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“I’m really not entirely sure about it professor, I mean I worked really hard on it of course, and I’ve thought it backwards and forwards, and ultimately it’s where I’ve ended up – I’d really appreciate your feedback, I really do think there must be angles to this I’m not seeing, not thinking of – there’s something I’m not quite getting at, and I really hope I’ve done a good enough job of building a base that you can help me sort out what I should be building towards, because I’m sure what I have now isn’t quite right.”

David looked up from his stammering monologue into Professor Entel’s large green eyes. “David, your modesty is truly remarkable.” She smiled wide, her perfect teeth reflecting the too-blue light from the sterile university bulbs. “This is one of the most remarkable papers I’ve ever read from a candidate – it reads like you’ve been writing in this field for a decade! Truly extraordinary.”

David flinched a little at this assessment. His eyes flicked across the small plaster walled room with its old wooden bookcases and volumes upon volumes of theory. “Well thank you professor, I’m glad you think so. But you don’t think it could be improved by some significant edits in the last couple of sections?”

The Professor pouted a little, “Really David, you should be more confident in your work – no I don’t think any major edits are necessary. I think you’ll find great success with this just as it is.”

David left the professor’s office with a strange mixture or elation, anxiety, and resignation. The Professor’s reaction had not surprised him. These kinds of interactions had been a common pattern throughout his life, and though he had hoped they would stop now that he was a PhD candidate, it’s not like he could complain about it. It seemed like a vain and terrible thing to be unhappy with, that everyone loved everything he did and proclaimed him a prodigy and a genius at every step of his academic development. But no matter how much his family, friends, colleagues, and mentors assured him of his incredible talent, he doubted it. As a matter of fact, the more they lauded him, the more he doubted. Now it had gotten to the point where every time he had to show his work, new work that he had never shown anyone, he was more and more convinced each time that this would be the time his supposed genius had finally failed, this would be the time he would be outed and revealed for what he truly was, a half-wit, third rate thinker who was derivative and nowhere near as thorough as he needed to be.

David walked through the leaf cluttered pathways of the university commons in the fading late afternoon sun and continued to think on his anxieties. He knew that so many others would dismiss these kinds of thoughts as self-loathing, or perfectionism in action, or imposter syndrome or some other such term for not believing in the quality of your own efforts. But this time David had been so sure he would receive a rebuke, or at the very least get some strong recommendations for edits or rewrites. The thing was barely complete, the ending was a total mess, and the conclusions genuinely did not make sense. David had gotten so anxious about the endless praise heaped upon him that he had intentionally left the piece as a fairly rough draft, seriously underdeveloped, and submitted in that state with all the caveats that he wanted help with it so that surely the professor would take note of the sorry state and at the very least comment on it. Nothing.

David rented the ground level apartment of a split-level three-story building. His place was a bit of a mess at the moment – there were dishes in the sink, some dirty laundry on his ratty old couch, but it was never too dusty, which was strange considering he never swept, dusted, or mopped. He called for Trish as he entered but there was no answer. He’d hoped his on-again off-again girlfriend… friend with benefits? He mentally weighed the two terms in his mind and determined Trish wouldn’t like either of them. Maybe they were just people who fucked sometimes, although he didn’t think he was anywhere near good enough at that to keep Trish’s attention as long as he had, so surely she must feel something else for him.

Anyway, he’d been hoping she’d still be around after they’d left off on a bit of a rocky note that morning. He’d broken down and told her about his half-assed paper (he’d felt a little weird and anxious about the prospect) and she’d gotten pissed about it, told him he was fucking around with his future because he couldn’t handle his own success. Told him he was just another whiz kid who ends up blowing everything up just to feel what its like to fail. At the time he’d maybe thought she was right – now he didn’t know what to think. Maybe she was right despite his continued success – after all it seemed like he'd really have to throw himself under the bus and screw up his life to get some negative feedback in a professional context at this point.

Thinking about these relationship troubles had him thinking back to another girlfriend (female friend who had sex with him) – it had been Anna, who he’d always gotten along well with even if he’d never really thought about her in that way. One day he did, and thinking about her that way one time seemed to have been enough – it happened all at once. He had complimented her on something – her dress? Then later there had been kissing. Then they were in his bed. He remembered later sitting up in his bed (mattress and frame – not bad for a 19 year old guy) in his cramped and tiny bachelor pad – you could see the whole apartment minus the tiny bathroom from that bed. Anna was pouring herself a glass of water, and even though she’d never been to his apartment she had known exactly where the glasses were, no hesitation and no opening the wrong cupboard. Some people just have an intuition for those kind of things, he had thought to himself.

