Red bird

1

The rain fell softly from the pale colorless sky. It was a light rain, neither drizzle nor downpour, neither warm nor cold. It made clear pools on the ground among the tufts of lavender grass, and it clung to the blades and to the leaves of the trees, glistening faintly in the diffuse sunlight. The sun filtered through the leaves and took on their colors: green here, blue there, purple yonder; never the same twice. The leaves hung low with the collected raindrops, bouncing up when the water fell off, then coming slowly down again.

A tall blue tree stood near the front of the woods. Its bark was dull gray, old and woody, and its leaves were bright blue and had a shape that was like a maple or an oak but not quite like either. Branch stubs and knotholes dotted its forked trunk. Its branches criss-crossed under the dense foliage in a seemingly endless array of curves and sizes. On a high branch sat a red bird, a single spot of warmth in the cool-colored landscape. She sang a thin bright song in the watery quiet, a series of notes that flowed along like a stream but went nowhere, meant nothing.

Rowan didn't mind the rain in this place. He barely felt it, and he knew it was clean. He walked aimlessly for a distance, then sat down on the soaked ground. The wet sound was soft, muted. The dirt underneath the grass varied between turquoise and black.

He didn't have to sit, he knew. He never tired here, never needed to rest. He could even fly, or float rather -- as far up as he liked, without ever touching the sun and falling down like Icarus. And yet he sat anyway, simply because he could.

As he sat, he listened to the song. There were words in it, he thought -- meaning -- if he just listened, if he understood...

"Hello, Rowan."

It was still only the song; yet somehow, he was sure, she had spoken his name.

"Are you talking to me?"

"You began to listen. You understand now."

This was no language he knew. He did not speak it, but he understood, and she understood him. It made no sense, but that didn't matter here.

"How'd you know I was listening?"

"I know all."

"You do, huh?"

"From every corner of the earth to its opposite, from the first dimension to the seventh, from before time to beyond its end -- I know."

"The earth doesn't have corners."

"Ah, but it does. They are infinite."

"Whatever. Is this the part where you tell me deep important stuff?"

"You will learn what you need to when the time comes."

"What if I don't?"

"Then you are doomed."

2

There was chewing gum under the desk, and the air stank of boring. It was English class. Rowan was supposed to write a poem in his own words, preferably using at least one literary device, or maybe a meter. He didn't want to. He would rather have been in biology cutting up dead animals. Formaldehyde, yum.

Finally he came up with a few lines. They probably weren't nearly alliterated or iambic enough, but they were better than nothing.

Red bird sits in the old blue tree

Holding a basket of rain for me.

Red bird always sings of many different things,

Of everything that isn't and what we cannot see.

3

It had been raining, but that was over for now. The clouds had opened to reveal the sun, which shone down out of the pale blue onto the still-wet trees and grass. Tiny spheres of water sparkled in rainbow colors, splitting the light.

The leaves were even more striking in the direct sun. Every color was brighter, and when fully lit they almost seemed to glow. The blue tree shone an impossible shade of blue -- many shades; almost cyan or turquoise where the sun struck it, almost purple in the deepest shadows. The shadows, too, seemed to shine. Its bark glittered slightly, silvery here dropping off sharply into dark gray there.

Rowan drifted over to the tree and began to climb. He stopped on a branch about halfway up, where he could see the tops of the short trees and the woods extending off in back. It seemed that he should not go any higher, as if something there was not meant for him.

The red bird was not here yet. The only sound was the water dripping from the leaves. As time passed, it grew gradually less frequent. Drip drip drip. Drip drip. Drip.

He had become used to seeing her, listening to her words that were not words. Even now they often meant nothing, and yet they meant something and nothing at the same time, something that could only be said here. She spoke of many things, colors that could not be seen, things that both existed and did not.

He looked up at the clouds. They, too, meant something and nothing, their shapes speaking to him in yet another language. Their cottony fluff was white closest to the sun, so bright it was hard to look at.

From here he could also see the stream that ran through the woods. It reflected bits of sky broken up by trees, semitransparent, showing the soil and stones below.

On the edge of a low cloud, he thought he saw a red spot. As he watched, the red spot left the cloud and flew down toward the woods, its shape emerging with the lessened distance, eventually coming to rest on a high tree branch.

"You may climb as high as you like," she said.

"Really?"

"Yes."

He continued up the branches, through gaps and dense clusters, until he was level with the bird. Now they could look each other in the eyes. If her eyes had been human he might have seen something in them, but they were just as bird as the rest of her -- shiny, depthless black.

"What basket of rain? There's no basket here."

"Jeez, how'd you know I wrote that?"

