Off Road
(Originally published in Best of Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction 2023-24) Honorable Mention
How the birds got into the trailer, Dray couldn’t imagine.
For the last 20 miles, he’d heard their rancorous caws from his place behind the wheel. Was it a murder of crows he was hauling across the desert? A murmuration of starlings? A deceit of lapwings…? An unkindness of ravens…
One moment his jeep was pulling an Airstream containing all his earthly possessions, swaying and veering as trailers do. The next, the trailer had lightened, levitating as hundreds of wings beat inside it, giving lift where there had been only drag. The ferocity of the beating wings came into a steady rhythm like so many oars stroking a Viking ship across the sapphire depths of a roiling sea.
Two sharp raps on his passenger window—something was gripping the door handle. A black pupil dilating in an amber orb was eying him imperiously, gray feathers vibrating with the uneven pavement.
Dray veered dangerously, but the trailer rose and compensated, the synchronized wings beating to level them smoothly back into a forward trajectory.
The creature rapped again. And Dray lowered the window.
First came the pointed head, the golden stiletto beak tucked back into the long neck which stretched suddenly forth, adder-like, upon rounded shoulders, feathers mottled as the sky before a storm. The imposing body followed, squeezing through the opening then falling with a thump onto the passenger seat, long knobbed legs in a scaly tangle, knocking Dray’s coffee cup from the caddy.
“Pull this inelegant contraption to the perimeter, human!” cried the bird, fixing Dray in the crosshairs of its monocular gaze.
Dray cranked the wheel and hit the brakes, showering the road with loose gravel. Again the trailer lifted gently, and alighted only when the jeep had come to a standstill on the lonely stretch of road.
The bird shuffled himself about on the seat until he balanced with haughty decorum. So tall was he that his neck coiled like the u-bend of a toilet, yet still the top of his tufted head brushed the ceiling.
“I am Indicus the Inimitable, Heron of Vengeance,” he cawed. “My Siege of Brethren comes with a single purpose: to purloin! To decamp with your camper!”
He cocked his sleek head at Dray’s confusion.
“We seek shelter from the destruction you and your kindred have unleashed. Our marshes and streams forever befouled, we shall use this structure as nursery for our chicks, hospital for our sick, and as a church where we may pray for your demise.” From the trailer came a unified thrumming of wings, the stamping of hundreds of scaly feet. Indicus blinked, and would have smirked, had the pointyness of his beak allowed it.
“Unhook the tethered carriage, human!” And fast as a fish, Indicus held his razored beak to Dray’s throat.
In the empty stretch of road littered with his possessions, Dray watched as his Airstream, now filled with a Siege of Herons, Indicus the Inimitable at the fore, lifted and took gracefully to the sky.