He poured himself a glass of water. Why didn’t the professor say anything to him? Why had she treated this clearly unfinished draft like a polished manuscript? Was he really unable to judge the quality of his own work, to this degree? Was she intentionally undermining him, setting him up to fail publicly, to suffer ridicule and humiliation? Was she somehow inept, unable to tell weak work from strong, incomplete thinking from tested and thoroughly thought out work? That couldn’t be…he’d read her work, it was very strong – his non-stop train of success had allowed him to work with anyone he’d wanted, and he’d chosen carefully and with thought. Furthermore it wasn’t just down to the professor – this was simply the latest step in a pattern that had continued throughout his entire life. He’d never submitted something done poorly on purpose like this before, but he knew full well that throughout his life he’d done work of variable quality, he’d submitted any number of papers and essays done in a late night scramble the night before after weeks of procrastination. Yet those received no more comment and all the same ecstatic praise of the works he had poured himself into day after day.

He sometimes felt that the work he produced was simply mass to be deposited onto a little pressure plate, like an animal in a lab experiment. You weigh down the plate, you get the cheese. It doesn’t matter what you put on the plate. David had fantasies sometimes about submitting essays composed of random characters, or even simply piles of blank pages (or text documents of blank pages perhaps) – the intentionally weak work he’d done so far was about the most he’d been able to bring himself to do – he wasn’t sure if he was more afraid of the consequences of such a provocation, or of the possibility that there would be no consequences. He sometimes dreamed of a future where he was a very successful author and entered a room containing a collection of all of his great work, and when he opened the books to look at them all of them were completely blank.

David ate a dinner of leftover chicken and rice, read for a while, and went to bed. That night, he dreamed he was defending his PhD in front of an audience whose faces were hidden by great dark hoods. They would ask questions that made little sense, referencing authors who he did not know and papers from years that had not yet occurred. He gave the best answers he could, and they were always accepted without further comment.

The next day, David awoke to find Trish washing dishes in the kitchen. “Good morning.” David said. “Did I leave the door unlocked?”.

Trish looked up from the dishes and frowned. “No, you gave me a key, remember?”

David did not remember. He was unsure of how to proceed from this position – was he going to accuse this woman of lying, of making a copy of his house key behind his back? That seemed extreme. Yet it seemed unlikely he would forget making a copy of his house key and giving it to her, given that he hadn’t had a spare on hand to give out. They stared at each other in silence for a minute. Then he shrugged and said, “I guess I must have – probably not a good sign if I’m forgetting things like this so young!” They both laughed a little. Trish went back to the dishes. “I need to go to campus early today.” David said. “Do you want to walk with me?”

“I had to work a late shift last night, that’s why I wasn’t here when you got home – I think I’m too tired to go out, I’m going to take a nap in your bed after I finish up here I think.”

David told her that that was just fine and headed out. Today as he walked he looked at the world differently. The normal neighbourhood people seemed to look at him a little longer than usual, and when they didn’t look at him it seemed to be a pointed not looking, like they were looking away from him the way you avoid eye contact with someone you’ve been staring at when they weren’t looking. Cars seemed to slow as they passed him. There seemed to be more ravens than usual. He remembered a friend used to say you could tell the difference between a crow and a raven by the fact that if you aren’t sure, it’s probably a crow, and if you look at it and think to yourself, “that’s the largest bird I’ve ever seen” then it’s a raven. These were ravens, and there were far too many.

David had left the house to avoid thinking about how his girlfriend had entered his apartment, and why she’d lied about being given a key. He had nowhere to be on campus so he went to the library. Deep in the stacks he felt a tug on his sleeve, and was suddenly pulled into a dark corner by a small woman who seemed to be incredibly strong.

“Don’t move.” She said. “They can’t see us here.”

“Who? What?”

“Do you like this?”

“Do I like what?”

“Your life of success.”

David was stunned into silence. “What do you mean by that?”

“You’ve started testing the boundaries. If you push too hard they will break.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t tell you everything. There’s no shame in it you know. Enjoying it. Living it to completion. But if you need to know, you can keep pushing, and it will break, and you will know. It won’t be pleasant, but maybe living this life isn’t pleasant either. I don’t know, you’ll have to decide for yourself.”

