Sweeney tucked his wings, and coasted to the ground at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The ring of church bells set the madness on him, sprang the feathers from his skin, true. But madness obeyed rules of its own devising, and the quietness of the cathedral grounds soothed him. He roosted in the ruined tower, and fed on seed scattered on the steps after weddings.
He had done so for years, making the place a refuge. There had been a woman, Madeleine, he thought her name was, who smelled of paper and stories. She had been kind to him, kind enough that he had wondered sometimes if she could see the curse beneath the feathers. She scattered food, and cracked the window of the room she worked in so that he might perch just inside the frame, and watch her work among the books.
Yes. Madeleine. He had worn his man shape to her memorial, there at the cathedral, found and read her books, with people as out of time as he was. She had been kind to him, and kindness was stronger even than madness was.
Maeve stood in front of the canvas, and wiped the remnants of sleep from her eyes with paint-smeared fingers.
It was good work. She had gotten the wildness of the feathers, and the way a wing could obscure and reveal when stretched in flight. She could do a series, she thought.
“I mean, it’s about time, right?” she asked Brian, her agent, on the phone. “Be ambitious, move out of my comfort zone, all those things you keep telling me I need to do.”
“Yes, but birds, Maeve?”
“Not still lifes, or landscapes, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Well, not worried exactly … Look, send me pictures of what you’re working on. I’ll start looking for a good venue to show them. If it doesn’t work, we’ll call this your birdbrained period.”
It hadn’t been the resounding endorsement of her creativity that Maeve had been hoping for, but that was fine. She would paint now, and enthusiasm could come later.
She could feel her paintings, the compulsion to create, just beneath the surface of her skin. She gathered her notebook and pencils, and went out into the city to sketch.
Sweeney perched on a bench in Central Park, plucking feathers from his arms. He had felt the madness creeping back for days this time before the feathers began appearing. Sure, he knew it was the madness. His blood itched, and unless that was the cursed feathers being born beneath his skin, itchy blood meant madness.
Itchy blood had meant madness and feathers for close to forever now, hundreds of years since the curse had first been cast. Life was long, and so were curses.
Though when he thought about it, Sweeney suspected curses were longer.
Pigeons cooed and hopped about near the bench’s legs, occasionally casting their glinting eyes up at him. Sweeney thumbed a nail beneath a quill, worried at it until he could get a good grip. The feather emerged slowly, blood brightening its edges. He sighed as it slid from his skin. Sweeney flicked the feather to the ground, and the pigeons scattered.
“Can’t blame you. I don’t like the fucking things, either.” Sweeney tugged at the next feather, one pushing through the skin at the bend of his elbow. Plucking his own feathers wouldn’t stop the change, or even slow it, but it gave him something to do.
“The curse has come upon me,” he said. Blood caked his nails, and dried in the whorls and creases of his fingers.
And it would. The curse would come upon him, as it had time and time again, an ongoing atonement. He might be occasionally mad, and sometimes a bird with it, but Sweeney was never stupid. He knew the metamorphosis would happen. A bell would ring, and his skin would grow too tight around his bones, and he would bend and crack into bird shape.
Sooner, rather sooner indeed than later, if the low buzz at the back of his skull was any indication.
“But just because something is inevitable, doesn’t mean that we resign ourselves to it. No need to roll over and show our belly, now.” Sweeney watched the pigeons as they skritched about in the dirt.
There were those who might say that Sweeney’s stubbornness had gone a long way to getting him into the fix he was currently in. Most days, Sweeney would agree with them, and on the days he wouldn’t, well, those days he didn’t need to, as his agreement was implied by the shape he wore.
You didn’t get cursed into birdhood and madness because you were an even-tempered sort of guy.
“You guys all really birds, there beneath the feathers?” Sweeney asked the flock discipled at his feet.
The pigeons kept their own counsel.
Then the bells marked the hour, and in between ring and echo, Sweeney became a bird.
Dusk was painting the Manhattan skyline in gaudy reds and purples when Maeve looked up from her sketchbook. She had gotten some good studies, enough to start painting the series. She scrubbed her smudged hands against the cold-stiffened fabric of her jeans. She would get take out—her favorite soup dumplings—and then go home and paint.
The bird winged its way across her sightlines as she stood up. Almost iridescent in the dying light, a feathered sweep of beauty at close of day. Watching felt transcendent—
“Oh, fuck, not again.” In the tree not a bird, but a man, trying his best to inhabit a bird-shaped space.
Maeve closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again. Still: Man. Tree. Naked.
“Okay. It’s been a long day. You forgot to eat. You have birds on the brain. You’re just going to go home now”—she tapped the camera button on her phone—“and when you get there, this picture of a naked man is going to be a picture of a bird.”
It wasn’t.
Sweeney watched the woman pick up her paintbrush, set it down. Pick up her phone, look at it, clutch her hair or shake her head, then set the phone down and walk back to her canvas. She had been repeating a variation of this pattern since he landed on the fire escape outside of her window.
He had seen her take the picture, and wanted to know why. The people who saw him were usually quite good at ignoring his transformations, in that carefully turned head, averted eyes, and faster walking way of ignoring. Most people didn’t even let themselves see him. This woman did. Easy enough to fly after her, once he was a bird again.
Sweeney wondered if perhaps she was mad, too, this woman who held the mass of her hair back by sticking a paintbrush through it, and who talked to herself as she paced around her apartment.
She wasn’t mad now though, not that he could tell. She was painting. Sweeney stretched his wings, and launched himself into the cold, soothing light of the stars.
In the center of the canvas was a man, and feathers were erupting from his skin.
“Oh, yes. Brian is going to love it when you tell him about this. ‘That series of paintings you didn’t want me to do? Well, I’ve decided that the thing it really needed was werebirds.’”
It was good, though, she thought. The shock of the transformation as a still point in the chaos of the city that surrounded him.
The transformation had been a shock. The kind of thing you had to see to believe, and even then, you doubted. Such a thing should have been impossible to see.