The Lovebird by Natalie Brown

evidently had more pressing concerns (understandable in acrime-ridden county of three million people) than the shenanigans of a small group of college kids obsessed with animal rights, enveloped the crew in a kind of heady haze—one in which it seemed the only consequences of our actions were the flickering beginnings of fame and, of course, happier animals. “Good work, crew. We are
on track
,” Simon said.
    The others were gratified by the glory of being mentioned in the paper. Bear even created an elaborate scrapbook comprised of all our clippings. Bumble, shaking his head at what he called Bear’s “archaic habits,” scanned the clippings into his computer. But I appeared, much to their perplexity, insufficiently excited. “Can you believe this?” Raven said, shaking another edition of the
Sun
in front of my face. I offered a slight sort of smile.
    The truth was, a new desire had welled up in me, one that I couldn’t bring myself to articulate to the crew, or even to Simon. It had happened gradually over the last several months, and now, I feared, it set me apart. Maybe, I worried, I had spent too much of my free time reading animal books—not just nonfiction treatises like the ones Simon had given me, but novels, and even children’s books I’d purloined from Annette’s room (
Misty of Chincoteague, Where the Red Fern Grows, Penguins!, Pat the Bunny
). Maybe my left ovary had twinged far too many times during our campaigns, leaving me in a permanent state of oversensitivity. Or maybe I had, a couple of years earlier, taken too many drives up to the hill houses to capture an ever-elusive feeling of closeness that I constantly craved. Whatever the cause, animals, the idea of animals, the feeling of animals—not just the physical fact of their existence or their suffering—had sunk straight into my soul.
    I wanted to hold them all in my hands, to know their little touches, to press my fingers into the fleshy cushions of their paws, to hear the clacking hardness of their hooves. I wanted to grow goosebumps from the ribbons of air they exhaled againstmy cheek and into my ear, and to be softly sniffed by them, and tickled by wiry, weird whiskers. I wanted to be bitten, scratched, to have my blood drawn one droplet at a time by fangs and claws, and I wanted to sleep among them in a sighing, smelly pile. I wanted to tuck my beak into my feathered chest and fall asleep to my own breast’s rising and falling, to warm myself, to make sad shrill songs in the night, to be a soloist. I wanted to smell every feeling before it was felt, to run, to dig, to dive, to breathe underwater, to open and close my silken gills without trying. I wanted to frighten, to surprise, to wiggle my antennae, to let my hair grow matted, to exude strange perfumes, to buck, bellow, bugle, and bray, to low, to preen, to stot, to trot. I wanted to bear young and lick them clean, to usher them forward on their wobbly legs, to nose the ground in search of the finest-tasting grasses and flowers, to live and move according to the seasons. I wanted to love because my body and biology willed it, to love without any threat or presentiment of loss, without any ladybug wandering behind my eyes. It was no longer enough to just help them. I wanted to be among them.
    Among them, I knew, loneliness was an impossibility. I could feel that all of them, every species, even those carnivorous ones who hunted and ate others, were part of a community from which I and every person I knew were excluded. But I didn’t know why we were excluded, always outsiders, and always manipulating a realm of which we were not even a part
—their
realm.
    I wondered why there was a separation, and how people had ended up in a position that was so harmful to animals, and then in a position to try to undo the harm. The situation seemed artificial, somehow—that we must be “us” and they must be “them.” I was troubled, a little, and so was my sleep.
    One night, several weeks