She disappeared as quickly as she appeared, around a corner and as David turned the corner after her she was already gone. He stood there, looking down the empty row, as a frazzled looking librarian came up to him and asked if he needed any help. She wouldn’t stop asking him what he had been looking for in that back corner, so he left the library. Just as he was beginning to wonder about all the strange things that were happening to him he almost ran directly into Professor Entel.

“David, I’m so glad I ran into you,” She said in her perfectly melodic voice. “I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday – I don’t want you to feel like you’re not getting the support you need with your work.” David had lost himself staring into her large unblinking eyes, and suddenly realized that she had taken hold of his hand in a strange way, wrapping her fingers around the palm of his hand and his wrist. She was holding him rather tightly. “I want to sit down with you again,” she continued, “and we can go over some of the parts of the paper you feel are underdeveloped.” She was squeezing very tightly now. “You are very important to this department and we want you to feel like this is a place you can produce your very best work.”

“Professor, you’re hurting me.” David said quietly.

She released her grip and slowly slid her hand away. “You have my calendar,” She said with a smile. “Schedule a time that works for you and we can go over your work in detail.”

As she walked away David stared after her, trying to place what had been so strange about her facial expressions during the conversation. On his wrist and hand dark bruises were forming, welts thinner than human fingers.

All the rest of the day David walked around campus in a strange sort of daze, just looking. Observing, as though he were seeing the world for the first time. Everywhere he looked the people were wrong. The students, the faculty, the staff, the random people on the street. He couldn’t quite figure out what in particular was off about them. Every time he tried to pinpoint something on a person that wasn’t right, every time he focused on a specific facial feature or trait, it looked incredibly normal – but when taken as a whole, and especially when let out of focus, when observed solely from the corner of the eye, they became like misassembled dolls, their faces stretched and contorted. When he got used to using his peripheral vision, when he became capable of parsing detail in the absolute corners of his vision, he started to notice that just as people left his view they seemed to suddenly possess beaks.

If you had asked David why his response to the strange things happening in his life was to go to the pet store, it’s unlikely he could have given you a coherent answer. Certainly he didn’t have an answer for himself – he was mostly concerned that he was losing his mind. He was trying and failing to tank a potential lifelong career in academia for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate, he was being confronted in strange corners by people with conspiratorial and paranoid musings about his life, and he was beginning to allow the stress of all this to cause him to hallucinate bird features onto random people in his peripheral vision. Why not go to the pet store – maybe if he could buy a bird in a cage it would let him get a handle on the delusions he felt himself spiraling towards – like a symbolic capture and imprisonment of the paranoid forces creeping up on him. What did he have to fear from birds in the world if he could cage a bird of his own! In a little retail strip, beneath the overhang of a tall brick building, sat a nondescript store with black paneling and a wide display window, wherein sat a few generic pet supplies – a tall cat tree, a selection of colorful and puffy rubber dog toys, and a very large and empty bird cage. It sat between an empty (possibly out of business?) laundromat and a dark tailors shop with the blinds drawn. Above the door was a long placard which listed its name in large red cursive letters: Creature Hutch.

David opened the door and a jingling bell sounded. Inside was unlike any pet store or store or room he had ever seen. The place was filled, absolutely packed with bird cages of every size and shape. They were stacked to the ceiling, some in neat towers of square and rectangular cages that balanced nicely, others in pyramid structures where cages with rounded tops would need to sit atop 3 or four other round top cages to remain stable – some others did not remain stable as still more eccentric shapes were piled atop one another with little regard for their ultimate stability. Some towers were leaning, and some had clearly fallen some time ago. The cages were packed tightly with incredible density, creating solid walls with only small passageways between them – it was truly a maze, and one made little easier by the fact that bird cages are transparent. Trying to determine the correct turn in the maze by peering through the cage bars revealed only more and more cage bars, and the brief snippets of detail that David could ascertain from some space beyond the cages were visual noise, lacking parseable information.

He wandered for some time through the bird cage labyrinth following an old rule he remembered hearing, probably on television or in a book – if you keep your left hand on the wall of the labyrinth and follow the path such that you never lift it, eventually you will reach the end. So he ran his fingers along the wall of tiny little metal bars, bouncing off of every rung onto the next and leaving his fingers vibrating with the little impacts. The left hand method of maze navigation can take longer than simply choosing the correct direction at each and every fork, but it is ultimately reliable (except for in a variety of fringe cases which we will not go into here). He emerged at what seemed to be the back of the shop – a man in a dark hood sat in a chair behind a counter which seemed to completely encircle him with no obvious point of exit. An ancient looking cash register sat on the counter in front of him, along with a glass jar of hard candy, a stack of old newspapers, and a few boxes of individually price tagged trinkets.