"I know all."

"Oh yeah, you told me. No fair."

"What do you think is fair?"

"Is this a trick question?"

She didn't answer. "Why did you write it?"

"Well, see..." He realized he wasn't sure. "I had to make it rhyme. I just kind of wrote some words, you know. I'm no good at this."

From here he could see much farther. The woods stretched out in all their colors, receding into the mist. On the other side, the grass receded into different mist. He noticed a distant patch of mushrooms, several feet tall, shiny yellow with purple spots.

As he watched, the mist faded. It was not quite gone when it began to rain again.

4

There was a girl he liked, but he didn't know how to get her attention. He couldn't just go talk to her and tell her about it. That would be wrong.

What did girls like? He wasn't sure. He didn't understand them. He'd heard all kinds of things about them, but when he tried to put them into practice, it turned out none of them were true.

Maybe they liked romantic love letters. He'd read about those. But you couldn't write love letters anymore because everybody communicated with smartphones.

One of his friends liked to show girls his poetry. Sometimes it even worked, even though he wasn't any good at it. Rowan considered the idea. He wasn't much better, but at least now he knew what assonance, consonance, similes and metaphors were.

He began writing on a scrap of paper. He was supposed to be drawing on a map of North America to show where the states were and where the United States ended and Mexico and Canada began, but that wasn't very interesting and he didn't know what to put in anyway.

Red bird flies in the clear blue sky

Sitting on clouds so far up high.

Where the red bird goes, no one ever knows;

We can never follow until the day we die.

After class, he located her and showed it to her. He waited eagerly as she read it.

"Do you like it?"

"Well, it's different," she said. "Not as bad as some of the stuff I've seen. Usually people don't bother with rhyme and meter."

"Yeah, modern poetry these days... say, do you want to go out some time? Maybe we could head down to Burger and Fry. They've got good food there. Totes sick."

"No, thanks."

"Why not?"

"I'm a lesbian."

"Wow, is my writing that bad?"

She gave him a disapproving look, then turned around and walked away.

"I was just trying to be funny," he said to the air. "So sensitive."

5

Rowan went in a different direction, toward the mushrooms. They were even shinier up close. Raindrops fell on them and rolled off like water off a non-absorbent surface.

He crossed the grass and entered the woods, stopping just past the edge. It was much darker here. Very little grass grew on the forest floor; it was mostly covered by old fallen leaves, which had turned various shades of brown and gray.

Ahead he saw the stream, and he walked over. The red bird paddled in the water, slowly following the current.

"Where are you going?"

"I am going to the end of the stream. You may follow me."

"But it's so small."

"You will fit."

As he entered the stream, he discovered that it was as wide and deep as it needed to be, and there was room enough for both of them to swim in it. The water was cold, but he didn't mind.

"Where does the stream go?"

"It goes back to the beginning and starts over."

"How can you go to the end if it has no end?"

"There are some things you do not understand. Perhaps some day you will."

She dived under the water, and he followed. He could breathe this water as if it were air, and he supposed she could too. The bottom became deeper. Variously colored water-plants grew among the stones, waving gently.

"You cannot follow me after you die."

"I can't?"

"No one can. There is nothing there."

"But we don't know what happens then. It could be anything."

"There are some who know. Some day you will learn of them. Perhaps you will understand -- or perhaps you will be afraid."

"Oo, spooky."

It seemed like a short time before they had gone all the way around and they were back where they started.

6

Math class was tough.

There was too much math. He liked math well enough, but in the quantities they assigned it, it quickly became tiresome. He wished he'd gone out to the drinking party with his roommate. Maybe then he could have had fun and picked up some girls.

He looked over at the other side of the dorm room, which was still an unadulterated mess. Old stale clothes and food containers littered the bed, desk and floor. The window was smeared with ketchup, which had grown moldy due to the humidity. Rowan's own side had been recently cleaned but was steadily reverting to its former state. He'd read on the internet that women liked you better if your home was clean and neat. He'd taken a girl home with him from a previous party, expecting her to be impressed, but she hadn't stuck around. Maybe it was because only one side was clean. Or maybe girls didn't like cleanliness at all. Maybe they liked mess.

He was supposed to be finding the derivative of cos²xsinx, but instead he found himself writing something entirely different.

Red bird swims in the sparkling stream

Where things are never as they seem.

It flows from early dawn till everything is gone;

It ends beyond the line where all is but a dream.

He wasn't sure why he'd written this. It sounded kind of gay.

7

There were bare patches in the grass. Parts of it had died, and some had already disappeared, gone back to the earth. The grass that was still alive seemed to have faded, now closer to gray than lavender, despite being brightly lit.

