Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 10. A Brutal Stay at the Inn of the Scoffing Hawk

They were close enough to the base of Hawk Mountain for it to delay the sunrise for a few minutes. Therefore, it was still dark when a muffin thudded next to Lucy's left ear. After a long day of walking, Lucy had been in a deep sleep, and did not stir when the muffin landed next to her head, which worried Jezebel, Lucy's barn owl familiar. Jezebel alighted silently on Lucy's snoring chest, leaned down, and ever so softly, screeched.

"Holy shit!" screamed Lucy, bolting upright. While she bolted Jezebel nimbly climbed up to her right shoulder, leaned down to her ear, and screeched again. To comfort her.

"AHHH!" Lucy screamed, which sounded like a return screech of affection to Jezebel. "AHHH! Oh fuck! It's you Jezebel," said Lucy, her eyes adjusting rapidly to the waning dark. Lucy closed her eyes and tried to slow her breathing. Jezebel, whose ability to successfully interpret human social cues had never been her strong suit, did however recognize this as a sign of distress, and managed to tamp down a last little screech.

"What is this, a muffin?" asked Lucy, holding up the muffin. It had survived nights of flight in two halves inside the wax paper. It was a cranberry muffin, which to Jezebel were the closest fruit analog to the bitter little turds you found in only the best fed mice. It was the heaviest thing that Jezebel had ever carried, and she had carried it for longer than she had ever carried anything before.

Jezebel had been a shitty familiar, she realized that now. It turned out that she could not bear being apart from Lucy. It had been killing her, so much so that she could not even hunt, and had trouble eating. Had there been Facebook in their reality she would have been changing all her likes to loves on years old pictures of her and Lucy, which to an owl would be an almost unconscionable lapse of self-respect.

Lucy was...umm...delighted to see Jezebel? I mean, she still felt much less of the familiar bond than Jezebel had in their time apart. She was flattered that the owl had found her. She loved the muffin, it was actually very good and way sweeter than the normal trail biscuits and fish she had been subsisting on. She held out her arm and Jezebel weakly crawled on to her forearm. Just as she had done to Marbles a week ago, she inspected Jezebel for damage, and found none, just a sleepy owl who accepted handfed bits of leftover fish from Lucy.

After feeding Jezebel, Lucy guided the owl back onto her shoulder.

"Hey your familiar came back!" said Marbles, waking up and turning his back to the rising sun, and stretching out his wings. "Wow that's so awesome! What's her name?"

"It's Jezebel," said Lucy, placing the crook of her pointer finger gently into Jezebel's chest and rubbing it gently.

"Hi Jezebel! I'm Marbles!" said Marbles.

Jezebel closed here eyes and spent a couple seconds pretending to fall asleep before actually falling asleep.

Jezebel slept for the entire walk up to Hawk Mountain. During the approach, Opal was coaching Marbles on some dos and don'ts for getting closer to hawks of the opposite sex.

"Stop saying 'hawk-pussy'," chided Opal.

"Dude I've only said 'hawk-pussy' like once in the entire time we've known each other," said Marbles.

"Uhhh no you've said it at least two times since you met me, which was only three weeks ago," said Opal. "And when I first heard it I politely ignored you, and you just had to say it again later that day. I know what happened. You overheard an older, cooler hawk say it and you thought it was a cool thing to say, but it's not."

"OK I understand," said Marbles. "You're right, it's vulgar. It's meant to like, cavalierly marginalize a part of a woman's body as an attempt to let people know that you're familiar with the act," said Marbles. "But frankly it's disrespectful and makes them uncomfortable, which is a condition anathema to lovemaking."