The man looked up at David, but his face beneath the hood was still cast deep in shadow and was hardly visible. David cleared his throat and said, “I’m looking to buy a bird – do you sell pets as well, or just the supplies?” The man pointed behind David, and he turned around. A moment earlier he would have sworn that all the bird cages were empty, he was sure of it, he had touched practically all of them in his long sojourn in the labyrinth – but now they were filled. Every bird cage seemed to have an inhabitant, birds of every size and shape and colour. The enormous cages he had noted on his way in were now filled with proportionally sized creatures, swans and storks and herons, and deep in parts of the labyrinth his left hand method hadn’t brought him to he thought he could make out even larger cages, with very large things that didn’t quite seem to be birds moving within.

“Pick a cage, my friend.” Said the gravelly voice of the hooded man. “You cannot go wrong with one of our birds – they are the finest in all the world.”

David approached the cages. The birds were silent, not a hint of cawing, chirping, or singing – there was only the soft noise of their shifting feet as they continually moved to watch him as he moved, and the occasional sound of fluttering wings as they adjusted their posture. David found himself drawn to an elderly parrot, bright red with yellow, blue, and green down his wings.

“Ah, Benny’s calling to you is he? Our one and only Scarlet Macaw – beautiful fellow, and I’m sure he’d make a fine companion.”

David found himself drawn to the parrot’s eyes, which never broke from his own. Total silence had come over the birds while the selection hung in the balance.

“Does he speak?” David asked.

“Scarlet Macaws generally only learn a few words and phrases – but Benny here might surprise you. He’s very quiet now, but I think you’ll find he has a lot to say once he gets settled in with you.”

“I’ll take him.” Said David, lifting Benny’s cage and turning back to the man behind the counter. The man was gone, and so was the counter. As David turned round again he found the maze of birdcages, in fact all of the birdcages and the birds within had gone as well. All but Benny, who cocked his head and looked up at David with a serious eye.

David went straight home from the pet store, which no longer had pet supplies in its display window, or the name Creature Hutch atop its door – it was vacant and empty. David’s home was empty as well – Trish had gone out at some point. David sat Benny’s cage down on the living room coffee table, and looked around.

“Well Benny I’d better let you out I suppose – I don’t have much of a set-up for you. I probably should have bought some proper bird care supplies at the pet store, but I didn’t think to ask before it disappeared. I suppose it’s a bit strange that I’m talking to a parrot, but that’s nowhere near as strange as the kinds of things that have been happening to me today – compared to what’s been happening to me today, talking to a parrot is extremely normal, I mean some parrots can even talk back, that’s about as normal as it comes next to what’s happened to me today.”

“David you should probably do some breathing exercises, I think you’re starting to have a panic attack.” Said a soft and kind voice unmistakably coming from the mouth of Benny the Scarlet Macaw. David froze in his tracks. He turned to face Benny and collapsed back into the couch. He paused for a moment and just stared at Benny as Benny stared back at him. Then he leaned forward and opened the door on Benny’s cage. “Why thank you David.” Said Benny as he stepped out of his cage and onto the coffee table.

“I don’t know if I’m hallucinating this or this whole day or if it’s all happening just as I see it, but I can’t keep anything that can talk in a cage, it’s not right.”

“You’re a kind soul David.” Said Benny. “This has been a long time coming, us coming together.”

“What?” Asked David.

“They’ll be coming soon. Ever since you picked up my cage at the store they haven’t been able to see you. My light is shining too brightly – all they see is the stupendous glow. And I’m sorry, you couldn’t have known what you were agreeing to when you chose me. But the fact that you chose me means that you wanted this, even if you don’t know what this is.”

David was crying now. “What is happening Benny? Are you god? Do you know what’s happening to me? Do you know why everything feels like this?”

Benny said softly, “I’m not god David, but I do know what’s happening. I can’t tell you now, there’s no time. I’m going to try and save you – it was what I was built to do. But you need to be ready – it’s beginning now, I can tell. Everyone you know is coming to separate us. If they succeed they will destroy me, and what they do to you will be worse. Now that you’re beginning to see through all of this they wont allow you to continue living this life, such as it is. You must try to stay behind me at all times. If all else fails grab hold of me and don’t let go. Do you understand?”

David nodded that he understood was the parrot was saying, just as there came a knock at the door, and then the rattling of a key in a lock.

