FLASH FICTION – FOWC & RDP

Every morning, she wrote to keep the birds at bay.

They came with the light—first as shadows dragging themselves across the windows, then as a rustle, low and persistent, like wind thinking too hard. Doves mostly, though wrong somehow. Their eyes were too still, their feathers too quiet. Occasionally, darker birds arrived—sleek as oil, with glints in their beaks like pins. They didn’t chirp or coo. They watched.

She used to think they were hallucinations, symptoms of grief. Her brother had drowned in the river five years ago. No body, no real goodbye. After that, the house changed. Or maybe she did.

The birds began showing up shortly after the funeral. Perched on curtain rods. Nested in the corners of the ceiling where cobwebs once clung. They moved like smoke. Never flapping, just shifting, gliding, like time with feathers.

She had never written a word before he died.

Now, she couldn’t stop.

At first, it felt like a compulsion. Survival. Write or unravel. But soon, the stories took on a shape of their own. They came through her fingers in long, fevered bursts—narratives that looped and twisted and whispered through the typewriter-like incantations. Whenever she paused, the birds stirred. Paper fluttered. Air thickened.

One morning, she stayed in bed. Her arms wouldn’t move. Grief sat on her chest like a second ribcage.

By mid-afternoon, the house was breathing.

Not creaking—breathing. The walls rose and fell in slow, silent exhales. Books slumped off shelves. The floorboards quivered like violin strings underfoot. And the birds—dozens, maybe hundreds—lined the walls, all facing her. Eyes like eclipse moons. Waiting.

She crawled to the desk. Typed three words: He was lost.

The air calmed. The birds blinked once. Vanished.

After that, she understood.

They weren’t punishing her. They were pushing her. Urging the story out. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what for. But she knew the birds were part of it. Maybe even keepers of it. Strange, spectral editors in feathered cloaks.

The typewriter, an old rusted Royal, began to type without her. At night. Quiet, rhythmic, like a heartbeat. She woke to new pages. Pages she didn’t remember writing. One had a map scrawled on the back—inked in spirals and loops. Another contained a letter addressed to her in her brother’s handwriting.

I saw the ice crack. I saw the light inside it. I’m not afraid.

She burned that one. She burned the next three as well. But they always came back. Not charred. Not even creased. Just waiting on the desk like polite ghosts.

The stories that came through her grew stranger. Boys who vanished into mirrors. Houses that forgot how to hold their shape. Rivers that swallowed memories and returned them in riddles. Always, always, a boy at the center. Sometimes drowned. Sometimes glowing. Sometimes stitched together from stars.

She never gave him her brother’s name. But the birds knew.

They began bringing her things. A button she remembered from his jacket. A library card he’d lost in third grade. A page from a notebook she hadn’t seen since they were children, filled with a crude comic he’d drawn—“Captain Birdbrain and the Time Vultures.”

She laughed. She cried. She kept writing.

She began to understand the birds weren’t birds at all. Not really.

One blinked at her one morning, and she swore she saw an entire galaxy in its eye—planets spinning, stories coalescing, a thousand unnamed lives passing through. Another unfurled its wings, and letters spilled from its feathers, fluttering like snow, dissolving on contact.

She no longer felt afraid. Not exactly.

They were eerie, yes. But so is truth when you haven’t looked at it in a while.

The house shifted in small ways. The closet no longer opened to coats but to mist. The attic smelled of saltwater. She didn’t question it. She followed the thread.

She wrote not to escape grief but to appease it. To make it into something legible. Something she could carry. Each word formed a tiny act of negotiation between what was gone and what remained.

One night, she fell asleep at the desk. When she woke, a new story was finished—clean, structured, heartbreakingly beautiful. The final line read:

“And when she opened the door, there he was—smiling, whole, and made entirely of light.”

The birds were utterly still.

One—larger than the rest, with a sheen-like moonlight on bone—landed on her shoulder. Its weight was real. Solid. She reached up gently, and it leaned into her touch.

There was no song. Just presence.

She folded the page and placed it in an envelope marked For Him.

The next morning, the birds didn’t come.

The house was quiet in a way it hadn’t been in years. She waited. She made coffee. Nothing stirred. For a long time, she thought they were gone.

Then, around dusk, the light shifted. Just slightly. The world outside the window tilted toward a kind of blue she’d never seen. Deeper than twilight, warmer than dawn. The birds returned—not many, just a few. But they glowed now. Dimly. Like coals before fire.

They perched around the room. Silent. Peaceful.

The largest one dropped a page at her feet. It held only a title:

Chapter One.

She smiled.

She had learned to write not to fight chaos, but to give it order.

And the story was just beginning.