The Uranium Bird

The uranium bird has been picking seeds from my lawn. It’s easy to tell where it’s been; it leaves behind a trail of brown, wilted grass or shriveled tree leaves. It lives somewhere near the end of the road near the brook, I think. I’ve seen it there when I’ve been out jogging, marbled bright orange and pitch black, cooling off in the water. Little puffs of steam float up as it wades in. It’s supposed to be quite dense, uranium, so I don’t know how it is able to fly, but it does. We tried to photograph it once, but the images came out all white and overexposed. 

A local boy tried to steal one of its eggs, but his hand got burned badly and they had to take it off. When the eggs hatch, the babies always come out deformed. One had two beaks for eyes; another was born with a couple of tentacles dangling out of its stomach. It looked like some kind of hybrid octopus-bird creature, or at least so I’ve heard. The babies don’t last long; they usually live just long enough to hop out of the nest, and then they fall apart. Sometimes, you find little piles of uranium bird parts lying around, or even just a single leg or a head. 

I’ve been getting headaches. They start at the back of my head and make their way up to my ears. The doctors don’t help much; they just keep asking me if I grind my teeth at night. I  don’t know, I tell them. They say I should relax. Every spring, I used to wake up an extra 30 minutes early and just lay in bed and meditate, listening to chirping perched birds and the white noise of passing cars outside. A few years ago is when I started hearing the uranium bird; it has a very distinct sound. It starts out very high-pitched but then quickly drops down to bass frequencies. Sweeping the spectrum. It does this in under a second, like an accelerated Doppler effect. How such a low sound can come out of such a small mouth is beyond my understanding 

of acoustics. It might be a quantum effect. Anyway, now all I can hear when I wake up is this ungodly sound every few seconds, and I can’t meditate anymore. It’s hard enough to live in this area, having to worry about that little fucker flying around shooting alpha particles at us; moreover, I can’t even sit in bed and relax for a few minutes before I start my day. 

I’m honestly not sure why this bird needs to be eating my seeds. I don’t know why it even needs to eat at all; it should be able to naturally act as its own energy source, just due to the heat generated by radioactive decay. I mean, they make power plants out of the stuff. I need those seeds to grow a full lawn, and in addition to losing the seeds, the little brown patches it leaves behind always need to be fixed. I’ve been thinking of how to get rid of it, but it’s not easy.  I looked up the chemistry of how to dissolve uranium, and now I think I’m on some kind of government watchlist. I hear buzzing in the walls of my house, extra breathing on the phone. I’ve thought of ways to crush the bird, but it’s made of pure metal, harder than steel. You’d need something like titanium or diamond. I’ve thought of ways of trapping it in a box and starving it,  but it has a half-life of 4 billion years. 

I’m sitting on my lawn, reading a book and sipping a cold glass of sangria made with fresh fruit from our garden. Trying to relax. The uranium bird is just across the street in my neighbor’s yard. It seems to notice me and starts to walk towards me. It clinks as its little metal feet walk across the pavement. It pauses as it reaches the middle of the road, daring a car to come by and challenge it. It thinks it owns this whole neighborhood, the little piece of shit. It flies up and perches itself on the top of my fence. It’s just sitting there staring at me, not moving. I take a sip of my sangria and stare back. It hops down onto my lawn. I see the tips of the grass around it start to turn brown and curl. It flies over and pecks me on the shoulder, I bat it away. The sangria 

goes flying. The bird comes at my head, making its frequency-hopping, unnatural chirping sound as it darts in. I duck, swirl, and smash it to the ground by swinging my hardcover novel at it with both hands. It falls to the ground, and I pick it up with my bare hand. I stick its head into my mouth and bite into it, twisting and tearing as hard as I can. Its head somehow comes off. I try to chew it but I can’t, it’s made of solid metal. It tastes metalli,c and I start hearing noises, not in my ears but inside my head. I spit its head out and throw down its lifeless body onto the grass. My head is burning. Everything is spinning, and I fall to the ground. The grass is thick where I am laid out, beautiful and green. The noises in my head stop. I hear the other birds chirping in the distance, naturally. Cars are passing by with their white noise. I close my eyes and relax.