--as we call it 'round these parts.
No real updates to be had. I'm hackin' at art. Some days a brother cannot properly draw hands.
When I think about ninelebbin-- that's a date, son, can't wallop me with charges of disrespeck for readin' a calender --I hear all the birds in Richmond, chattering as one.
That's what I experienced. After the phone call from my art partner, Josiah, woke me-- "Have you seen the news? Turn on the teeevee" --I screened the footage for the first time. My roommates began filing in, stunned by the unfolding narrative, so I drifted out... Through the front door and up a cthonically silent road. I walked in the general direction of the city proper, outta the Fan district (so named for how the grid fanned away, the further one went from downtown Richmond) and aimed toward the capitol.
After a good twenty minutes of numb trod I was in the capitol district, and there were state trooper trucks parked at regular intervals along a hastily assembled traffic stop / redirect. No-one gets to the dome. Troopers in their dopey ranger hats and bulletproof vests milled around, cradling shotguns like they were beauty pagent bouquets. I tried not to stare, kept on my vector, pointed toward the historical district, the worn bubblepack of cobblestone reassuring me that I'd be at the railroad corridor in another ten, and that's when I heard their fainting couch chatter fading up.
All the birds. Every one.
It took the ten minutes' walk to hear clear of the wind and occasional engine. Raining from the trees where sparrow & duck & finch & crow & jay & goose & robin & cardinal & pigeon & dove & raven jittered and flitted, the cacaophony overdubbed in every direction, the sound of a vast and agitated crowd. Like Whistler in Sneakers, describing earmarks of his trip in the trunk, the geese all chattering with one voice. No call & response. All the avians in concerted panick, united in noise & fear: something had shaken the world, something had befouled the winds, no-one knew what, except that it was man's fucking fault.
In wonder I caromed through the fearsong, watching the birds in the trees, sky blue as Krishna, trying to figure out when I'd ever heard anything like this. Wondering at how, beyond the occasional motorist speeding home or strainfaced trooper out of their truck, the streets were empty.
I wouldn't see them as empty again until the season of the Beltway Sniper.
