statement, and it seemed to imply some other unknown information.

The air felt thick, sounds got sharper, and the hair on Theodore's arms reached upward, as if to fly away. As an experiment, Theodore stepped a little left and then a little right. The Bird's enormous and illogical round head and shining charcoal eyes predicted each movement and moved to follow him while the rest of her body remained rigid. The cool wet wind on The Roof picked up, and he shivered along with the broken-down shack behind him. Theodore sneezed and The Bird fluttered.

"Salud!" squawked The Bird, which was met with a high-pitched echo by several tiny black birds as they landed around her. One of her stick figure wings raised up and down in a fanning rhythm to each small bird's arrival, but as it rose and blocked the sun it somehow transformed into a wall of black feathers, and then back again. A sharp sewing needle glistened at the tip of her swooping wing, seeming to stitch the little creatures to life in real-time.

Each little bird that arrived was just a bit smaller than Theodore's hand, each a miniature replica of the larger one, save for eyes that were tiny mismatched buttons, no two the same. More and more landed, covering the chimney and alighting upon the deserted falafel cart in a slow black blanket. The only thing they avoided was the old shack.

"Little boy, little boy, hello ha little boy," she spoke again, words clacking forth from her stick figure jaw like shattered bits of metal scraping on top of one another.

"Little boy...little boy," the small birds echoed, their voices sounded scratchy and far away, like high-pitched recordings from the bottom of a well.

"Hi. Hello. I'm Theodore," he tried to sound casual, but spoke too quickly, and his voice cracked around the lump in his throat. He chased a vague hope that he'd misunderstood her intentions, and maybe some manners might do the trick. "I don't think we were introduced properly when I saw you downstairs," he tried, mustering an ill-formed facsimile of polite conversation.

She simply cocked her head in response at a forty-five-degree angle, and all the small birds mimicked her. Despite the cold breeze, sweat covered his arms and face, and his shirt clung to his back, making him shiver. He tried to edge towards the hatchway, but the little birds closed ranks, and his path was blocked.