Not an Owl
A Short Story
Bones.
“Scattered,” Jabari muttered, staring at a tiny skull and more bones he couldn’t identify. “Huh. Scattered. Scat-terd. Scat…turd.”
He’d heard about this — owls would hunt rodents and poop out, wait, no, vomit out the bones. Must be hell on the exit, he smirked, peering into the palm fronds directly overhead. The palm tree was probably three stories tall, and bushy, like his Pop’s ancient, grey beard. He should probably get those dead fronds cut. He guessed it was decades worth of overgrowth. California didn’t need another fire hazard. And it most likely fell under his job description.
But this was a crappy apartment complex — if they were gonna get fined for a health and safety violation, it would be because of the hundred worse things lurking in the ancient structure.
Plus the owl was probably endangered. He was doing it a favor.
Still kinda weird he hadn’t seen an owl around. And he should have, his reverse-migraines kept him glued to that one window in his studio apartment.
But right now he was feeling pretty good. He had managed to leave his hovel, walk to In-N-Out, navigate human interactions and was about to pound his Double-Double. No, he shouldn’t pound it. The health app suggested if he wanted to get under two hundred pounds, he needed to eat slower. Savor it.
Speaking of savor, bounding up his steps, with the key inserted into the loose, grimy door latch, he was moments away from enjoying The Brood. Cronenberg’s films weren’t going to watch themselves. Or maybe they would.
Jabari set a reminder to pen a pitch where Cronenberg’s characters watch the auteur’s other films which subsequently come to life and united, wreak havoc on the world.
As Jabari plunked down in his disheveled La-Z-Boy, crushed up against the studio apartment’s only window, he glanced back at the palm tree. Were those yellow eyes near the top? But then The Brood’s opening music jerked to life on his VCR, and he lost himself in Animal Style and gore. What a way to spend a Tuesday.
Bars slammed into the back of Jabari’s head.
Not like metal prison bars hardened to comply with NACE MR0175 though. These were bars of music, but they felt like steel pipes piercing parietals.
Groggily he stared at his phone. A video was playing, but how did it start? Pausing the lyric video, he stared at the time. 10:11. AM? Right? It was an overstatement to say he’d acclimated to the migraines, but he knew the routine. Jabari’s body robotically climbed out of bed. Without opening his eyes, his legs navigated the cramped space.
He didn’t think about avoiding the glass case of Funko Pops, the last obstacle before the window. His left hand reflexively gripped the yellowed wand, making the blinds squeak open. He fell into the worn chair, sunlight spilling onto his brown skin.
Pulling the recliner’s handle, the back rest angled until a line of light sat directly across his eyes.
Sunlight. Okay, AM. 10:00 AM. Thank God.
The pain of blindness was soothing compared to his throbbing head.
He breathed in. Breathed out. In. Out. It always took a few minutes, but the pain began to subside. He had to angle the chair’s back again as the razor line of the shade’s shadow had migrated over his cornea. After an hour he worked up the strength to shuffle to the fridge.
Legs a little wobbly but good enough. Cereal bowl plunked down. Milk and Marshmallow Marauders. Jabari’s large frame dwarfed the tiny, two-person table. In a fluid motion, he slid his phone on the table with the video open.
So what did his haunted phone play? It was one of those poorly organized videos. Titled “hymns” with a runtime over an hour, a quick swipe showed the eager uploader didn’t bother to list the songs included.
Jabari un-paused. “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise the One, risen Son of God!”
Easy enough, he dumped the lyrics into Google. Ah, every Christian song had those words. Grabbing the video timeline he jumped back about a minute: “When Satan tempts me to despair, and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look…”
Pretty typical Satan stuff but he tried the lyrics anyway. And that seemed to be enough. It was a super old song. Apparently called a hymn. And titled “Before the Throne of God Above.”
Weird. He listened to the rest of the song. It was a bit captivating.
A bit? How could it be a small amount captivating? He didn’t want to admit being interested.
The cereal was awful. Stale. He threw it in the sink, flipped the disposal switch. Nothing. Cool.
Turning around, both hands found the counter. His eyes drifted out the window to the base of the palm tree.
His phone buzzed.
Ugh. Mrs. Jimenez. What now?
