Fowl
By Karina Lazorchak
A woman fainted in the middle of the coffee shop while I sat at the window, pretending to write. The barista, the second cutest one with the grown-out mullet and the nose ring, kept on making drinks. “Americano on the counter,” he said, his voice soft and shy against the whir of the espresso machine. I tried to smile at him, batting my spindly eyelashes like women in black and white movies, but he didn’t look up, his eyes fixed to the swirling pattern in a soy mocha. I finished my latte while a man in a navy suit jacket called an ambulance that would never come.
The woman sat up suddenly. The barista handed her a complimentary blueberry muffin. Suit Jacket Man hung up the phone, and I closed the door behind me, leaving a stack of quarters in the tip jar and a thin line of foam on my upper lip.
No one pointed it out to me. Not in the eleven blocks back to the office. Not at security, as I put my keys and wallet in the plastic bin and walked through the metal detector, arms tensed at my sides even though I had nothing to hide. Not in the packed elevator on the way up to the fourth floor, squeezed between the man with the rotten egg armpits and the woman with the Bath and Body Works perfume. Not as I crossed the carpeted floor of Section B, stopping at the junction between each set of cubicles. I jutted out my chin so that my foam mustache was in full view, but everyone’s eyes were glazed, turned to Milky Ways in the glow of their computer monitors. Not even Tom noticed as I slid into the seat across from him, making sure to let my body fall heavily with a squeak and a sigh. There used to be a divider between our desks, set just above my eyeline, so that I could see nothing but the top of his balding head. But I had torn it down the week before. He still didn’t know what I looked like.
“Good morning,” I said with a voice like a rattlesnake, exercising my vocal cords for the first time. I stared at the fluorescent lights reflected on his forehead.
My desk was in the back left corner of the office, next to the one-way glass windows.
They had been installed the wrong way, so I couldn’t see out. In between emails and articles, I liked to stare at the dull gray rectangles embedded into the duller gray plaster wall. I listened for the periodic thunks against the glass. I pictured the birds falling to the sidewalk below. Each one was different. I could tell by the sounds they made. Thwack. Bump. Clunk. I pictured piles of them, up and down East 52nd Street. Sparrows, crows, woodpeckers. They spilled into the road and backed up traffic, but sanitation always cleaned them up by the time I left the office. I never saw them.
Tom took two minutes and twenty-three seconds before he grunted back, “Morning.” He kept his eyes down, his shoulders hunched forward. His fingers never stopped fluttering across his keyboard. I liked the deep gruffness in his voice. He must’ve been a lumberjack in a past life.
I typed my employee username into the clunky desktop. KATHERINE SWANSTON. The name flashed under a sepia photograph of a young woman with a fresh-cut bob, a small freckled nose, and buggy eyes that still had a glimmer in them. I touched the heavy bags under them now, dragging my fingers down so that the red creases glinted in the darkness of the startup screen. I opened a new document and copied an article on the migration patterns of American goldfinches.
It wasn’t plagiarism. I had written it myself, though I couldn’t remember when. When I’d first started, I would arrive every morning to find a sheet of notes waiting on my desk. The editors thought it was best to leave research to the professionals. Our job was to focus on writing, not to worry about the facts. I started to reuse the articles every four months. The readers of Fowl Magazine never noticed because there were no readers. The editors were far too busy to actually read what we submitted. And I doubted the goldfinches understood English. I repeated Tom’s “morning” in my head with each COMMAND+C, but it grew distorted, sadder and smoother. By the end of the day, I wasn’t sure whether I’d heard it at all.
At exactly 5 p.m., I logged out. I sped back through the maze of cubicles and out the double doors as fast as my pencil skirt-confined legs would take me. The elevator was waiting. I relaxed into the lowering feeling. I thought of the article I’d copied on the canaries that coal miners used to use to test for poisonous gases as I went down and down and down. I wasn’t sure if I was the coal miner or the canary. The elevator paused on the second floor. I jammed my index finger against the “door close” button, but they slid open anyway. A woman in blood-red high heels and clown red lipstick walked in. I glared at her. She didn’t look at me. I would’ve hated her even if she wasn’t taking the elevator down a single floor. I would’ve hated her even if her lips were a normal color. She must work in marketing, I thought. A pair of crystal earrings in the shape of peacocks tugged at her earlobes.
The second we landed in the lobby, I was outside. I stood in the middle of the road, ignoring the swerving taxis and swearing drivers. There were no birds. I didn’t see a single feather.
***
The next morning, I replaced my foam mustache with a new one. I accidentally rubbed it off while scratching my nose, somewhere between a story about the differences between cage-free and free-range eggs and an interview with an esteemed ornithologist, both copied. At lunch, I tried to pry apart the seal around the gray glass. It wouldn’t budge. I had filled my pockets with birdseed, hoping to spread it on the windowsill. I counted 1,076 thunks against the window. I imagined the 1,076 birds littering the street. I wondered if they knew that I was listening for them. I wondered if they knew that I was coming.
