– Manfred
It was long past sunset when Manfred landed at the Tick and Cow. He’d clearly missed something big: the place was raucous. He pushed his way through a crowd of at least a hundred gulls telling tall stories; shouldering his way to the bar. Rashidi didn’t even bother asking him what he wanted over the noise—she just poured a delicious warm, stale, flat beer into a bottletop. Manfred footed her a ladybug carapace, took his drink, and made his way back to the story-telling gulls.
One of the gulls, a wing wrapped around another bird in comfortable camaraderie, was yelling to a captivated audience. “It was the biggest crab we’ve seen since the Great Storm!”
The gulls cheered, the volume reaching pain level. As Manfred adjusted his outer ear membrane to shut out the racket, he thought he recognized the gull—his name might be Steve? He twisted, trying to see who he had his wing wrapped around, when the bird yelled out in Felix’s voice.
“It was making its crabways run to the safety of the waves!”
Manfred’s beak fell open. Felix?!
Steve picked up the story again. “Felix was on it in a flash! He trapped it in his beak, grabbed it head first.” The crowd of gulls cringed. “Yep, you got that right—those claws were right in front of his face. Waving and snapping something fierce. Even chicks know better than to grab a crab head first.”
“Yeah and a nano-second later you lot mobbed me,” Felix added, pushing back feathers to display a gash above his left eye. “All I could see was a whole syndicate’s worth of biting beaks, kicking legs, and those crab claws snapping at me.”
“Did you let it go?” One of the audience gulls called.
“Never,” Steve yelled back. “Not even when a wave barrelled him crab-first into a sandbank.”
“I’m no quitter!” Felix grinned with pride. “But in the end all I had left was a crab head.”
“And I nearly got that off him,” another gull yelled. “But he swallowed it whole!”
“You’d already eaten the big front claw, Sam,” Felix replied. “You weren’t getting my one and only bite out of my very beak!”
Manfred shook his head. Was this the same Felix? The Felix who never strung a sentence together without at least one ‘errr’ and two awkward stares at his own feet?! Manfred couldn’t help feel a little bit proud of his friend.
“My turn to tell a story!” Sam yelled. “Who wants to help me do The One That Got Away?”
“That was the puffer fish!” An excited gull yelled next to Manfred—he adjusted his outer membrane as far as it would go. “The one in the shallows, right? That was me! I started that one!”
Manfred retreated to the bar, signalling to Rashidi that he’d like another please. By the time he was on his fourth, the syndicate, with Felix still the star attraction, had told The Feast for Everybird (a fight over another puffer fish, this one dead in the sand) and were just finishing up The All-in Brawl (apparently a fight over a single pipi). There seemed no end in sight and Manfred was considering going home, when Felix and the seagull he’d called Sam appeared at the bar. They didn’t seem to notice him.
Sam winged a stinking crab-claw to Rashidi and screamed his order. “Two of something special. Please.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” she hooted. “Or else I give you a pair of Love Birds and you can see how your reputation handles that.”
Sam cringed. “No love birds. Just something sugary and lemony and full of rum.”
Rashidi laughed. “You’ve made my night, Sam. For that, you can have this round on the tree. Keep your claw.”
“What?” Sam yelled.
Felix shrugged. “Free drinks.” He finished off the last of whatever he was already drinking as Rashidi returned with two plastics filled with orange-and-pink loveliness and a battered cardboard box filled with fresh honeyed barflies.
“Vents up!” They yelled together, drinking their plastics in one gulp as another roar rose from the gulls.
“Oh-my-Hawk-they’re-doing-The-Big-Stink!” Sam raced back into the fracas as the re-enactment of a glorious fight over a dead whale carcass in their grandparents’ time commenced.
Felix stayed at the bar. Manfred watched quietly as one by one he stuffed barflies in his beak until the entire box was empty. Felix closed his eyes, apparently to better enjoy the tickle of their wings as he swallowed. The gulls wound up their last re-enactment. The sound of a hundred guano spatters suggested they were about to leave.
“Are you coming, Felix?” Steve yelled, but Felix, eyes still closed, didn’t move. The gulls left without him in a cloud of yells and screeches.