“Hello,” Jabari grumbled, making no attempt to sound friendly.
A Hispanic accent floated over his phone’s speaker, “Mr. Jabari, there something broken on the gate.”
“What on the gate is broken?”
“No. Gate broken.”
“Oh. The entire thing? Like, it’s not opening?”
“Si.”
“Okay, I’ll take care of it.” He hung up.
Threw on a shirt, slipped on the Rainbows, down the three stairs outside his door, walked to the driveway gate. Knowing full well he’d have no idea how to fix it.
Gate officially reviewed. Yep, no idea. And a new text to Javí started. Javí was the Mr. Miyagi of the buildings. Well, an average version. Maybe catching flies in chopsticks wasn’t mandatory for maintenance, but it’d be nice.
That was Jabari’s last thought as he was slammed against the nearby stucco wall, knocking him unconscious.
Both Jabari’s knees were broken when the five-year-old from apartment six jerked the Honda Civic into reverse. The paramedics noted the thick wood guardrails bolted to steel pipes protecting the wall. The wood held. The knees did not.
Hospital. Conscious. Unconscious. Conscious.
He’d had the double casts for two days and Jabari’s legs were already itchy. They went from mid-thigh, down to his shins. Sitting in a wheelchair, he looked like a little kid with their legs poking off a couch.
A bus with a special lift dropped him off in front of the apartments. The complex was so ghetto, there was a Jack in the Box in front with a narrow driveway on the side that led to the apartment buildings. The driver was only contracted to get the patient to the street address, so Jabari was dropped off near the corner of Leffingwell and Telegraph. Alone, wheelchair-bound, legs stuck straight out, lookin’ like a fool.
“Jabari?” A voice from behind inquired, “Dude, what happened?!”
Dirk was the closest thing Jabari had to a friend, so he recognized the voice without craning his neck. “That hellspawn Holldber brat from 6 hit me. Like, with their Civic.” By now Dirk was in front of Jabari shaking his head, staring at the casts.
“That’s crazy. You gonna sue?”
The thought gave Jabari a shiver. Being on the agoraphobic spectrum meant the intriguing possibility of Jabari resigning from being super over the apartments, didn’t outweigh traveling to and dealing with humans in court.
“No, but I definitely won’t prioritize six’s requests to Javí.”
“I mean, yeah. …Want me to push you to your apartment?”
Dirk steered the wheelchair, droning on about something, but Jabari was internally spiraling. He didn’t want to leave his studio apartment but now he couldn’t. His mind raced, then suddenly his pupils focused and he realized they were approaching the palm tree. “Can you stop here, Dirk?”
Jabari investigated the base. More bones. Little bird skulls. And wings.
Full bird wings with feathers still on and where they attached to the bird’s backs, red bloody roots. Jabari guessed those were muscles and tendons and veins.
The lyrics “When Satan tempts me to despair” popped into his head. And then what? Something about “guilt within” then “Upward I look…”
Jabari looked up. Up into the palm tree. Up into the ash frond beard where shadow recessed into void. Leaning an elbow on the chair’s armrest, his hand shielded the sun from his vision. Jabari’s eyes slowly combed what could be seen, but that darkness was unknowable.
No nest. And no glowing eyes staring back.
But something felt off. He noticed six or seven finches perched on a telephone wire. All facing the same direction, motionless, silently staring at the top of the palm tree. For the second time in under three minutes, Jabari shuttered.
Calming himself, he resisted referencing Driving Miss Daisy, especially since the roles were racially reversed, and simply asked Dirk to push him to his door.
Dirk had to call three other guys to cajole Jabari’s wheelchair up the steps and through the door. Once inside, it was painfully obvious the wheelchair didn’t have space to maneuver in the claustrophobic room. Unfortunately for Jabari, that obviousness wasn’t the only pain, as the residents jerked the wheelchair back through the door, reverberating his broken bones like glow sticks. Making room for the wheelchair, the guys ripped the La-Z-Boy through the door frame and dropped it in the adjoining planter. Ten huge roaches scurried out of the red apple succulent, and no one was surprised.
Jabari was re-hoisted up into his home and left alone.
