The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

and she would feel shame as she remembered how good it felt each time she left him, a throb of dark satisfaction in her heart for every ounce of her he was left wanting. And though the relationship between her and the boy was different, the notion remained: he was sustained by her presence, and she knew it.

The flute from Macaw, Cheaply made and out of tune, Still plays.

Unlike most babies, she had been designed to be ugly. It was her mother’s doing. As one of the figureheads of the post-vanity movement, her mother requisitioned for Fumiko an off-kilter nose, crooked teeth, a slight overbite, eyes spaced close together, and satellite-dish ears too large for her small, heart-shaped head.

A man at a signing once told her that yes, it was a shame her mother had made her ugly, but at least she was a genius. “Thank God for small mercies,” he said. It never ceased to amaze Fumiko, the things people would say to her face with a smile.

She uploaded the picture to her mother’s Handheld, her insides twisted with stress as her mother regarded the picture with a stoic face, until she nodded, and said, “Good.” Fumiko devoured the praise.

Every day there was a new viral, billions of people pumping their PrivateEye stories into the Feed, to the point where it was impossible for anyone to remember the contemporary folklore for too long unless the subject of the viral made an effort to remain under the spotlight, which Fumiko refused to do.

“The people who leave always forget that the world doesn’t end once they’re gone,” she said. “They forget about the decay.”

Planets were borne upward with the swiftness of bamboo, and, as it had been since the beginning, the steadfast tradition of hierarchy was continued in this fashion, the wealthy living above the clouds, and the unlucky down below. And though it was lost on no one the strangeness of this progress, of how humanity had come so far but still there were people who never saw the Stations, or even the sun, no change was made to the structure.

Shops gone, devoured by the competition, subsumed into larger entities, with long chaining names that asserted their predatory lineage.

“My dear captain,” he said, “we live this life only once. We must live it bravely.” She noticed in the man’s pearly eyes a hard-cut gleam, a boldness behind the pomp—an earned boldness, from someone who fought for his seat at the table.

Nothing makes you feel quite so monstrous as when a child runs from you.

Perhaps he has the Kind One speak it for him first, before he tries it out on his own; smiling over the syllables, the sound like a sweet on his tongue, rhyming with the word of his soul; a discovery of not only his new name, but a guiding philosophy on life. That this is how everyone should be named: a hand, thrown into a bag of words, in search of that singular & fitting shape.

Two hours of Sonja folding me like laundry, twisting my body in such grotesque contortions it is as though she expects me to breathe out of my anus.

This is our first opportunity to see how the fringe-dwellers lived with visions unclouded by company bias.

What more is there to say in the face of truth than silence?

Memory is water through fingers. Sometimes able to grasp half a remembrance.

Why did I imbibe that awful substance? The answer came to me upon a hallucinatory sunbeam. Drink, or go thirsty, I told her. Eat, or starve. For the journey is long, & cannot be survived on hope alone.

Shield the fire from the wind. Feed it with old branches. Time was slipping, and he needed to learn the important things, learn them before it was too late.

“I’ve warped reality, sundered empires, & built from nothing a legacy that will be remembered for millennia—but now, the work is done, & I think only of my empty youth in Arcadia. The idleness of summer. The sun on my back, & his hand, stroking the hair from my eyes.”

“Whatever you might think, I am but a mere mortal, and it is startling how easy it is for mortals to be cruel when they are afraid.”

In the worst of his nights, when he lay with his head in Nia’s lap and described to her in whispers the violence in his head, she did not tell him it was only a dream, that it was over, and there was nothing left to worry about. She spoke no lies. All she said was that she was sorry, which was all he ever wanted to hear; it could’ve been from a stranger, and it would’ve been enough to end the night. And it was these words that he now gave secondhand to the dying woman before him.

that there were times when people needed to vent their frustrations, and the best thing to do was listen. Listening was safe.

There were some protests, people who worried about the source of potentially unethical tech, but Umbai’s stock was unharmed by these meager outcries, which rarely made a dent in the public consciousness.

“They still believe memories are citizens of the mind. But memories also live in the bones, and the blood.”

the eyes that trailed her without affect before those eyes returned to their listless gazing at the holo-light adverts thrown against the walls, adverts that proclaimed the expensive miracles of new Umbai Company products.

These differing opinions filtered down to the children, who parroted the arguments of their parents and guardians among themselves in the yellow fields, shouting at one another with the ferociousness of those uncertain what they were fighting about, while behind them, the great machines installed the last of the landing pads.

And he absorbed the new teachings, unaware that his life was beginning to split in two, right down the sternum. There was little else for him to do but adapt. Change was coming regardless.

We skip on reflex. Her note is the hammer on the knee. The jump is the leg twitch.

“Some roads go on and on,” the Kind One said. “And some roads end before their route. But no road goes on forever. “All of them are half-finished circles,” they said.

“You tried,” the Kind One said. I tried. “That’s enough for anyone to be proud of.” Be proud.

Once in a rare while, there is an alignment. Moments that, to some, reveal the workings of God, and to others are simple fortune. But there is no known explanation for this communion of events. It only is.