I waited until 5 p.m. again. “Goodnight,” I said to Tom, turning away from the windows and dragging my feet slightly as I walked toward the door. I didn’t have time to wait for him to respond. I took the stairs to avoid Lipstick Lady, jumping down three steps at a time and pushing past a man smoking cheap cigarettes on the third-floor landing.
“Watch it,” he might’ve said, twenty minutes later, but probably he said nothing. I closed my eyes as I pushed out the main door and onto the sidewalk. I breathed in the cold city air and wished. But when I finally dared to look, the street was empty. So was the sky. I threw the birdseed into the air like it was rice at a newlywed couple.
I walked home feeling heavy. I had felt the birds fluttering in my stomach, but now they sat at the bottom. My feet sank into the sidewalk from the extra weight.
***
On Friday, I had my weekly meeting with Jeff, my editorial supervisor. He wore a pale blue button-down and looked at his clipboard as he spoke.
“So, how have your articles been this week?” he asked, putting his thumb up and out in front of him, then turning it sideways, then down. His voice was echoey and shrill, like a prepubescent sports announcer.
“Same old, same old,” I said.
“Please use the correct terminology,” Jeff said.
“Satisfactory,” I said. He checked a box on his form.
“And exactly how many have you completed?” Jeff said, clicking his pen in and out. He didn’t say “written,” so I wasn’t lying. I told him 117. He frowned.
“That’s quite a bit behind schedule.” He checked another box, shaking his head slightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was distracted. It won’t happen again. “I just couldn’t stop counting the birds.”
I watched Jeff’s face. His jaw tightened. His dark eyes, still pointed down, hardened.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He left Conference Room 12, taking his clipboard and leaving me to stare at a wall that was slightly more yellow than gray.
Later that day, I received my formal letter of termination. It was Kelly from HR who delivered it to me.
“It’s okay to cry,” she said, staring at her shoes. I didn’t feel like crying, but that seemed to be the normal thing to do, so I thought of the thunk, thunk, thunk against the window. My eyes burned. Kelly handed me a tissue. I wondered if birds knew morse code. “There, there, Katherine.” The name was prickly on her tongue. She pursed her lips as if preparing to spit it out. “Just don’t be like Mary Kate,” she said. “She made such an awful scene.”
I didn’t remember meeting a Mary Kate. But then, people hadn’t made a habit of introducing themselves.
“Did she count the birds, too?” I asked. Kelly said nothing for one minute and thirty-seven seconds. She clenched and unclenched her fists thirteen times.
“Birds aren’t real,” she said and left, snatching up the box of tissues as if I didn’t deserve them. She left her clipboard behind, sitting on the edge of my desk. I flipped through it. Under “reason for termination” she had written, “worker is flighty and peckish.” She drew a heart over each “i.”
I gathered my belongings from my desk drawer. I didn’t have much. A few loose thumbtacks and a blank punch card for a free sandwich from the cafeteria. Everyone brought their own and ate at their desks, chewing silently on stale bread and gelatinous lunch meat, so I had done the same. Sometimes I would sprinkle breadcrumbs around my feet, on the off chance the birds could find their way in. The crumbs were always gone by morning. But then, maybe I was just making more work for the janitor. At the back of the drawer, shoved behind a packet of Sunchips I didn’t remember buying, was an employee ID. It was one of the old, laminated paper ones. I typed in the username. M.K. LARKIN lit up the screen. She must’ve left before the computer overhaul. They’d forgotten to remove her credentials from the system.
The computer released a high-pitched chirp as a red bubble appeared next to the chat icon. I opened it.
birder2.0: What are you doing in my account?
mklark: Found your ID while I was cleaning out my desk. Well, your desk too, I guess.
birder2.0: Back corner? By the windows?
mklark: That’s the one. Why did you leave?
birder2.0: I’m guessing the same reason they’re making you.
Because we knew. We knew… what exactly?
birder2.0: What’s your number?
mklark: What, like ID number?
birder2.0: Forget it.
mklark: No, wait.
mklark: 1,076.
I held my breath.
birder2.0: That’s what I got, too.
And then,
birder2.0: Parking garage.
I couldn’t think. They were real. I had really heard them. I had counted 1,076 birds hitting my window. And I wasn’t the only one.
mklark: Why?
I meant “why is this happening?” not “why should I go to the parking garage of a twenty-story office building alone at night when I didn’t even know it had a parking garage?” Mary Kate understood.
birder2.0: Where do you think they got the ideas for our stories?
I walked slowly out of Section B and down the stairs, my legs on autopilot. I passed the lobby door and unhooked the latch of the wrought iron gate. That had been enough to keep everyone out. Including me. I continued down another floor.
I opened the door to the damp parking garage. There were hundreds of thousands of them, too many to count. They looked up as I approached, beaks pointing straight at me. They stood like soldiers on the white lines of the parking spaces.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go,” I said.
Karina Lazorchak reads and writes from her home in Arlington, Virginia and as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studies English Literature. When she’s not writing, she enjoys playing the bass guitar and listening to music, her other true love.