While he was thankful for the help, he was more grateful for the solitude. Between medical staff, the bus driver, and four residents, he had maxed his social interaction quota. Inexperienced with a wheelchair, he meticulously labored at nudging the wheels into the exact position his La-Z-Boy had been and fell asleep.
His eyes fluttered open, catching the ’80s pinks and purples of sunset above the second-story red clay roof across the courtyard. Hungry, he grabbed his phone and ordered pizza. One more human interaction couldn’t hurt.
He ordered so frequently that the Little Caesar’s drivers knew how to thread their way to his door. He awkwardly reached over his shoulder and turned the doorknob. It was weird having his back to the door, but the driver took pity and walked the box in, placing it gingerly on top of his casts.
The driver kindly closed the door, their back shortly coming into view, passing under the palm tree. Jabari thought he saw something gleam in the upper branches but once he trained his gaze, there was nothing. Scanners was on the playbill for the evening and as long as he ate slowly, he could make the large pizza last at least until Louis Del Grande’s famous exploding head scene.
As the final credits rolled, Jabari wheeled to the bathroom, relieved himself in a Mountain Dew bottle, and dumped it in the toilet. Once that chore was complete, he returned to the window. While lying in the recovery room he had found a version of “Before the Throne of God Above” by Vanessa Boehm with TheSoulMindsScars that he liked. He started playing the song. This version started with a different verse about “perfect pleas” and skipped the Hallelujah stuff. It also added new lines like, “One with Himself, I cannot die, My soul is purchased by His blood” that stuck with him.
How was it this Christ guy could lose blood and save people?
Jabari’s peripheral vision detected movement in the sky. His head swiveled up and to the left. Something was moving but it wasn’t in the sky, it was high in the palm branches.
It took a second for Jabari to register what he was seeing. The movement turned out to be two claws, aimed at the ground, sliding from under the full mane of palm fronds. The claws resembled human hands except the fingers were twice as long and seemed stuck together while a thick thumb jutted above the wrist.
Smooth, pole-like arms came into view, hovering parallel with the trunk. Then suddenly the claws grasped the tree and bent at the wrist, gradually making the tops of the long, greyish arms extend away from the fronds. This ratcheting motion silently drew a grotesque head-torso out of the tree’s dead vegetation.
The head and shoulder-ish area were covered in thick black, matted hair while the abdomen was smooth, similar to the arms. It was impossible to see if the thing had a face so all Jabari could make out were bulging amber eyes. The thing continued facing the ground like an animal climbing down a tree headfirst.
Eventually, thin, tube-like legs appeared. Because the hand-claws hadn’t moved, it was apparent the thing’s feet slowly descending the trunk had caused the head-torso to protrude away from the tree. By now the thing looked like a right triangle, where the hands and feet were at 45 degrees and its torso bent in half at 90.
Then without warning it scurried down the tree, effortless and silent. It moved so fast; Jabari couldn’t tell if it had put one arm in front of the other or with appendages in unison.
The not-owl disappeared into the grass which seemed impossible given the head-torso was roughly the size of a human chest cavity. The moonlight made it hard to tell colors, but the smooth areas had been light grey and the hair was raven black, so how could it become all void on the grass? Jabari kept his eye on the spot afraid if he turned, he’d be unsure if it moved.
As Jabari subconsciously drew closer to the window, his thoughts weren’t about the thing’s origin. Or even how it…he decided to call it “the Void”…ended up in the apartments. Instead, why had it come down the tree? Was it bored of eating finches?
Then, as if in answer to his question, the darkness began to slink away from Jabari, into some bushes nearby. As he watched, a yellow orb appeared near the top of the bushes, followed by another. The Void was swiveling its head toward him making sure the coast was clear.
A second later it was pressed against the wall under apartment six’s open, screenless window. The smooth leg poles must have had elbow-ish joints because it steadily raised the head-torso up to peer in the window.
Jabari snagged his phone and dialed the Holldber’s number. He could hear it ringing across the courtyard. The Void paused on the first ring, then slowly raised its furry head just above the window sill.
Mr. Holldber picked up.
“Kevin, you need to…” What instruction could Jabari give? Run outside and get eaten? Stay inside and get eaten?
“Hello?”
“Mr. Holldber…do you have a gun?”