It wasn't raining. The sky was clear, the sun shining. A few wispy clouds lurked in the distance. A thin dry wind rustled the dying grass and the leaves of the trees.

The mushrooms were dull and wilted. Rowan could not tell if they had completed their mission or if it had been cut short.

The leaves on the lower branches of the blue tree were also dying. They had turned shades of green and yellow. One branch had detached itself and was lying on the ground. The woods, like the grass, seemed to have turned partly gray.

"What's happening to this place?"

"You can find the answer," said the red bird, perched on the usual high branch. "You must look within yourself."

"Why don't you give me straight answers, you stupid know-it-all bird?"

"You have changed too much. You must go back to the way you were before."

"But I don't want to change. I want to be myself. I'm fine how I am."

"Hey, you asked."

8

It had such pretty white fur.

The stack of soup cans was close to its maximum height. If he made it any taller, he knew, it would fall over and he'd get in trouble again. He sighed and dismantled it, then started over.

He was supposed to be actually organizing the shelf items, but he didn't want to. This job was so far beneath him. He'd had a better one until they'd fired him three weeks ago. All those years of work and they threw him out because of that one time he did something he wasn't supposed to with one of their rabbits. Just one rabbit. He didn't understand what the problem was. It wasn't like it couldn't be used for studying after that. Surely he was entitled to a little fun when he couldn't get any dates. He figured he'd have gotten off easier if he'd been a woman. Affirmative action, you know. If only they just hired competent people like him. They'd probably replaced him with some dumb chick who wanted to take the rabbits home because they were "cute".

He'd used to kill time by messing up Wikipedia articles. He'd tried to edit there legitimately, but they wouldn't listen to his expertise, so he gave up. He had spent enough time on it that he'd made it onto their "long-term abuse" list, but it still didn't fill the holes in his life. Now he couldn't edit at all because their servers had been taken down by terrorists. His fancy new phone was of much less use. He'd replaced his old phone with one of the newer kinds, the ones that had near-perfect autocorrect and voice-texting and could only be unlocked with faces or fingers. It wasn't the kind that had thought-texting. He didn't want anything reading his mind, whether it was a device or a person. They had those now, too. They said they'd existed all along, as if that was supposed to make them less disturbing and not more.

He was pretty sure one of them had ratted him out. He didn't have any evidence of this, but it made sense. They could easily be in back of everything, and if they weren't already, they might try to take over. They didn't need "acceptance". They needed to be kept in check.

And wherever he was, they could be there, watching. Listening.

He was happy when his shift ended, but he was not eager to go out into the darkness, even lit as it was by the new white LED streetlights.

They're out there.

9

There weren't any.

Not a single cloud interrupted the blue expanse of the sky. It seemed too intense next to the landscape, with its sparse gray grass and its dull, nearly leafless trees. The blue tree was no longer blue: all its leaves had turned some other color, and most were already dead. One of them came loose and fluttered to the ground.

The red bird sat on a high branch, singing. Rowan had a vague sense that it was supposed to mean something, but he didn't understand it.

Something sparked in the woods, and the leaves there caught fire. The wind spread it through the forest floor, then up the trees. The bird fell silent, its song replaced by crackling.

The once-blue tree fell, crashing down to the fiery leaves. The bird left the branch and flew into the flames. It never reappeared.

It seemed as if he should feel something, but there was nothing.

10

Science?

A cat meowed. It scratched at the bars of its cage, at the label that declared it had a number and not a name.

Something dripped from the ceiling and landed on the floor. They hadn't had anyone in to repair it in some amount of time. They weren't keeping track.

Rowan wasn't listening. He was writing down notes on subject 17, purposely leaving out the part where it said it wanted to go home and be with mommy. He was using actual paper, even though they'd used to say the future would be paperless. Wasn't he supposed to be taking all his notes on an iPad? But instead it was iPads that were obsolete. Kids these days didn't even know what they were.

Something must have distracted him, he thought, realizing he'd written something entirely unrelated.

Red bird sits in the old blue tree

Holding a basket of tears for me.

The country's gone to war, and red bird sings no more.

They set the land on fire, and the color left the tree.

He had no idea what that meant, so he crossed it out and went on. Maybe it meant he needed more coffee.

11

The sun was high in the cloudless sky. Rowan stirred up dust as he walked, fine gray stuff that swirled over the dry ground and dissipated into the air. A few tufts of dead grass dotted the field. On the other side stood many trees, some standing, others fallen, but all blackened and dead. There was no sound but the wind.

This place had been different once, he knew, but he wasn't sure how.

And then he awoke, and he never saw it again.