Not Birds

An unknown teacher shows us diagrams of the different ways bees reproduce. The girls sit attentively in the dim light, while the boys giggle to themselves as they rip the legs off of spicy ants.

Moral Dilemmas

I am independent from my family now; I decide to attend some sort of function at my old church, to see all the people that have forgotten me.
Standing in line for the bathroom, I allow several incontinent old women to cut ahead of me. When it is finally my turn, I enter a long yellow hallway with a toilet at one end. Another doorway opens onto the gathering hall; it does not have a lock. I close both doors and quickly take care of my business, hoping no one barges in on me. I am successful.
I procceed to the sanctuary. None of the lights are on, the colors seem faded and grey. I see an old friend sitting in a pew where the pulpit used to be. Sliding in behind her, I tell her, "I vant to suck your blood!" It seems to be appropriate for the situation, turns she turns and gives a welcoming smile. In a pew futher up sits another girl I haven't seen in years. In my absence, she has undergone a sex change and is now wearing only nordic beanies. She has her arm around another girl. She is mad at me, I can only assume because I missed her supposed birthday party. The first friend mutters under her breath to be nice.

After the service we scour the pews in the balcony for a siren (the mythical kind) of sorts. As soon as we approach her, she teleports to the next level up.






Later, I am transporting my pets from one location to another. A beautiful white kitten catches my attention, and I can't decide if I can put my mouse and my ant down to pet the kitten. I do so, and thankfully, they do not wander off. All three animals begin to form high-pitched gibberish, which I know will turn into real speech in the next week or so. In fact, it seems to be doing so faster than I had expected. I am relieved.

We appear to be on a road trip. Andrew is driving; Holly is in the front and I am in the back with Kellen. Suddenly she demands to stop, and is unusually snappy with us, so we decide we had better stop, even though we are running late. We pull into the parking lot of a department store, and Kellen rushes inside as Andrew and I get out to stretch our legs. It starts to rain. We see a crowd of people standing underneath a gigantic statue of an ant but it looks a bit unstable to me, so we find a picnic table underneath some trees. As we sit down, everything around us disappears, and suddenly I find it very hard to concentrate on anything Andrew is saying because I am so amazed by the infinite grass fields that surround us.
Andrew begins to tell me about some freshman girl that has taken an interest in him. Her name actually consists of five names, and I feel slightly sorry for her, and wonder what her parents were thinking. Trying to describe her, he holds his hand down to his waist: "She's about this tall." I vaguely wonder if he is crazy - she couldn't be just three feet tall - then decide that he must mean three feet taller than the picnic table. Suddenly I think of the time, and as soon as I stand up, we are back in the parking lot of the department store. I look in the glass doors and I see Kellen waiting patiently on the floating escalator that will carry her to the door. Somewhere along the way she has lost her pants and hasn't noticed, but I decide not to tell her because we would lose time while she tried to go back and get them.
Now I am in Mr. Wilder's classroom, sitting in the desk that I sat in last year. There are a few other people in the classroom, talking quietly. Wilder comes over to me and demands, "What makes you angry?" I am puzzled by his question, and he repeats it three times before I shrug and pretend to be captivated by a poster across the room. He leans down next to my face, and says quietly, "Do you get mad when the little girl on your team doesn't get enough points?" Now I am even more confused, and I slip out the other side of my desk and ask him what I can do to get out of here.
He tells me he has dropped his DVD player outside, and he wants me to go get it. I walk outside and I see it laying on the grass, in pieces. Looking out to the street, I am frightened by a gigantic ant, possibly the statue that was in the department store parking lot, who is chasing a crowd of screaming people. I fumble to pick up the bits of DVD player, when off to my left, I see my old ballet teacher, Miss Sandy, walking towards me. She looks angry, and she is foaming at the mouth. I begin to run. I stop along the way to pick up an open physics book lying in the grass (I'm positive it's mine), and even though I'm running and Miss Sandy is walking, she is gaining on me. Finally I reach the door, where the janitor lets me in with a smile, then disappears.
I walk into my room, where there is a party going on. Wilder takes the DVD player out of my hands and starts a movie. As I sit on my bed, I notice Andrew cuddling a three-foot long sock bunny. I realize that the stuffed bunny is the girl he was telling me about, the one with five names, and I wonder if maybe he's been overworked and that's why he's acting so strangely.