But the Void’s eyes were on Jabari. Looking him right in the face. It heard him talking. Then it darted into the bushes and was gone. Jabari jerked his face away from the window, accidentally dropping his phone. He used his now free hands to unlock the wheelchair breaks and…
…did nothing. Where could he go? The apartment had one door. One way in, one way out and the Void was probably crouched under his window.
The wheelchair finally spun backward, Jabari propelling himself into a display case. Grabbing a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, he briefly sighed before ripping it off the backing signed by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Jabari stared at the window, waiting for the Void to crash through and murder him to death. But nothing happened.
As the last drop of adrenaline seeped from his system, he saw tubes slowly moving up the palm tree. It felt like a million years but eventually he saw the Void’s beady yellow eyes. The freak was moving up the tree backward! Just like it came down but staring him in the eye the entire way up. Jabari rolled forward so he could get the optimal angle through the window as it disappeared into the fronds exactly as it had descended.
Now in the midst of the mix of graven grey and inky abyss were two yellow eyes watching him.
Unsure whether to close the blinds so the Void couldn’t watch him or to keep them open so Jabari could watch it, he fell asleep undecided. The wheelchair somehow drifted back to the display case through the course of the night, and Jabari woke with stabbing pain at the base of his skull. He rolled himself into the sunlight, but relief came slowly.
Seeing his phone on the floor reminded him of last night’s call when he dropped it. The Holldbers didn’t call back or check on him. Weird. He wondered if they were okay.
Jabari plugged in his phone, staring at the open lyric video for “Before the Throne of God Above.” The rhythm cadence was mesmerizing. He kept hearing the words, “One with Himself, I cannot die…My life is hid with Christ on high.” He resolved to learn more about this Christ guy and how Jabari’s life could be hid with Him. Just as the pain in his head suddenly disappeared, he heard a horrible squawking in the palm.
Squinting up into the tree revealed nothing, but there was definitely a finch being unalived in the convulsing fronds.
Jabari noticed finches lining every rain gutter and telephone wire as far as he could see, all of them eerily silent, staring at the top of the palm tree.
The migraine had miraculously been gone since Jabari’s conclusion to learn more about Christ, but as dusk settled, the headache crept in around the edges of his mind.
Jabari tried to disassociate, daydreaming about dinner, absently looking at the palm tree. Then his eyes focused on movement, sending a sharp pain through his skull.
Two slender claws slowly descended from the fronds.
Suddenly, once a yardstick’s worth of the Void’s arms were visible, every finch divebombed the tree. In a coordinated effort the birds pecked and scratched the visible appendages and flew into the web of dead fronds, apparently attacking the rest of it. The Void instantaneously sunk one claw into the trunk, ratcheted its head-torso out of its cave, and flailed its other arm defensively.
Jabari gawked at the battle, his subconscious noting how absurdly Hitchcockian it was for him to be Rear Window’ing a scene from The Birds. But these weren’t marionette seagulls with no explicable motivation. The finches had a purpose, and they didn’t relent. Even as the spinning arm smashed some of their frail bodies, the birds managed to shred every inch of the Void.
Death by a thousand cuts.
The Void’s lifeless body dropped from the top of the tree. Motionless. Slamming into the cement below, showering the palm’s base with blood.
Jabari stared at the body. Seconds into minutes. Minutes into an hour.
Nothing could survive that incessant pecking and scratching and finally, that long fall. Adrenaline had left his bloodstream.
Should he check it? “Cryptid checker” was definitely not in his job description. And he didn’t need to protect residents from learning a freaky thing existed. Plus there was no way he could get his wheelchair outside.
Eyelids fluttered and he was asleep.
Light woke him. Sunlight through the window. Thank God, no reverse migraine. His neck snapped toward the window, eyes squinting looking for the body.
Nothing.
He grasped desperately at anything to leverage his large frame out of the chair. Grinding bones sending shock after shock through his legs. Jabari ripped open the door and, with stilted hobbling like Frankenstein’s monster, made his way down the steps and onto the cracked cement path. Blood and bits of organ strewn exactly where you’d expect, still slightly damp, no drag marks.
But no body.
Jabari squinted into the heights of the palm tree. A dark void, with hundreds of small yellow eyes staring back.