Trish’s voice came from down the hall. “David are you home? I’ve been looking around for you all day, some people at the school said you were acting strange, and,” She cut off suddenly as she came around the corner and saw the Benny and his crimson plumage sitting on the coffee table, exactly between her and David.

She looked at Benny and let out a soft groan. In a near pure monotone, tinged only with the slightest hint of what might have been disgust or possibly awe, she said “What have you done?”

Benny spread his wings wide, and Trish began to circle around him, crouched as though she was ready to leap. David, keeping Benny’s instructions in mind, mirrored her circling, so that Benny remained between them at all times. Trish cast a large shadow on the wall directly behind her, tall and menacing as though there was a light shining directly at her from a low angle – from Benny, though he emitted no light visible to David. Trish’s shadow, he noticed, was distorted and exaggerated. Perhaps it was simply the strange angle, but the shadow’s arms looked too large, the shadow’s face too long and protruding.

“Was it really too much for you David?” Trish was speaking in a menacing undertone. “Was a life of constant unchallenged success simply too much of a burden for you? Aren’t you ashamed that you couldn’t manage to keep it together when everyone around you soldiered on with real problems?” As she spoke her movements became strange – her arms and legs bent at funny angles – it seemed like she shouldn’t be able to bear her own weight, but she went on circling, trying to get around Benny’s wide wings and piercing parrot eyes.

“Trish what are you saying?” David begged. “What are you talking about? I feel like I’m losing my mind!”

Benny spoke. “David you need to ignore her. She’ll say anything to break you. This is the hardest part but you need to ignore her and all the others when they come.”

“Do you think that bird is talking to you David?” Trish said in a rasping whisper. “Are you hearing words in it’s squeaks and caws? You’ve totally given in to delusion, after everyone in your life has done everything for you, given you everything you could ever need!”

They’d completed a couple of complete rotations of the coffee table at this point. David realized that somehow the couch and chairs and tv stand seemed to have receded at some point, otherwise they’d be bumping into them in these rotations. It took all his concentration to continue moving slowly and carefully while getting a look at the room, but it seemed like it was much bigger than he remembered. It had been such a cramped little room, but suddenly it seemed enormous – as he took note of this he began to hear a gentle rapping at the window. There were ravens at the windows, dozens of them, and they were gently banging their beaks against the glass. One of the windows shattered, glass raining down on David’s couch which was now at a distance greater than what David would have sworn the entire length of the room had previously been. Crouched in the frame amidst the few shards still in place was Anna, David’s ex from years ago. “This is so like you David.” She said as she lowered herself into the room, her hands and face covered in cuts from the broken glass. “You can’t spare a thought for anyone but yourself. Trish has given up so much for you, and you break down like this – you know you don’t deserve her. You know you’re like a little child that she’s taking pity on – how dare you break down like this?”

A second window shattered and gripping the frame, not caring that his hands were pierced by the glass edges, was David’s childhood best friend Charlie. “You running away again Dave?” He asked, his curled and yellow feet latching on to the floor as he entered the room. “You left home as soon as you could because you knew you didn’t belong there – and now it turns out you don’t belong here either – are you starting to realize that you don’t belong anywhere, and there’s nowhere where you ever will?” He let out a cackling laugh, his mouth opening much too wide.

A third window shattered and finally, largest of all, it was Professor Entel. She was larger than all the others, larger than David had ever seen her, at least twice as tall as David himself. She could only get her head and one of her arms through the window – it had grown along with the room, but it still wasn’t big enough to allow her full entry. She opened her great black beak and said, “David I’m sorry I couldn’t support you better in your work. It’s difficult for me, for us, to tell the difference between good work and poor work for someone with your limitations.” As she spoke she reached in with her incredibly long arm and clawed at the floorboards only a few feet from David’s feet, leaving great rends in the wood with her talons. “I know it wasn’t best practice to simply praise everything you did, but it seemed to keep you stable, and wasn’t that the most important thing?” She dug her talons into the floor and began trying to pull herself through the window – the walls of the room began to crack and shatter inwards as her massive bulk began to burst through. “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us.”

Trish and Anna and Charlie surrounded David and Benny now, and Professor Entel was coming through the wall and pulling herself towards them though she had to move carefully as she was much too large for the room even with the walls pulled back and the ceiling raised. David remembered what Benny had said to do when all hope failed and he wrapped his arms around the scarlet macaw and held on for dear life. He could feel talons stab into him and wings beat against him and beaks tear his flesh but he held on to Benny and all he could see was light, light filling the room and filling him, and his body and the suffering of his body felt farther and farther away until he felt no pain at all.