You were always slightly quirky. You loved bright patterns, flowers, and birds. Especially birds. Since you were a small child you have always talked about birds, and how you wanted to become one and fly away. One day, as a birthday surprise from your parents, you came home to bird wallpaper in your bedroom. The white doves against the bright blue made you happy. In your dreams you would see them fly around and you, and you would follow them, watching from the ground, and sometimes the sky.
Tonight you are flying. They are in your town, they fly around people you know. Occasionally they would peck at the group of boys that bullied you at school. But these dreams had spaces, dark patched where you couldn't see.
You wake up in the morning, not clearly recalling your dreams. This occurred for several weeks, until you stopped really noticing them and you dreamt of less whimsical things. After a while, your bird phase wore off, but you liked the wallpaper, so you kept it.
The walk to school was regular. You walk along your normal path towards the front of the school until you feel something hard suddenly hit the back of your head. You aren't bleeding, but the next rock hits your nose and it starts to drip. You hear a disgustingly familiar voice, and when you open your eyes, the face is just as gruesome. It's the leader of the group of boys, along with his cohorts standing behind him.
"What are going to do, bird? Fly away?" He chortles and his companions laugh along with him and throw more rocks. You run away as fast as you can, wipe your nose, and avoid people all day. The rest of the day is normal as always. You got home and cried into your pillow, but you got over it. This wasn't that irregular. You didn't talk at dinner and you went straight to bed. It seemed like a night like any other, until a stirring of your curtains awakes you. You forgot to close your window before you went to bed.
The next morning, as you are eating breakfast, you hear the TV in the other room. The news is on, and you don't pay much attention until the news anchor says a name you recognize. One of the boys in the group, who had been mean to you since preschool, had been stabbed to death in his home. It was a break in, the news anchor said, and he had been stabbed in his bed. You are too shocked and too focused on the fact that you have a report due today to notice the strange smudge on your wall on a bird's beak as you walk out the door to catch the bus.
About three days later, you awaken to a rustling of curtains in the middle of the night, at about the same time. You swear you had closed the window, but you are too tired and groggy to care about it. You slam the window shut without a second thought and go back to a bird-free dream. The next day when you are walking to school, instead of taking the back alley to avoid the bullies, you are feeling gutsy and you take your usual passage. You peek around the corner to make sure there are none of the boys that beat you up, but what you see horrifies you to the fact that you cannot even scream. You stand there frozen in peril until the crossing guard notices you standing and shaking, and walks over and asks if you are okay, but you can't respond. The sight of the leader of the group stabbed and bloody on the ground, still bleeding, has every muscle in you paralyzed. You tell the cops that you didn't really know him and how you found him. You go home and sleep, and you are starting to get scared.
That night you have another bird dream for the first time in a long time, but this time it is violent, dark. The birds squawk loudly rather than sing. They attack random people, mostly people you know and don't really like. You watch from above as your math teacher gets pecked and drops her purse in the bushes behind the school and runs away. The feeling in your gut tells you to wake up, but you suffer through the dream, watching your once whimsical friends, and now gloomy and aggressive, attack those you barely know. Shooting up from your dream, you look over at the clock. It is four o'clock in the morning. You palms are sweaty and you are shaking like a leaf. You tell yourself it was just a dream. Just a dream. You turn on your lamp, and something strikes you right away. There is a substantial amount of birds missing form part of your wall. You squint your eyes and shake your head in disbelief. There is blood staining your windowsill. You close your eyes and hide under the blanket. You force yourself to fall asleep.
When you wake up in the morning, the birds have returned, but traces of blood still remain. You don't know what to do, so you just wipe it up and act like nothing ever happened and drudge out the door to the bus.
At the end of the school day, you are walking on the path and kicking rocks to the sound of Asking Alexandria through your pink ear buds with little birds on them. You turn past a bush into an alleyway, kicking a purse, and you hear scuttering. You walk a little faster, but it is close behind. And you feel, is that, a breeze? No, it can't be a breeze, You think to yourself. You feel something sharp on your head. And your back. And your shoulders.
Meanwhile you parents are talking at home, sipping tea. Your mom comes downstairs from your room and mentions to your dad,
"Hey Mike, did you see that our little bird has taken down her bird wallpaper at last? There's not a bird in sight up there!"
"Well, she was bound to grow out of that phase sometime. Isn't she into those loud, angry bands now?" Casually said your father, taking a sip of his chamomile tea.
"Yeah, must be, dear. Must be." She mentioned, changing the channel to sports center.