Olly flew in. “Thank hawk that’s over,” he said.
Felix’s eyes snapped open.
“Give us a round willya, Rashidi?” Olly added.
“Manfred! Olly!” Felix exclaimed. “Did you hear I caught a crab?”
“What?” Manfred replied.
“Hear?” Olly asked. “Much like the ripple effect I think some birds are experiencing it still.”
“Hey, Manfred,” Felix turned sombre. “Can I ask you something? How’s it going with your new henling?”
“My beak is sealed,” Manfred said.
“At least you’ve got something to seal it about,” Felix said. “I don’t think my henling knows I exist. And that’s just the start of my problems,” he added.
“Seriously!” Manfred said. “We can’t be talking about this stuff.”
“Come on, Manfred,” Olly said. “Can’t a bird just ask hypothetical advice? You are the local expert after all.”
“Well…” Manfred shrugged.
“Come on then, Felix,” Olly said. “Out with it.”
“Well, she’s amazing,” Felix said. “I mean, you’d like her too if you knew her. Hey maybe you do! Have you ever heard of—”
“Stop!” Manfred threw his wings up as if to push the words back down Felix’s throat. “Don’t jinx it! Hawk, am I the only one who understands anything about quantum physics??”
“Yeah, nah, I get it.” Felix clearly didn’t. “Of course I get it. But what’s that got to do with Am—”
“Quantum mechanics,” Manfred cut him off firmly. “Is when you happen to talk about something you think is happening before it happens, then it doesn’t happen the way you thought it’d happen, or it doesn’t happen to you and it happens to somebird else instead. Unless it’s bad, then you have to talk about it or it will happen to you.”
That shut them up.
“W-e-e-e-e-ll,” Felix finally spoke. “I’m pretty sure Stormfeather thinks it’s about cats in boxes, but your explanation makes better sense.”
Manfred sighed. “Thank you.”
“But—” Felix continued.
“Yes!” Olly interrupted with glee. “Bring on the but!”
“—I was just wondering,” Felix said, “how we’d make sure we weren’t, you know, chasing after the same henling. Right?”
“Well my bit of feathers is definitely not seeing some other bit of feathers when I’m not around. Is yours?”
“Errr…”
“Right then! This calls for a toast,” Manfred raised his drink. “Vents up!”
“Vents!” Felix agreed, throwing his drink into his beak. “So,” he added, slamming the already-empty plastic back on the bar. “I gave her a present.”
Manfred raised a warning wing. “Doesn’t sound very hypothetical to me.”
Felix rolled his eyes. “Ok. If I—”
Up came the warning wing again.
“Alright! Alright! If a friend was to give a henling a present, how long would the friend have to wait until she said something about it? That she liked it?”
“Well, that depends on the present,” Manfred judged. “Hypothetically, she might never tell your friend about an ordinary present. I gave mine a pair of expensive cups and she still hasn’t mentioned them, but she happily told me about a present of food she got from her mother on Monday.”
“His was on Monday too, and it was a really good one.”
“Only Monday? I think your hypothetical friend is overthinking it. Mine only mentioned her mother’s present because I was with her when she got it.”
“But mine was a dozen live crickets, gently simmered in sun-warmed yellowbox honey.”
Manfred froze. His mind whirled. Crickets? In yellowbox? It could just be a coincidence, couldn’t it? Couldn’t it?!
“He’s got you there,” Olly said. “I’ve been known to kill for yellowbox.”
Manfred emptied his vent involuntarily. “Yellow—” he managed before his voice cracked.
“And the box,” Felix said. “It even had her name on it. Well, her initial. It was written in fancy flowing—”
“Felix.” His voice cracked again. He cleared his throat. “Stop. I…errrr…”
“Oh, sorry. Her hypothetical initial.”
Manfred regurgitated. It splashed onto his legs, as he half-ran half-stumbled out the borehole. A second heaving sprayed them with a fine mist as he took off into the warm summer headwind.
“What’s wrong with him?” Olly asked.
“I don’t think it’s something he ate,” Steve said through a mouthful of mist. “These minced worms are delicious.”
Evolution: it's for the birds 