YELLING AT THE BIRDS. - by Nonso Obi

On existential dread. There is a boy on a mountain, He arrived with a bag that was not heavy and a question he could not finish and he has been standing at the edge of the ridge since whatever day when the world stops making sense and you stop keeping track of time. The sky too wide and the trees below too green and everything is unreasonably, almost insultingly beautiful for someone in the middle of not understanding anything. The forest spreads beneath him like a canopy so dense it swallows its own light, mist threading through the branches like a slow conversation between the trees, the valley floor somewhere underneath all of it breathing quietly in the dark of its own shade. A river catches the morning somewhere to the east and throws it back at the sky in pieces. He opens his mouth and yells. The birds scatter in every direction at once, a sudden explosion of wings and alarm calls, the whole flock lifting off the branches in a single startled motion . They wheel overhead in a loose panicked orbit, calling to each other in a language made entirely of urgency, and then one by one they land again on branches further away, ruffled and indignant, tilting their small heads at this large confused creature standing at the edge of the ridge making noises at the sky. They do not understand what he wants. They were just sitting there. A mother bird on a branch to his left turns to look at him with one eye and then the other. Beneath her, pressed into the warm curve of her chest, two small birds who have not yet learned to be afraid of anything sit with their eyes half closed, unbothered by the yelling because their mother is unbothered by the yelling, and if she is not alarmed then the world is probably fine. One of them opens its beak in a small silent yawn. The other shifts its weight and tucks its head further under her wing. The mother looks at the boy one more time with her one eye and then her other eye and then turns away and does something with her feathers that, if he could read birds, would translate roughly to not my problem. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000169961.jpg"/> He yells again anyway. His yell did not fade. It rose, climbed the thermals, and began to peel the paint off the sunset. Where it hit, the gold curdled into something rawer. A single, wavering line of red—the sound of a breaking voice—scribbled itself across the horizon. The echo comes back across the valley, slightly smaller than he sent it. On the second day he tries sitting still instead of yelling. He has heard that silence held long enough becomes its own kind of answer and he is willing to try anything at this point. He sits on the rock at the ridge and breathes and watches and waits. The mountain does not speak. A hawk appears above him and circles once, twice, three times in a wide lazy spiral, riding something invisible with an ease that feels almost offensive, and then drifts away over the ridge without acknowledging him at all. The birds return to the branches around him gradually, cautiously. The mother bird is back on her branch with her two children, who are slightly larger today than they were yesterday, or perhaps he is only noticing them more carefully. One of them has begun to practice standing at the edge of the branch, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing, leaning forward into the air and then pulling back, leaning forward, pulling back, working up to something it does not yet have the language for. He stays quiet for two hours. Then he yells again. He cannot help it. The silence was just silence and the mountain just a mountain and none of it told him anything he could hold onto. The birds scatter. Come back. A father bird somewhere above him sings three sharp notes that mean something specific to every bird in the forest and nothing at all to him. Two birds chase each other through the canopy below in a spiral of motion so fast and fluid it looks like one creature arguing with itself. Another sits absolutely still on a dead branch and stares at nothing with the focused intensity of someone solving a problem nobody else can see. They are all so busy, he thinks. They are all so completely and entirely busy with the serious ongoing work of being small and alive and he is standing here on a mountain yelling at them and they have not once, not for a single moment, stopped to wonder what it all means. Well they're birds, he thought. He picks up his bag. He does not have answers. The mountain did not explain itself and the birds offered nothing and the silence was just his own voice returning to him smaller and changed and still only his. The birds do not watch him leave. They are busy. The mother bird is busy. Her children are busy practicing the edges of things. The father bird is busy singing his three sharp notes into the morning for reasons that are entirely his own. The hawk is somewhere above the ridge doing its slow unbothered circles in air the boy can no longer feel. He walks down the mountain. The mountain stays. The mist rises. The small bird on the branch finally leans forward and does not pull back. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000169964.jpg"/>Above him, the heavens went about their business of being vast. A brushstroke of crimson here, a swirl of periwinkle there. It was a masterpiece. And it had absolutely no room in it for a small boy and his small rage.

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